Sometimes I feel that if there was a diary about the life-cycle of Second Life, fragments of it would look like this:
April, 2002: Launched Linden World yesterday! Got our first user, and she made a giant beanstalk! This is going to be great. The birds and snakes roaming the servers are awesome. We’re going to need a lot of content, so we’re instituting an Early Creators program.
November 2002: We have an economy! Prim taxes will solve all of our problems!
April 2003: Happy Birthday, Second Life! Can’t say as I care very much for the new name – nobody here really does – but the marketing specialist tells us that it will work out well. No more birds and snakes. Turns out they were a resource hog.
3 June 2003: We’re open to the public! This is so exciting!
December 2006: Creating content is hard. We should focus on creating and helping communities and let them take care of all of that.
June 2008: Creating communities is hard. We let communities handle themselves, and focus on marketing Second Life.
September 2010: Marketing Second Life is hard. Let’s just focus on marketing vampires or the virtual pet industry or something.
Honestly? I’m not sure that would exactly make for a successful adaption into a major film. Which is a shame, because I’d rather like to see Karl Urban as Cory Ondrejka.
This would have made a great comic.
Way funny… too realistic to laugh.
I dunno .. rather sounded like a Greek Tragedy to me. (Hmm .. come to think of it, the declining economy, continued cutbacks, general apathy and unrest .. could be a Modern Greek Tragedy too.)
That is the saddest story I’ve ever heard (sorta). I keep reading about the decline of Second Life. I keep hearing about sims closing; geezus, even Green Acres golf course is closing. That was one of the most immersive experiences inworld. I know a lot of people are really down about SL right now. Friends comment on it frequently, as if it’s in the air or something. And yet, there are places that are full of life, like Calas Galadhon, New England and others. There’s a magic sauce in there somewhere.
Has the makings of a reality show I’m sure
xoxo
Its funny because it’s true. And that’s sad
August 2011:
Marketíng Vampires is hard. Let´s market 3Ds, Google Sketchup and Maya instead.
Although the Lab hasn’t marketed those at all, at least not yet.
If anything, the Labs have been pushing Blender, rather than the programs you named, Vivienne. But they don’t promote very much of anything.
Ha! So true. But you can’t really blame LL too much. If you were told to sell “The World”, what would you say about it? In a sound bite? Second Life is a world, and it’s too big and diverse for any sound bite, catch phrase, or 30 second ad spot.
It’s a sad irony, but LL has created something wonderful that cannot be marketed, only experienced.
September 2012: Facebook doesn’t want us, after all. Dump those stock options, now.
And Mark Hamill as Philip!
[...] addition to Mr. Humbles comments, a comment made by writer Tateru Nino in her “Second Life Diaries” post was my first revelation. Using humor, she describes characterizes the situation in 2002 like [...]
[...] I’ve seen this kind of childish representation at other LL developments (and I’ll get into those later this week), but it wasn’t just Silly Monkey it was also giant silly spiders and silly “snakes roaming the servers” (this came to mind, referencing back to Tateru Nino’s The Second Life Diaries post). [...]