Baba Sucks

The end times are near! Just one look at the Shirky mess will make it clear that this hype bubble has popped. Time to jump ship everyone… right? Come on! AMIRITE?

Well, no maybe not. Some others have done the job of debating this one. Read Wagner James Au over at GigaOM and Tateru Nino at the Second Life Insider.

I was prompted to write this after reading Giff’s posting Second Life skeptics — you’re right! (and wrong). Mostly the first paragraph,

We continue to see the inevitable anti-SL pendulum swing from all the hype of the last few months. Frankly, I don’t blame the detractors, and I think the skepticism is really healthy. I know lots of people who “just don’t get it” and my response is “all in good time.” I don’t expect everyone to have a need that fits the current environment, or to see the promise through some of the current limitations.

What is Second Life?

All the big hype about Second Life, but what is it really? The simplest answer someone might give you is that Second Life is some kind of game. Unless they think Second Life is the coolest game ever, it was probably said dismissively.

Oh, it’s just another online game. WOW Is way better.

Isn’t it a game though? It’s got all the components of a game. It’s used on a computer, it’s got little 3D people you can control. You can even shoot people and blow stuff up. It’s a game! But not.

It looks like a game. What makes it not a game?

It’s not a game, because without hundreds of thousands of hours of effort by the users of Second Life, there would be nothing at all In Second Life except flat ground and little avatars. A giant 3D chat room. Second Life doesn’t come pre-packed with all the planned scenarios and bells and whistles of a game. No rules of play or objectives. It’s a collections of tools and and a place to make use of them. It’s (shitty)3D modeling software, a (shitty)Software development platform, a couple thousand servers, and magic.

The Magic

It’s free.

That is, anyone can use it and do with it just about anything they want for no cost and share it with thousands of other people instantly — live.

You might look at second life and say, “but everything sucks.”

You would be almost right. Most of the things people make are ugly, useless, and boring. In much the way the web made publishing and sharing ideas, art, and information so easy, Second Life has opened development of interactive 3D to a wide range of people who may never have otherwise had a chance to express themselves in the same way. Not many people in Second Life are professional artists, or at the least they were not when they signed up.

Second Life lowers the barriers to entry for 3D and programming. Some people make games. Others make clothes, buildings, or gadgets. A huge number of people who make the most amazing things in Second Life didn’t know a whit about 3D modeling, texturing, or programming before becoming users of Second Life. Many people who have been following Second Life for a while lose sight of this. It’s not so special that people make money and sell these things they make, but that they can make them at all.

Still others make nothing at all. They don’t make things in Second Life, but they are what drives it. Some people are awestruck when they realize that somebody else might want the little gadget they made on a a whim. The sense that you’ve made something that others find interesting or useful is sometimes almost narcotic.

Will everything move to 3D then?

The Web 3pointD [link]

Are we on the cusp of the new web? 3D replaces 2D. Some of Second Life’s detractors scoff. How galling of those 3D people to suggest they can replace the web! How could Second Life replace the web you might wonder?

Indeed it cannot. Second Life can’t make the simple task of reading the news or writing a blog any easier or fundamentally better. That is not to say it does not have a place. Even as Second Life struggles to join the Web 2.0 movement by integrating its services with the web and HTML on a prim, in some ways it has already surpassed it.

As I said before, part of the magic of Second Life is that it is live. Second Life streams to you, and everyone else, the exact same thing. This is the part of Second Life that I expect the experts will call Web 3.0 if they’re still counting the numbers by then. It’s shared context. It adds something to communication that is more real than reading a blog or looking at pictures. The sense that every action has an immediate effect on everyone around, because what you see is what they see.

In Conclusion

Stuff
More stuff to come.