Why I Hate Second Life
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 16th, 2007 2:02 pmI recently did a drive-by bashing Second Life. Now that David All has joined the action, I figured I’d better flesh it out a bit more.
What I don’t like about Second Life is that it emulates the features of First Life that I don’t like: The fact that it’s so linear (everything depends on where you land at a given point in time), the clannishness, the finiteness and lack of scalability, and having to gain approval to go to open political forums. Eric Frenchman was at the Congressional Second Life gig the other week and had to email for a “seat” despite there being plenty available. When I had a staffer “sit in” on the Warner event in August, a single gatekeeper wouldn’t let them teleport over to an event with 30 people. And when they finally got in, nobody knew how to sit down.
Second Life is technology for technology’s sake. I’m even tempted to say it’s anti-technology. The Web brings people together based on common ideas and interests. It makes possible the kinds of interactions we’ve always wanted but could never have because of the limits of the physical space. Personal interaction brings a special element you can’t get online, but the killer app is the ability to share ideas instantly across geographic boundaries. Interfacing with an avatar is at best an incremental improvement over lively interactions based on ideas, whether in email, IM, or even on the phone. Call me old fashioned, but I think more meaningful conversation is possible in an e-mail or Google Talk thread than is in the walled garden that is Second Life.
On the Web, you don’t generally need approval to go into places, and when you do authentication protocols are up to more than single capricious arbiter. If you have a web chat, it doesn’t matter if it’s with 5 people or 50,000 people, so long as your servers can scale. If something face to face is more to your liking, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s live video chat is probably for you.
I downloaded Second Life, tried it, and have no desire to go back. And it seems that the public shares my point of view. Clay Shirky deconstructs the hype around the Second Life membership numbers. Best estimates suggest only 20,000 concurrent users on Second Life. MySpace it ain’t.
The case for Second Life basically boils down to “What the heck?” And there’s something to that — you always want to be testing new things. But from my admittedly cursory review of the product, I say it’s nowhere near as compelling as the Web for communicating independent of physical space, virtual or not.
UPDATE: The paper on this by Nancy Scola does little to convince me. Even SL proponents concede that it’s standard online interaction with some physicality attached. I’m not convinced the benefits of that outweigh the inherent limits of the medium. I’d personally find a virtual world built on top of Google Earth more compelling — something about it being “reality based.” As of now, there is no SL killer app for politics.
The currency exchange is fascinating from a sociological perspective. It’s remarkable than entire economy can be built with no tangible products or benefits.
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