Metaplace - Some Initial Observations

I have to confess, I originally joined the Metaplace cyberspace back in May of 2009 and have been an occasional visitor ever since (though mostly only to see specific events rather than for general exploration). So it seems a little odd that it's only now that I'm writing down some initial observations! It just seemed the right time to put down some thoughts so let's see what we can find to say about Metaplace.

Avatar creation is simple enough in Metaplace although frankly the options available are almost pointless. This is simply due to the fact that once you are inworld, the size of your avatar means that your avatar's appearance is lacking in any real detail. You can at least zoom in using your mouse wheel which is a benefit not shared by Blue Mars as I discussed here although when you zoom in, the detail of your avatar becomes heavily pixellated. That being said, I did what I could to recreate Senban as much as I could.


After a useful tutorial on how to function in this cyberspace, you're let out to fend for yourself. One thing you'll notice that's different to Second Life is the way you get money (called coins). You get money for adding friends, money for visiting places, money for finding the golden egg hidden in each place, money for leaving comments about each place. Like Second Life you can also buy inworld currency using your credit card but as you can get a lot of money just by wandering round, this doesn't seem necessary. Because each location seems to turn into a game of Hunt The Golden Egg, it's impossible to avoid comparing this cyberspace to the computer games of the eighties and nineties. Given that you can attain levels that unlock new capabilities (like being able to run instead of just walking), it's again impossible to avoid comparisons. In fact I'd personally go so far as to say that Metaplace is a gameplay-based cyberspace and not a virtual world in the sense of say Second Life. I would even go so far as to say that Metaplace has more in common with Zwinky than with Second Life and indeed it shares a great many characteristics with that cyberspace, although it does have far superior graphics to Zwinky.

Much as I pointed out when I discussed Blue Mars in this blog, Metaplace has the amazingly annoying method of putting people's chat in speech bubbles.

One thing I've noticed with some surprise about Metaplace is that there is a casual violence towards lower lifeforms built in and encouraged. Metaplace is populated with cute-little furry things called Meeps. There are in fact a variety of these based on size and colour.


These again give the impression of computer games of the type where ghosts chase you round a maze and in fact I even found a dungeon maze where red Meeps would chase you round while you attempted to collect treasure chests. If they caught you, you screamed and died, splashing blood across the floor which was surprising given the fact that Metaplace seems to be aimed towards a younger demographic.


But as I say, there isn't just the violence of red Meeps towards you - you are actively encouraged to treat the blue Meeps with similar casual violence. For example, near Metaplace Central you can buy a blue Meep from a vending machine for 25 coins and throw it to a shark in the sea nearby - the shark thrashes around and blue blood stains the water.


I also found a desert region where you could load blue Meeps into a cannon and shoot them across the terrain until they hit something with a large green splat!


The overriding culture of Metaplace seems to me to be geared towards creating a user-generated game universe, a next generation Zwinky as it were and in that sense I'd say it succeeds because almost every area I visited had little games that could be played, if indeed the whole area was not set up as a game such as Zoo Escape which mimics the gameplay of the classic arcade game Frogger. But for anyone to consider it a valid virtual world along the lines of Second Life, Blue Mars or There is an attempt to take it out of one market (in which it succeeds) and to place it in another (in which it can't help but be considered a relative failure). Metaplace is an interesting place to visit from the viewpoint of metaverse exploration and it's an interesting stage in the development of cyberspaces but I don't believe it has a future beyond what it was apparently created to do. Yes, it has benefit of being able to embed worlds inside ordinary web pages and yes, it's possible to interact with objects inside those worlds which enable you to browse a seller's items but ultimately these are mere side issues to the main business of this world, no matter how many articles are written by the Alphaville Herald attempting to make it seem more serious than it is. Does it have the potential to include more serious issues and break away from the user-generated gameworld impression? Can it become more than a mere point-and-click adventure game? Perhaps and developers are no doubt working on it but right now I think Metaplace is having trouble preventing people from running round shouting "paku paku paku" while eating power pills and looking for Mario and Donkey Kong.

The Belonging Kind

Imagine being in a nice bar, sitting next to someone and you strike up a conversation.


Somehow everything is perfect, like something from a movie. You find yourself fascinated by that person, so much so that when they leave a little while later, you find yourself following them down the street towards another club. This time it's a jazz club. And then as you watch, that person transforms before your very eyes, shedding clothes and hair and taking on a whole new appearance and way of moving. They look and move like completely different people but somehow you *feel* in your bones that it's the same person. You can't explain it, you just *know*.


At this new bar, you don't speak to the person. What would you even say that wouldn't make you sound crazy? So you just stand and watch as she talks to some guy. You watch as she hands over some money to the bartender to pay for some drinks and yet she never reached into a pocket or a purse to get the money; it was just suddenly there in her hand, like it had sprouted from her palm. Before long, you're following her down the street again, watching her head for another bar, a light airy place this time where people always seem cheery. You're not even surprised this time as you watch the light shimmer across her hair, changing it from dark brown to a light red, watching as her clothes morph into a light summery green dress. Her movements change from the slinkiness of the jazz club to a bubbly excitement. And yet again, against the evidence of your own eyes, you *know* it's the same person.


You watch as she dances with a few people, shares some drinks yet never appears to get intoxicated. What *is* this person? It gnaws at you, you have to know! You follow her again as she ducks down the street, morphing as she goes (can no one else see this?!?!?) Now wearing a green top and black shorts and boots, her movements have become almost aggressive as she ducks into a local bar known for being a bit rowdy, her long brown hair flowing behind her as she passes inside. The loud rock music almost deafens you as you strain to hear her conversation with the man at the bar. You catch fragments of the discussion - something about a TV show - but somehow you *know* there's something else going on. That somehow, on some level there's a whole other layer of communication between these two, that somehow they are communing beneath the perceptions of most people. But somehow *you* are aware of this.


The above is a heavily borrowed idea from the short story "The Belonging Kind", written by William Gibson and published in the Burning Chrome anthology which I can't recommend enough.


So what's the point of this? I recently read this story again and was struck by the way it reflected everyday Second Life activities on so many levels. As we move between locations we alter our avatars in so many ways. We change clothes, hair, skin, shape, animation overriders, everything. And yet someone viewing us would know it was us regardless because of our name tag over our head. And even if that wasn't present, they could click on us to read our profile. We literally adapt ourselves as we move through cyberspace, becoming the right shape to fit where we are and who we are with. To borrow a phrase from the story itself, we become the personification of conformity.

And what about the money appearing as if from nowhere? We rez things in Second Life, causing them to appear out of the ether. In the story, it was money and a hotel room key but in Second Life we create whole buildings out of thin air, as if we had them behind our back just waiting to be brought out. It's the same with drinking alcohol in Second Life; we can "drink" all night and yet not show any effects. In the original story, the creatures created money and hotel keys from inside themselves, slits opening in their bodies to allow biologically created objects to slide out.

And what about the couple sitting at the bar talking? In our situation, we knew that there was something going on beneath the surface. How often have we held conversations both in public chat and in IM? An observer might sense that something was going on that he wasn't aware of. In the story, it turned out that the two were actually mating through their slight contact. How many avatars sit in a public space like a bar appearing to have a regular conversation and yet in IM they're busily having cybersex outside our perception?

"Her hip was touching his, just a little. They didn't seem to be speaking, but Coretti felt they were somehow communing."

In the original story, the main character Coretti watches the strange woman who he comes to know as Antoinette and ultimately realises that he too is one of these strange creatures, creatures that he finds roosting in a hotel room. We never find out what "the belonging kind" actually are. Maybe they were avatars.....

With thanks to Jessikiti Nikitin, Invictus Berthold and Tiffany Ahren for their kind assistance in preparing this blog :)

Filling The Big Empty Spaces

Anyone who has spent any time in Second Life will no doubt have noticed that there are a lot of big empty spaces with nothing in them. In a similar vein, you've probably visited sims which are like ghost towns, deserted shopping malls and clubs and so on. Some people choose to use such things to back up their arguments that Second Life is failing or that Second Life is dull with nothing to do.

How wrong they are!

Let's take those sims with big empty spaces first. Why are they empty? Well partly, there may be a technical reason in some cases. Each sim can only handle a certain amount of content so if the sim's content is concentrated in just one area of the sim then yes, there will be big empty spaces in the rest of the sim. To a degree we can also look at social reasons for lots of empty space in a sim. People will naturally cluster in one area on account of wanting to socialise with other people. So if a sim has a natural cluster point such as a seating area, an infohub, camping/lucky chairs and so on, then naturally other parts of the sim will be mostly deserted. And if there's no one visiting those parts of the sim, why put content there?

Another technical reason for sims appearing empty is actually so obvious that I'm amazed more people don't realise it for themselves. Look at this photo of a dull, uninteresting, empty sim. It almost looks like Siberian tundra, frozen wasteland with patches of standing water (if you ever get a chance to fly over that terrain by the way, do it because the vast empty spaces are humbling).


This photo was taken with the graphics slider set to "Low". It's actually quite common for residents of Second Life to move around with their preferences set this way, usually due to their computers being relatively low-capability. Vast empty sim, nothing to do, right? Watch this!


The exact same landscape only this time every possible graphics option is turned up to ten so to speak. Suddenly that sim isn't quite as empty as people would have you think! Suddenly the landscape is blossoming with things to see and explore. So, before we continue to explore this blog's topic, perhaps already we can start to question whether claims of vast empty sims are necessarily true, don't you think?

As an aside, many people who keep their graphics settings at the lower end of the scale do so because for the most part, the majority of their Second Lives are spent dealing with other avatars at arm's reach and so don't need their draw distance set to 512m.

Now, let's think about those deserted shopping malls that we're always hearing about. Isn't this actually a mirror of meatspace? How many shopping malls in meatspace closed down or lost business because in the 21st century we buy everything from online companies such as Amazon? So if people in meatspace don't want to traipse round shopping malls as much as they once did, why do we expect them to do so in cyberspace? Shopping malls are empty because people are buying from online sources such as XstreetSL and Slapt instead. That's actually sort of ironic because people are in effect going online to get away from a shopping experience which in itself is online.

So the ghost town shopping malls we hear so much about are in reality just a reflection of meatspace and in fact represent the inability of their creators to adapt to changing markets. It's not a failure of Second Life; it's a failure of certain residents' business models and perhaps also their business practices. We can also go further and point out that at the time of writing there is a global recession and that this is a contributing factor.

Okay, here's the thing. Now that we've covered some minor points, let's get to the real message here. People complain about the fact that there are empty spaces. But in return I ask "what are YOU doing to fill those spaces?" People complain that there is a lack of fresh content. But in return I ask "what are YOU doing to create content for your world?"

The problem is this. And if I'm honest, it's a problem that really makes me grind my teeth. People treat Second Life as if it's a theme park. They walk in the gate and then expect scripted content all laid out for their enjoyment. They expect their entire experience to have been created and planned out for them. Now bearing in mind that to get into a theme park you usually have to pay for a ticket so perhaps there's a legitimate expectation of a reasonable amount of content, right? But the people complaining about lack of content in Second Life are almost always USING FREE ACCOUNTS! So in effect they are getting a free pass into a theme park and then complaining about the lack of rides. Can you see the irony in this?


The problem is that Second Life is NOT a theme park for us to visit. The famous tagline is "Your world, your imagination". As such, Second Life is nothing but a mirror of who and what we are. Consider those big empty spaces again. If we went into a theme park and saw big empty spaces where we expected to see rides then we might have cause for complaint. But in this reflection of our own personalities and social structures, those big empty spaces in fact mirror a lack of content in our own selves and in our own societies. When we see big empty spaces we shouldn't be complaining! We should be going "wow, how can I fill that space?" But people aren't doing this.

People are expecting to arrive inworld and be fed other people's content and tomorrow they expect fresh content to keep them interested. In that sense, I can understand the frustrations of Second Life's content providers because they deserve fair reward for the effort they put into creating content for everyone else to enjoy. But what we really need to do is to turn everyone into their own content provider rather than passive consumers. Of course the people who use Second Life as a business platform don't want us all creating our own content because if we start to do that, if we start to fill our own big empty spaces with content that we're making for ourselves, then we're not paying them to do it for us. But the sooner we do this, the sooner Second Life will stop being a theme park and start being OUR WORLD, OUR IMAGINATION again.

Next time you see an empty space in Second Life, don't passively sit back and expect others to fill it. Ask what YOU can do to fill that space. This is YOUR world and YOUR imagination - start acting like it. Go to a sandbox and try playing with the building tools. Take a scripting class. Better yet, buy the books "Creating Your World" and "Scripting Your World" and get a proper skill base. Download a free copy of Qavimator and try creating your own animations. It's hard work! But the first time you see something you've created actually happen inworld, you'll be thrilled and want to go further.

It's Only Meat

As any of my friends can attest, I'm something of a fan of William Gibson. The more I read his work, the more I notice small points that I'd previously missed. Given that these points often relate to the metaphysical aspects of cyberspace and meatspace, they fascinate me as you can imagine.

I remember many years ago when I first bought the Neuromancer graphic novel and, although it wasn't quite the imagery in my head when reading the original book, it brought the story into a visual format which added a new layer for me.


One of the lines of the graphic novel that stuck in my head from the very first reading were from the scene when Molly and Case go to the knife fights. Here's the specific panel so you can see it for yourself.


"It's only meat"

Before we go further, just to give context, here's the next panel so you can understand just what form these "knife fights" actually took. Giant holographic avatars projected into the space above the knife fighters so that the audience in the vast gladiatorial arena can see the action. Of course the audience isn't watching the actual combatants, only their avatars.


So, let's return to Molly's comment.

"It's only meat".

It's a strange thing to say and it could be interpreted a number of ways.

Perhaps Molly is expressing a lack of empathy for other human beings? "It's only meat" could refer to an opinion that other human beings are mere cattle and that as such they don't deserve her empathy. Certainly a casual reader could easily come to this conclusion due to the fact that Molly is in effect a cybernetic assassin, a "razor girl" who kills quite calmly. In fact just after they enter the knife fight stadium, she kills a street thug who is about to attack Case with a knife and doesn't appear to bat an eyelid.

But someone who digs a little deeper into the character could perhaps read her words differently. Is it possible that Molly is actually expressing an opinion that anything that happens to the physical body, such as being cut by a knife, is actually unimportant because "it's only meat"? This is actually a rather deep argument.

If we assume for a second that the flesh and blood body is merely an avatar for our consciousness, just like our pixel avatars are, then we're getting into deep water. People often say "it's only pixels" when referring to someone's avatar in say Second Life, the implication being that it is of no importance. But if the vehicle of our consciousness is of no importance then surely the same must apply to our meat avatars?

And so suddenly we can read Molly's statement of "it's just meat" as "what happens in the knife fight is of no importance because the person themselves isn't harmed, only the avatar".

But now we're also getting into the realms of social commentary! Look again at the second image from the graphic novel, showing the huge holographic avatars. The actual people are miniscule dots in the far distance. In fact we can't even see the physical people so how do we know they are even there? Perhaps Molly's statement of "it's only meat" is actually an expression of the distance that the audience is at from the reality. For the audience, the avatars *are* the combatants! There is no human element for them to empathise with. Indeed is this so far removed from the fact that for many of us in the opening years of the 21st century, reality is the avatars we view on our television screens and that we are becoming disconnected from the fact that real people are (or were) at the other end of that communication?

For comparison, consider Case, a console jockey who manoeuvers through cyberspace. In the cyberspace of Gibson's world, we see a consensual hallucination, data is represented by three dimensional structures that can be manipulated. Case's world is in effect one of dealing with avatars. Case does not see money for example. He might see a green cube that represents the data that represents the money. As such he is disconnected from the essence of the money, in much the same way that Molly and the audience could be said to be disconnected from the essence of the huge holographic avatars projected over the stadium.

Finally, this also raises the question of the way people treat other people in cyberspaces like Second Life. "It's only pixels" is used as the justification for acting badly, for saying terrible things. We would never do such things when face to face with a person and yet we do them when faced with that person's avatar. Does that not also indicate a disconnection between ourselves and the essence of who we are dealing with?

Does it even matter if "it's only meat"?

Hidden Spaces

Every day, we experience the surface of our personal bubbles and it's very rare that anything moves us to go beyond those bubbles. Sometimes we find ourselves accidentally pushing past the surface of our bubbles and making new discoveries as we do so. That's fantastic of course! But it's not enough to then go back inside our bubbles and wait for more accidents. We need to develop the mindset of deliberately exploring beyond our bubbles. We need to develop our thinking so that rather than simply seeing "surface", we also start to think in broader terms of 'beneath', 'above', 'behind', 'before', 'after', 'instead of', 'inside', 'outside', 'alongside' and so on.

So where am I going with this and why was this blog entitled "Hidden Spaces"?

Too often, when traversing cyberspace, we forget that it is alive with the expressions of countless individuals and groups. Each individual and group will leave a flavour of itself in the places it inhabits.

From the original creators, we pass through generations of new residents, each moving in, leaving something of themselves before moving on and being replaced by a new generation who will add their own layers above, alongside and beneath the existing layers, perhaps now abandoned. Even if a generation doesn't leave a layer, the absence of a layer is in itself a layer in broad terms. Perhaps the addition of those new layers creates pockets of abandoned space that become forgotten.

Consider this picture. It's a shame that it can't show the subject more adequately because the hidden space I'm sitting in is huge. A vast man-made cavern beneath a sim and just a stone's throw from a heavily-trafficked infohub yet I'm betting that very few people know this space is even there. It appears to be the remains of the original sim that stood here, a forgotten space that in meatspace might be dusty, cobwebbed and inhabited by rats but of course here in cyberspace, it's like the original creator only left a few moments ago. There's no way to fly or walk into this hidden space. It's only accessible through a little sleight-of-hand. There's nothing down there of direct interest. Only the very fact of its existence is of interest.


Then consider this picture. Now that I have a PC that is literally on the verge of artificial intelligence of the kind that declares war on humanity and gives rise to a series of movies, I can run Second Life with every possible setting on maximum and not experience any problems. I'm not saying that to boast you understand, rather to point out that by having the draw distance constantly set to 512m rather than the default 96m, it enables me to notice things in the distance that I may have walked past a thousand times and never seen. In this case, I was wandering through one of my regular haunts when I noticed something jutting from the waves offshore. Taking a deep breath I plunged through the surf and after a little swimming (I hadn't even realised that my animation overrider had swimming animations - do you honestly even know if yours does and what they look like?) I was amazed to discover that beneath the waves was a whole field of shipwrecks! There was a midget submarine, there was a sailing ship, there was cargo strewn across the ocean floor. Manta rays and eels and fishes swam beneath the hulks. And yet no one would normally come out here. This hidden space, this hidden expression was so far off the beaten track in this world of flight and teleportation that I imagine very few people would ever come here and see these things. And yet there they lie, beneath the waves, created by someone who felt the need to express themselves this way.

Of course, I understand that it's not always possible to run around with our draw distance on maximum just in case we spot something unusual. But can I suggest that once in a while, you take a moment to stand still and set your draw distance to maximum. Let your machine catch up with itself and then just look around and see some of the things you'd normally not have seen. Maybe you'll find something that's worth investigating :)


Finally for now, while exploring recently, I came across a small glade at the foot of a hill covered in Buddhist and Shinto iconography. As I wandered through the glade, I suddenly heard a goat's bleat and then out of the mist came a goat! Why? Why in what was effectively a religious retreat was a goat wandering round? Cyberanimals and the behaviours they exhibit fascinate me and the subject was even part of my recent studies. And here was a goat, happily enjoying life in perhaps the last place I expected to find one. Someone out there put this goat here because to do so meant something to that person. Second Life is full of such things but rarely do we notice and even more rarely do we try to understand why someone did something like this in their little hidden space.


One further type of hidden space I've found is graffiti. Not graffiti in the sense that we might see it in meatspace of course because build/mod permissions mostly prevent us from changing the textures in say a wall to create the generational metascrawls we see in meatspace. The kind of graffiti I'm referring to is more along the lines of builders' marks; messages left behind in hidden angles and in the spaces between prims by the original builders. I've found several examples of these marks, mostly just used as a tag to show "I built this" although sometimes the tag is used to present a message to the reader, should one ever find the hidden element.

In a sense, what we're talking about is cyberarcheology. We can look at the abandoned spaces left behind by previous generations and perhaps understand something about who those people were and how they thought.

As a final point, why not apply this thinking to your meatspace lives? Take a moment to look around you and work out how everything fits together and then work out what's in the spaces inbetween. In a sense, this borrows from the thinking behind urban exploration so that should give you an idea of how to proceed. Much like changing the draw distance settings, all it really takes is a fresh pair of eyes and to be willing to push outside our personal bubbles.

The "Intellectual Property In Cyberspace" Debate - Some Thoughts

Anyone who has even a passing interest in cyberspace affairs can't help but be aware of the recent and ongoing legal case between Stroker et al vs Linden Lab. It's been reported and discussed in many places but this, this and this will provide some idea of the case and the discussion surrounding it.

It seems to be the case that the ongoing issue is the lack of protection for the intellectual property rights of the content creators. It also seems to be the case that the issue has been around for some time now. The question I would like to ask is why this is so and to answer, I'm going to start with a quote.

"Authorship" - in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity - was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like "jottings" in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright - "the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work" - was born.

Xerography - every man's brain-picker - heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simple xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one - instant steal!

As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.

(Taken from "The Medium Is The Massage" by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore)

Last night, I spent a little time ripping some music files from a CD (bought from a shop)into mp3 format on my computer's hard drive. Once I'd done that, I took some of those mp3 files, mixed them with some others and created a compilation CD that I listened to on the way in to work this morning. In this day and age, this series of actions is so common as to be unremarkable. It is part of every user's reasonable expectation of usage. Is it really that different to ripping prims and putting them together in different combinations?

If I buy a sweater and then later want to pass it to my sister, I can. If I buy a skirt but then need to have it shortened and the waist taken in, I can. Can I do such things in Second Life? Sometimes, but often not. If the creator has set the sweater to No Transfer, then I can't pass it to someone. If the creator has set the skirt to No Modify then I can't adjust it for a better fit. I believe that this is one of the reasons why so many Second Life users use copybot. They know that copying other people's stuff is against the TOS but they demand fair usage of the things they have paid money for, just like they can expect in meatspace. If Second Life content creators want to have meatspace intellectual property laws applied to them, perhaps they need to have meatspace consumer expectations of fair use applied to them in return? Just a thought.

I mean compare this to software you can only install a limited number of times. It's a tactic to destroy the second user market because that market generates no revenue for the creators. In exactly the same way that I refuse to buy games with this kind of limitation or music that can only be copied onto so many devices, I will no longer buy Second Life content that I am not able to have reasonable freedom of use from. If something is No Transfer, it's useless. If something is No Modify, it's worse than useless. Just like I'm allowed to make reasonable backups of my digital media for my own use, I should be allowed to make a minimum of one backup of every item I buy; a backup that can be transferred to an alt or backed up off-grid. We get this with all other digital content and yet not in Second Life and all because the businesses want to protect their intellectual properties.

Now, the main issue of the current legal case and a common complaint of course is that unscrupulous users have used tools such as copybot to steal their content and sell it in competition with the creator. It happens, we know it does. For the record I'll add that I have never personally copybotted anything or knowingly accepted a copybotted item off anyone. But it happens. Does it happen because thieves want to steal your work and sell it as their own? Yes, it happens. But it isn't the only reason why people do it. You would reduce a lot of the need for copybotting just by giving your customers fair usage rights.

If you are a business and someone steals your content then yes, you are entitled to make a complaint and have it investigated. But as everyone realises, it's an impossible task, just like the music industry can't investigate every possible CD someone copies for a friend. So why not follow their lead? Why not give your content away freely and find other sources of revenue?

ZOMGAWSH T3H CREHZI B!TCH WANTS US 2 GIVZ OUR STUFFS AWAY FREEZ? O.O

Well, actually yes! It works for musicians..... See musicians are now realising that they make m-o-r-e money by giving their music away free as a form of advertising for merchandising sales, live gigs and so on. And no one denies that musicians put a damn sight more time and effort into producing music than the majority of content creators in Second Life. So why not give content away as a way of drawing people to visit your place of business where you can sell them other services or perhaps more unique items?

In a sense, this blog isn't really aimed at business people. Such people have a real resistance to diversification (related and unrelated) and will seek to preserve existing markets through lawsuits about intellectual property rights. This isn't surprising as most businesses in Second Life are founded on skills an owner enjoys using and they don't really want to change. But all businesses have to constantly assess themselves and ask themselves which market they are in and why. Too many will refuse to realise that the market they were once successful in has now moved on and left them behind and instead of adapting to the changing demands of the markets, they will attempt to prevent the market from moving on.

So what do we do? How do we find a solution that works? What we really need is to get the content creators to go back to creating collaborative content for the sake of making good quality content. If they want to make money from Second Life, there are dozens of ways they can do this and they can find plenty of ideas in this book). We need to take Second Life back to a time when users created new stuff and passed it to their friends who would then add something of themselves to it and share that on again. People weren't mere passive consumers but active content creators, producing content for their own world.

If you are a content creator, why not start working collaboratively with an open source/creative commons mindset instead of an intellectual property mindset? If you need to still generate revenue through Second Life, use some of your creativity and innovative thinking to find new ways to do this.

What Second Life needs - really needs - is to take content creation back out of the hands of the businesses. Create a new generation of content creation tools that mean the average user can create high quality content without having to master half a dozen software packages such as Maya, Photoshop, QAvimator and Archipelis in addition to Second Life itself. Let's see more videos like those put out by Torley Linden and others helping the average Second Life user to become their own skilled and successful content creator.

I have no problem with people who want to run cottage cyber-industries in their spare time or even as a full time job. Good luck to them! But let's replace the business of content creation and all its baggage with a widening culture of collaborative creativity. Learn to create stuff, pass copies to people so that they can enjoy them. If they modify them and improve them or even if they screw them up, then great! Because it means that slowly, everyone becomes more involved in content production instead of content consumption. Standards of skill will improve and become more widespread. The residents of Second Life will invest more of themselves in the Second Life community and the community will become stronger as a consequence.

As a final point to this rather long blog, I'll attempt to pre-empt two counter-arguments.

"Why should I spend hours and even days creating content just to give it away? Don't I deserve to be paid a fair price?"

Of course! And if you still want to run a business selling your content then brilliant. Windows (commercial) and Linux (open source) happily co-exist, right? But hopefully you'll come to see there are far more positive benefits to collaborative creation than a few spacebucks.

"Without business, sims will close. Second Life needs business to survive".

Again, business can continue of course and should. But there are far better businesses to run than content creation that don't infringe on creativity and empowering the community as a whole.

These have been just a few thoughts on this current hot topic, not just in Second Life but in meatspace publications and even in other cyberspaces where content creation is heavily restricted .

Oh, as a final note, yes, I am putting my money where my mouth is! I may not have much in the way of content creation skills just yet but I'm going to start to learn some lsl scripting and see what I can come up with. And yes, I'll be sharing anything I come up with, possibly right here on this blog :)

Blue Mars - Some Initial Observations

So this morning was my first real chance to once more delve into cyberspace. I've been without a PC for anything beyond the basics for the last month as my power supply decided to destroy itself, taking the motherboard and chip with it in the process! A round of applause for my laptop Little Pink, who took up the challenge of keeping me functioning magnificently :) I took possession of my new custom-built creation a couple of days ago and have been busy setting everything up since then. Finally today I was able to visit Second Life, catch up on gossip with my friends and sweep out the old to make way for the new.

One of the things I'd done during this break from exploring cyberspace was to sign up as a beta tester for the new Blue Mars cyberspace because I'd heard some promising things about it. Today I was finally able to go in-world for the first time and begin mooching around to see what was going on and to compare it to my benchmark which will always be Second Life.

Admittedly, the following are just some initial observations and impressions of what is effectively a closed beta i.e. not the final product. So I'm not praising or condemning Blue Mars with this blog, just making some notes of my own thoughts.

So, after logging in for the first time, I was given the opportunity to create my avatar. I didn't expect a great many options with this being a beta and I wasn't disappointed in that sense. But I did what I could to recreate Senban in this new cyberspace and then leapt ahead to see what the rest of Blue Mars would hold.

I arrived at a sort of "infohub/welcome area" much like I'd found when I first arrived in There. I was actually a bit concerned already as here I was and yet I'd not had any tutorials on how to do anything! So my first few minutes were sheer trial and error and by accident, I ended up teleporting to a plaza in a built up area near the beach, aptly named "Beach City". There are a number of signboards in the welcome area which give you the option of teleporting to various locations, some currently under construction.

Once I'd arrived at Beach City, I decided it was time for the first official shot of Senban Babii in Blue Mars. Now, where's the snapshot button. Oh there isn't one and that's one of my first issues with this new cyberspace. So to get that first official snapshot, I resorted to one of my favourite toys, the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista.

Okay so, at least now I was out in the real world, even if it was devoid of life (remember this is closed beta, not an active world as yet). Hmm, I'll check my map and see where everyone is! Map, map, map. And that's my second grumble about Blue Mars! Never mind, I decided to just explore a bit and figure out how to move around and interact with things. Movement isn't controlled in the same way as in Second Life. Rather than keyboard controls, you literally left-click where you want to go and your avatar walks there (or runs if the point is at a distance). Here's where I say something positive about Blue Mars: the avatar animations are far smoother and superior to those of a similar new account in Second Life. The realism of the movements is excellent. And there is a larger selection of basic animations to choose from in the menu as well.

But this point and click movement system left me cold. While it does simplify the movement controls so that you don't need to be an experienced gamer to have good control of your avatar's movement, it does create an extremely limiting feel to what you can do and where you can go. Someone comparing Second Life to Blue Mars will also immediately notice the lack of flight in the latter. Admittedly flight was only originally added to Second Life as a rushed stopgap before an early business presentation where they hadn't had time to create the animations for climbing and so on but it's now integral to that cyberspace. It allows for a feeling of unlimited freedom of movement. Blue Mars restricts your movements far too much. But I think this is deliberate. I'll come back to this in a moment.

The next thing I noticed were the camera controls. I like to be able to move my camera position around when I'm in Second Life. I like to be able to zoom in and out as well. That's all about creating a suitable "frame" for the conversation or activity, something extremely important in virtual spaces where experience is primarily visual rather than acoustic (to steal a concept from McLuhan). In Blue Mars, there is a rather nice way of moving the camera position using right-click but no zoom that I can find. This reminds me of one of the worst aspects of There; the limiting viewpoints.

The lack of content creation tools in Blue Mars is well known and this again is deliberate I believe. Much like There, the intention seems to be that content can only be created and provided by certain approved sources (not the common or garden user). While this will undoubtedly keep quality high (and no doubt appeal to meatspace corporations looking for business opportunities), it does remove any aspect of creativity from the environment and that makes me think that Blue Mars is like walking through someone else's world, one that I'm only visiting rather than engaging in or being immersed in - a world where I am reduced to being a mere passive consumer, something I personally despise.

My final initial observation relates to the chatting system. It's pants. It in effect uses the bubblechat system found in There and Metaplace. Not only is this annoying and childish, it leaves no chat history to refer to if you go afk and also leaves no chat history which can be viewed when not in-world, something that might be a valid concern for business purposes if reference needs to be made to something said at a meeting.

Which brings me now to my real observation. Given the lack of content creation, given the very nice graphics straight out of the box (i.e. a casual user will have something nice to look at without having to make any effort), given the simplified control systems, given the apparent lack of counter-culture elements e.g. neko and furries, the whole thing to me seems to have been created for entirely different reasons to Second Life. Second Life is an open sandbox environment that can be turned to many uses, drawing in and engaging the user and empowering them. Blue Mars gives the feeling of a platform designed specifically as a business tool for virtual conferences. When you look around in-world, you see plazas, you see golf courses. You don't see anything of the creativity found in Second Life like urban neko sims, sex areas and so forth. You get the feeling you've arrived for a business conference and will squeeze in a few games of golf while you're here and finally relax at the bar to chat with colleagues in the evening.

Ultimately, I think that Blue Mars has got a serious chance of ousting Second Life in regards to being used for business conferencing, especially as it prevents people from turning up to meetings dressed as spaghetti monsters, vampires and neko strippers (something discussed recently in various business sources such as this, this and this). But in regard to providing a creative world to be involved in for sheer enjoyment, it is unlikely to catch up to Second Life. It will be interesting to see how the two evolve in comparison to each other's evolution.

PS - It's amusing to note that Blue Mars suffers from the same lag and crashing issues as Second Life ;)