assert(♥)

An idea didn’t crystallize for me until I read this article on Habbo Hotel that states a lot of Habbo Hotel users spend their time simulating real life activities; that the pre-mature citizens of Habbo Hotel are spending real money creating simulacra of the grown up experiences they expect to have. I saw (and participated in) this same behavior in social MUDs, so it seems natural to me, though I’m surprised the lengths to which Habbos have apparently taken it.

There must be the same impulse in SL, which ends up a source of tension: there are the people who see SL as an interesting software environment, and the people who are playticipating, each enabling the other by providing tools and a market respectively. To the extent these groups are separate and don’t have the other’s interests in mind, their relations are tense.

I’m sure this is not news, but I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.

I'm tired enough that I'm reading a bunch of Roughly Drafted and this sounds just pretty totally awesome, maaan:

Another idea for enhancing .Mac would be to create a virtual realm for .Mac subscribers to create 3D avatars, something between Second Life and World of Warcraft, where participants could dress up as a character, invent virtual crap, learn virtual skills, and run around in a vast virtual world blowing huge amounts of time and fake money, all while paying subscriber fees. It works for Blizzard.

Or perhaps, by injecting some intelligence into the fake world genera, Apple could create a modern eWorld, where participants could actually learn real skills, from code development to Photoshop and SketchUp tricks, and then draw and build parts, models, widgets, and applications to use and trade online.

I'm sure I would realize something like oh but it's so far outside their core competency after some sleep, but right now it's totally cool.

It occurred the other day that a potential way to put a text interface on a virtual space is SHRDLU, the MIT AI Lab project covered in Gödel, Escher, Bach. SHRDLU can reason about limited environments, and could stand in as your representative in a space—some sort of incarnation of you on a lower plane—interrogated by you in text to understand a space and its contents, and directed by you to alter them. Some of the example interaction from the SHRDLU site (which is the one in GEB, a little rewritten):

Person: PICK UP A BIG RED BLOCK.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: GRASP THE PYRAMID.
Computer: I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHICH PYRAMID YOU MEAN.
Person: FIND A BLOCK WHICH IS TALLER THAN THE ONE YOU ARE HOLDING AND PUT IT INTO THE BOX.
Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE BLOCK WHICH IS TALLER THAN THE ONE I AM HOLDING.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: WHAT DOES THE BOX CONTAIN?
Computer: THE BLUE PYRAMID AND THE BLUE BLOCK.
Person: WHAT IS THE PYRAMID SUPPORTED BY?
Computer: THE BOX.
Person: HOW MANY BLOCKS ARE NOT IN THE BOX?
Computer: FOUR OF THEM.
Person: IS AT LEAST ONE OF THEM NARROWER THAN THE ONE WHICH I TOLD YOU TO PICK UP?
Computer: YES, THE RED CUBE.

On the topic of Linden Lab becoming a bank, an interesting biased rant from an anonymous “financial consultant,” if you can muddle through financial jargon:

This didn't make sense. After all, the liquidity supposedly existed to support these simple, smallish trades. Well, when the guys running the banks and the exchange trading floor are the guys with most of the [L$s], it's no surprise that outsiders are not permitted to extract any significant returns.

We concluded that we weren't playing in a market at all. We were suckered in by a classic pyramid scheme, albeit one with a pretty new user interface. —

Mint tells me the latest search that ended at neologasm.org as of this moment was Linden Labs business model.

Believe me, we're all looking for that. If you find it, let them know.

Finally, after enough involvement over enough time to become "that guy" to more than a few people, I've stopped using, reading, and caring about Second Life. It's not a very forward looking system, its being locked up by a single vendor preventing the development that could make it great.

Starting from the basic fact that they're both San Francisco startups, I've always seen parallels between Linden Lab and Six Apart. That makes it hard to actually argue what I just wrote without slipping into or having to defend its business model: selling an internet service on which it has a natural monopoly through source code control. I could argue that my employer's business model is not something I can control, but thinking of it more locally, my "business model" rests solely on the company's. At least, that's so if we were speaking morally instead of economically—and if economy is the science of scarcity, doesn't it have great moral implications?

Instead, I would argue actual differences. We aren't the only vendor of blogs; in fact, we're in a pretty competitive space, competing not only with other blog services but other supplementary products (photo hosting, social networks, etc).

Really, though, Second Life is not a community to which I belong. I might find it useful to start doing my own thing, cultivating my own little basement metaverse—it's an unfilled facet of my life as of a few months ago—but at this point it's hard for me to want to replace Second Life, too. I thought I had some good ideas about building a new internet community (in a larger context than, say, the social MUD theses I wrote a while ago, I mean). I started writing this post probably a month and a half ago, with a very different focus. I had a plan, a rudimentary program design. I even imagined a brand identity, and bought the domain name.

This is the crest of a wave, though. Had I acted when I was first developing the idea, I could have helped lead a movement toward a more open system. Garages are starting to hum with the activity of cloning and refining the formula Linden Lab is selling so hard. The basement pirates are already building (not to genericize jarodrussell's term of art too much). At this point even the bloggers are realizing a closed metaverse does not sustain (despite my best efforts I lost the link I was going to cite—I hope I didn't imagine it).

However I like to think duplication is not my cup of tea. Plus things are going better at work, so the fantasies about my own startup are firmly back in the realm of fantasy. (Good thing too, because going into business up against so established a player as Linden Lab in a space about to be so crowded is surely crazy talk.) Plus I spend barely any free time alone at home, so I don't have any time I could build such a thing, anyway.

I guess I should talk about the program plan I was developing. The idea was guided by three precepts:

• Distribution. Linden Lab has shown that you can get amazing horizontal scale by sharding geographically, connecting servers at the physical edges. However, that doesn't let you scale where you'd most like to: inside one place. To step that up, you'd have to model the world in a differently (you might say "more") distributed architecture. You need to solve the problem of how to increase computational density of a space, and scale inward, not outward.
• No invention. There's a bevy of free infrastructure parts for delivering data and user experience. It happens to currently all be optimized for experiences shaped like web sites. Use them. (I think this is what drove me from MUDs: you can't reuse components when your system is some ancient C monolith, instead of a pluggable n-tiered service. Hell, split the difference and be a gooey UNIX pipeball, just give me options.)
• Modest goals. Even using commodity parts, Linden Lab has a big head start (in marketing, if nothing else). Unless you have some field-changing advantage, you can't compete in their niche--mdash;but then, you shouldn't, anyway. Imvu is in a good place here by being differently good.

Based on these axioms, there were three possible products. The first was I (one), and it was the latest evolution of the MUD I always wanted to build. So you have a universe of objects; make each object its own service on the internet, exposing an API by which they can communicate with each other. "Hi, Room, I'm a Thing. May I move myself into you?" "Hello, Thing. (I see you're operated by Player, who is trusted by my operator with that permission.) Sure! Here are my description, exits, and the URIs to the other objects I contain..." Make a gateway service that's a telnet server, which presents itself to the world as an object you inspire, and converts your commands into messages to other objects and messages from other objects into text output for you to read. Very distributed, and so modest I doubt I would bother making it for its own sake.

But from that idea, it's a small leap to the product I called 3D: render the world not in text but as a 3D scene. It's the exact same thing. You can pull textures and rich content over HTTP to leverage web infrastructure parts. (The main reason I started considering seriously the entire possibility of competing services to Second Life is because I found with a little research that the core renderer for Disney's Toontown kids' MMORPG is open source, co-maintained by Carnegie Mellon for use in computer/media coursework.)

In the middle of the two is the path I considered most seriously, and which I was calling 2.0. This is something like the same thing, but instead of using a that speaks MUD, or a 3D program, the interface is a dynamic web site.

The truth is—and I realized this most only just now when I wrote these here descriptions of I, 2.0, and 3D—you could make one contiguous metaverse that supports all three interfaces. It would lay the burden of making three interfaces for every object on content creators, which you wouldn't want to do, but it would be possible at least.

Ultimately, without the work, these ideas are worthless. The ideas of anyone who produces running code are greatly more valuable. As I learn I don't have to do everything (because, as you might expect, I can't do everything), I feel more like it's fine if I don't participate in this movement. On the other hand, if this new energy truly is a rising tide, and if I aspired to compete, then the name I picked would be eerily prescient: I chose Waveshark.

On the subject of object banking in Second Life:

Forty Acres and a Mule.

Land ownership in Second Life v1.2 comes complete with a guaranteed allocation of server resources to ensure fair distribution of objects in each region. Prim hogs are a thing of the past, as you'll have sole access to a portion of prims equal to the percentage of purchasable land you hold - land in regions with large amounts of Linden-owned open space will have higher allocations and will be especially valuable. —

So they are making the “land-to-prim ratio” standard.

At the same time, they're making other interesting, major changes in 1.2:

• They're involving real money with the “Developer Incentives” program. As Philip Linden (LL CEO and RealNetworks ex-CTO Philip Rosedale, I expect) says in the discussion thread, “Linden Lab will not be selling L$ for RL$. We will instead be offering programs where you can get RL$ for L$.”
• You can join for a one-time fee of $10. You just can no longer claim land willy-nilly. So for a negligible cost you can visit and use Second Life, you just can't contribute building-wise without paying more.
• In fact, the entire onus of funding the world has moved from access to development. It sounds like you can no longer claim land at all, only buy parcels at auction. You can only own so much land, which for the $10 cheapskates means none, and otherwise depending how much you pay. Interesting that they're going to allow you to pay for your land with L$, though, so if you contribute to the world as indicated by the in-world economy, you do get to own land.
• You can get beta client software for the Mac now. Maybe you could with 1.1 too—or maybe that is 1.1 since all the 1.2 stuff sounds like preannouncement—but I hadn't mentioned it, so here it is.

See also the Terra Nova post about it, which points out a point of the land pricing chart my eyes glossed over: “Under the new system, the land mass of an entire 2L server can be had for $195 a month.”

My trial ended last night, so this will be my final entry about Second Life, unless I reread Everyone in Silico or try There™ or something and find more words to share.

• For several days this week I led the “referrals this week” leader board. Thanks!
• The page you get without JavaScript is still a 404, so Google still doesn't index the site.
• Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, used to be Real's CTO. I guess that's from where the idea of streaming a 3D world came.
• Second Life is expensive, but that means they aren't giving away their ice cream for free. The commercial enterprise won't collapse under the weight of its own popularity. Plus there's the snarky but entirely true answer someone gave when a fellow trial user at the mentor meeting the other night asked, “What does Second Life have that other services don't?” “Adults.” You can't get an account without being 18, whether or not you have debt digits to give.
• I never figured out how to make custom avatar animations. Even the ones used by items like the Jetball shooter (standard gun anim) and baseball bat (standard sword anim, which looks funny) are precompiled and provided with the viewer software. I bet the bow and arrow animation is also provided, but I'm not sure. There's no documented way to make your own animations, and as those are precompiled and already present instead of streamed like everything else, it sounds impossible. You probably have to write a program that explicitly moves the parts of your avatar somehow, but I couldn't figure how to do that either.
• Reading the scripting forum, you find there are a lot of complaints about LSL. That's a definite area for improvement.
• If you buy a clothing item like from Kenzington's and get an object (shows up in Inventory as a box), drop it on the ground, menu it and select Edit, click the More button, and go to the Contents tab. It should have the clothing item there. After copying it to your inventory you can delete the object (and I think recover L$10 or so).
• Some neat things to build: working Venetian blinds, an AirZooka, a fully articulated tail (you can get cat tails that “twitch,” which is better than not, but you still can't swish it or curl it up).
• As Hamlet Linden says when discussing the Cory Doctorow book club meeting, it's hard to sit on stuff (perm). One cafe I found was very nice, though unfinished, and except that its awe-inspiring glass chairs were very, very hard to sit in. I'm not sure how Hamlet means “do it manually,” either.

I did meet a “rate miner,” who traded positive ratings with anyone and everyone in an effort to maximize his... which worked: he's in the leader lists for most things. But then, he also built the nice mall I visited, and has been there for ages, so a top rating is probably deserved. I rated him positive for behavior (he seemed nice during our chat) and building (the mall, at least).

He told me he never played computer games until he tried SL, which goes with Raph Koster's games turning into art: SL isn't so much a game as a long-running collaborative artwork. Raph says, “games will never be mature as long as the designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind.” I recall a forum thread I read yesterday about invisible boxes that you can use to hide something, and how it was basically a rendering bug; someone cautioned that they wouldn't whine about trying to sell those boxes and . Someone else said the Lindens loved the emergent properties of SL, the ultimate expression of which would be that players would discover a rendering bug and sell it to other players.

Regardless of whether the bug is fixed, that it's even an issue shows how SL is like this next generation “game” Raph discusses, which I would restate as a game that's fully participatory for the designer. The Internet itself is such a game with a higher barrier to entry, jokes about beating the Internet aside (“the end guy was hard”). From what I've heard of the other graphical social MMOGs, Second Life is the most open ended, the most designer-participatory. Second Life is the frontier forger in that niche, and deserves our support if not our money.

I was going to write a new post reading, “I want it I want it I want it,” and dithering about what seems like my new addiction—but then I realized I've played enough Second Life and can stop now. Yes, if I had the disposable income and broadband (and my computer would run it decently; that remains to be seen), I would subscribe. I don't, and I'm OK with that.

I did play Jetball (that game played in that arena from “Island Boy”), and it was fun. It'd be better if you moved faster: you still walk like normal (and female avatars still with that prim female_walk animation). If you ran, or had rollerskates or something, it'd be more interesting. Heh, maybe if you had jet skates that let you zoom up the sides of the arena... It also got dark while we were playing, so it was hard to see. Second Life needs better lighting if it's going to have night.

That description elides that the six of us who played all sucked, and the referee had to join before someone scored. And yes, it was the referee. (I had quite a few shots on goal but I couldn't figure out where to aim to get it in.)

It's been a while since I felt that deep-stomach ache of inadequacy in my real life; it was last when I started on social MU*s, and made so many (of you as) friends. That's about the best endorsement for Second Life I could give.

Thanks to alfienet for pointing out slides (PDF) of Raph Koster's keynote at Austin Game Conference 2003. This explains how an “open-ended game” like Second Life can be so attractive, compared to what we normally think of as video games.

Through my incessant jabbering about it, I've now coerced three of you into free trials of Second Life. Thanks! I also found that, while you need a login to get the to the Guides and Tutorials page, the documents themselves are entirely unprotected. For your perusal are these Adobe® PDF™s:

• Starter Guide: good introduction if you don't plan to use the free trial. If you do, you get an interactive tutorial (called the “Prelude” in the Starter Guide), and what from here isn't covered there, you can figure out if you know how to use a computer and have ever played an FPS or adventure game.
• Reference Guide for the client and world (5 MB!): there is material in here you won't learn on the fly. When I couldn't figure out how to “Link” objects¹ together, the reference told me how; there are five entire pages on the economy of SL; et cetera.
• Beginner's Guide to LSL Scripting: shows you what the language looks like. You'll see a lot of “Java/C-like” in this and the reference manual. Interesting is the explicitly state-based design of the language: you write different functions for different object states.
• Fashion Design: Using the Templates: a brief manual with hints for making avatar and clothing textures.

The last is curious, especially with the charge SL is KiSS: the MMORPG. Players of open games have four main motivations: achievement, exploration, socialization, and imposition. Designing your avatar and building a home are achievement activities. I've had plenty of fun simply playing with the freedom afforded in avatar design.² People have already set up shops where you can buy outfits for in-game currency.⁴ However, I would say the primary achievement activity is to earn reputation; to some extent that's a function of your building prowess, but you also earn reputation through being a good citizen of the world.

If this sounds like socialization, that's because it is. That's the mechanism for the game. Second Life is not specifically a roleplaying game, but it is in that it's about playing a role in society. In fact, the activities for the three other suits are subactivities undertaken in the overarching social milieu. Exploration of others' building is another activity;⁵ as you find neat building, you can vote for them and improve the builder's reputation. You can also “explore” avatarspace by meeting people with new and interesting designs. There are few enough people using the service currently that finding anyone is a formidable challenge at times.

Bartle also calls the fourth activity “killing,” which sounds more apropos of SL's games and areas where you can be killed. However, the initial name imposition implies you can have social griefing: you must account for being a jerk for the fun of being a jerk. Balancing the social imposition goal with others' right not to be hassled is a difficult line to walk. In SL you can mute other people, similar to MU* ignore. I don't think you can do anything about avatars wearing big costumes, though.

Other thoughts:

• Occasionally I had problems flying. The server would get ahead of me, or me the server, or something. I would hit F to stop flying and the client would show it thought it did, but it was still zooming ahead in space. With a combination of key mashing (F for fly, WASD for control parallel to the ground, and E and C for up and down) I eventually broke out of it, and found myself back somewhere much earlier. That's the only case of desyncing I've found, but it has happened twice. Perhaps it was a lost-packet issue (though surely they have some protection against packet loss, as UDP itself doesn't).
• You can remember landmarks (which are kind of like teleport destinations, to you MUCKers). You can teleport to any landmarks you have, but it costs L$. The most I saw was L$10 though.
• Pie submenus don't work as they ought. If you mouse to a submenu, you still have to click to get the submenu to show up. That's annoying, being used to the Firebird extension RadialContext that opens a menu on mouseover but only selects an option on (un)click.
• I couldn't figure out how to buy something at Kenzington's,⁴ even though it sure seems to be a clothing shop, not an art shop. I couldn't get the “info” object to work, though after reading a little I decided maybe you have to speak to it.

• Scripting. The scripting language is called Linden Scripting Language (LSL). It's sort of like ECMAScript (née JavaScript, aka ActionScript), which I expect would've been a good choice, except for the emphasis in LSL on object state. You can get the Beginner's Scripting Guide here (pdf).

  You can get an illicit, gzipped copy of the LSL2 reference manual here. The manual comes with the client so it isn't too illicit, but still, I have no permission to distribute it. I consider this sort of document promotional material, but as with the PDF guides Linden Lab has cloistered the technical documentation. Presumably that means more people use the trial to find out about the game, but some people would only care to read about it (and this is for you).

• High system requirements. I tried Second Life on my parents' woefully underpowered PC (unfortunately the only one at home that has broadband) and got rather poor results.⁶ So, yes, you have to be at the tip of the technology curve (like the lab computers I was using previously) to really use the thing fluidly. As the normal PC upgrade cycle continues, more people will be able to run the thing—unless Linden Lab keeps upgrading the client to keep pace, that is. Ideally they'll provide new features as frobs that can be off for consumer PCs and on for gaming PCs, though. (Already all the nice things like shadows and local light sources are off by default, which is why they're missing from my screens.)

• Avatar accessories. You can “attach” objects to various points of your body, to wear wings, cat ears, etc. (Someone I invited just told me people are, in fact, selling attachable penises.) For L$300 I bought a slinky catgirl outfit that included cat ears and a tail, but the only good part was the cat ears.³ I probably should've made them myself instead.

  I tried to make a fox tail, but it looked blocky,³ and I ended up destroying the black tip when changing the color to a darker red to match my avatar's hair. Neither tail actually moves, which would be the #1 way to make one you could sell for L$, I think. I might try to do that Tuesday, though the Reference Guide says roughly, “Joints are hard.”

  Costumes are used, though, as you can tell from pictures in Hamlet Linden's weblog. Monkeys seem popular. “NIMBY!” features a hippo ex machina. In “Crashing the Party,” a dragon attends the wedding of the virtual year.

• Hacking. At the lowest level, Second Life is a UDP application. If someone decodes the packet protocol, we'll see all sorts of add-on tools to “possess” the client, on the same principle as FPS targeting bots: sit between the client and the network connection, augmenting surreality.

  The biggest win would be the ability to build objects in a real (or at least better) 3D modeler, and “play back” construction instructions. Building that lighthouse was a pain, because you can't click into wireframe mode, or select an object from a list (so you need good mouse aim). You can't use an arbitrary mesh, though there are options to twist and deform the default primitives that might let you get close. POVray would be my vote for interoperation, as it's free, there are (nonfree) modelers available, and in the end it's a real language you can parse and translate into building instructions. The author could provide a POVray include file that lets you easily use the standard shapes and textures.

  Bots providing services to other users would be nice, but you won't see them because they'd have to, as above, sit on top of some real actual person's interaction. You won't see anything performing an entirely different function; only enhancements for the user's interaction.

  With the protocol decoded, you'll also see third-party servers. However, you'd have to hack or possess the client to use them. I imagine you'd see the same reaction from Linden Lab as from Blizzard against FreeCraft, more or less: more because the service, not the software, is Linden's bread and butter, and less because they aren't as big.

Screenshots:

1. I built something; barberio suggested it was a lighthouse. The latter is the only shot I've posted containing the entire window.
2. Avatar design T&A (may be NSFW—see what I do for you people?).
3. Trying out gestures. Also a good shot of the cat ears; here's the tail I made.
4. Kenzington's had some neat outfit stuff: various tattoos and shirts (“Internet killed the video star” and “I'll be too busy looking good,” a quote from Enter the Dragon; there were at least two quotes from Princess Bride), and some slinky outfits.
5. Some nice buildings.
6. It didn't run on the PC at home.