I like the ability to create anything. But I don’t like all the muck and guck that came with Second-Life and it’s pseudo reality mixture. The pricing for land is Draconian and everything is trapped in Second-Life(only importing no exporting own objects). People can become obsessive/weird with this virtual reality fiasco and seems more about money than creativity. Something that I didn’t sign-up for in Second-Life.

Boredom has a tendency to creep up and new people end of leaving simply because they log into a hub/sim and avatars are just standing around with nothing fun to do or clustered in individual groups. Socialism is lacking in-world and communication is key. There’s plenty of times i’ve felt out of place for simply chatting in a dead-zone with folks that just stood around.

I would very much like the ability to actually keep what I create in Second-Life but that is why I use my own 3D programs.

Linden Language is choppy and unreadable. Information is scattered everywhere so for a fresh beginner it would be hard to find what they want or how to make it work. There could have been scripting workshops by Linden Labs that could have given users a better grasp on how things worked in Second-Life or at-least some videos to create something other than the very basics. I’m just use to getting into the swing in a day or two but scripting takes weeks or months or years to learn.

Mine-craft is successful because the player can literally build a world with no/very little rules and in-game mechanics which they can host their own worlds that interact with the player. Creativity in a sense is not blocked and rules are determined per server, not per person/land mass. Second-Life discourages the use of regular mechanics which would be deemed normal in any other mmo related client or chat. Something I find overall to be a little too restricting. Unfortunately some of these witch-hunting “Patrol” groups have gone over borderline obsessive for Second-Life which is not good at all for any game or client.

I wish Second-Life would take the approach like Open-Sim has and give the ability of users to upload/connect their own regions to Second-Life(with a bridge fee) but that’s very unlikely to happen. Until then i’ll continue with minecraft and other mmo’s that continue to push a high entertainment value without the $1,000 tag.

It’s very clear why Second Life failed and everybody repeatedly told you. I have recently had the pleasure of meeting Philip himself, and the lack of vision from the visionary astonished me.
Everyone came here and said “there’s nothing to do!” and “I don’t know anyone!”. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. All of those that didn’t stay.

Philip asked me, “You have all this experience. Tell me – what CAN be done with Second Life?”
Well, not much. Passive content. The scripting language has not evolved at all while builders have enjoyed enormous leaps. It’s simply not possible to do anything worthwhile – such as a normal game. I keep telling people, SL isn’t done until Blizzard seriously considers building the next World of Warcraft on top of it.

There’s a limit to how many people can enjoy an illustrated chat room. Facebook has games. Try developing Farmville in Second Life. It doesn’t even have a GUI toolkit – I can’t draw a text field or a window or a button. Everything has to be painstakingly done with raw geometry. It’s insane. We should obviously be able to draw the same type of windows that are built into Second Life, and there should obviously be a way to develop in a controlled environment where the user cannot simply cancel everything we do, such as pressing ESC to cancel our camera, or standing up from our vehicle, or simply not giving permissions. Have you seen a game that asks the user for permission to do anything? We have *always* wanted to make serious, professional, ambitious, well-polished, commercial types of games, and I don’t mean Tringo.

And we can’t improve anything ourselves because there is no normal way of developing abstractions, modules. It’s like pre-historic man, before the invention of writing allowed culture to pile up and people to develop on top of what already existed.

The other major problem is that we cannot import our contacts. We need to choose between talking to the people we know and like, using a normal IM program, or making an effort to meet new people that we will never see in our lives. And even if we do meet some people, we can’t expand our network through the friends-of-friends mechanism that all social networks offer.

All Facebook games constantly force us to promote them and ask us to invite more people, over and over again. Linden Lab made absolutely no effort to promote Second Life. Linden Lab supplied no mechanism through which we could directly incite users to buy stuff from us – they had to buy L$ separately. There was never any mechanism for ad-supported content, either.

Second Life very purposefully avoided anything that enabled professional development of large-scale content, profitable content that would attract people to “Second Life” without them even realizing that it’s run over Second Life. We could and should have ***commoditized*** MMO development! What better way to sell dozens of sims for a single project? Let us create something of value that we can actually sell! Second Life could and should have been Massively Multiuser Online Torque. Immersive, creative, worldwide collaboration. A CSCW IDE for MMO development.

Firing Cory Ondrejka was the worse management decision I’ve ever seen, comparable only to firing Jim Purbrick. They should have fired everyone else and put someone with an actual technical background and enough vision to steer what is essentially a technical project. Design is irrelevant, you can just import stuff from turbosquid or whatever. Prims were silly to begin with, streaming textures has always been the same order of magnitude as streaming a mesh, and we all had broadband in 2003.

The Activeworlds people also considered it “done” and then fired the devs and sat on it for years. We all know how well that turned out for them. Linden is an engineering company which should be run largely by engineers.

I’ve never seen anything I actually cared about in Second Life, and I’m not hard to please. I love playing DOS games and Facebook games and stuff that’s simple. But nothing is really simple to develop in Second Life because we have no control over anything and you need a thousand scripts to develop a sim instead of one script that centrally controls it – and there’s no easy, abstract way to manage your content, such as a file hierarchy, the model used by FTP and CVS/SVN/etc.

I’m done with Second Life. I have removed all mentions of it from my resume, and then I removed any mention of virtual worlds. People don’t know what it is about and they don’t care. We bet on the future of game development and catastrophically lost.

It didn’t fail and I don’t know what measure you are using.

We have used Second Life as a form of media for the past six years. By doing so, we introduced people to the idea of 3-D virtual reality.

Kurt Vonnegut gave his last sit down interview in Second Life, in front of an audience of 100 people (avatars) from around the world, and it’s memorialized for all of those who didn’t hear it on NPR’s The Infinite Mind. Suzanne Vega, Howard Reingold and John Maeda appeared as well.

We built a replica of the Holocaust Museum’s brilliant live photo installation, on the side of its building in Washington, and held a teach-in with Mia Farrow on the Dafur crisis.

We brought Antonio DiPietro into Second Life to hold a live press conference with the Italian media to challenge the media tyranny of Silvio Berlusconi.

We are working in Second Life to help find ways to re-orient those newly released from prison to life outside, and to help those who have been traumatized to heal.

Second Life is part of a process I wrote about in 2006 in my seminal essay: “The Transmission of Experience.” See: http://www.northcoastangelfund.com/temp/transmission.pdf

Soon after, Harvard Business School called and asked that I come explain it all to them. See: http://greytales.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/hbs-virtual-worlds-braingain-bill-lichtenstein/

So please do tell (and I did go back and finish reading your post). What is this talk of failure? Please be clear as it’s a disservice to all of us who use and cherish Second Life as a place where, as I often tell clients, if you can dream it up, we can build it quickly and inexpensively.

Best wishes for a great 2012. Bill Lichtenstein

I address you avatar to avatar as you seem to have achieved an insight.

“I’ve been gone from Linden Lab for over two and a half years, and still my failure haunts me. The last day of the year is always a good moment to come to terms with the passage of time, and this New Year’s Eve I’ve decided I should finally accept the fact that I’m never going to let it go. I’ll try to reach peace through the zen realization that peace is unattainable.”

In SL, I am DeNovo Broome. When I’m not in SL, I cannot fully be DeNovo Broome. And you may tell by the arch pun that is my name that I had no idea what I was in for either.

Now, I’m a mere user, one of little renown, but I do know one thing that took me a while to realize. SL is not a tool, it’s not an experience, even. It’s certainly not a game platform. It is a distinct and useful reality. And it is magical in the sense that things – insights, personal development and connections – happen there in a way that could not happen in any other way. I’d venture to say that nobody could have expected anything like that to happen, so it’s not at all surprising to me that everything seemed to go sideways and pear-shaped.

And you miss it. And you miss being part of it. You found limitations and capabilities you would never have discovered in any other way.

You were brought in to “fix” things – and were transformed yourself.

But I have another, most persuasive insight. When Second Life started out, it was indeed a blue sky, experimental project. It still suffers from all the duct tape and bailing wire that was used to put it together. It is a magnificent kludge in just about every way; a series of grand plans and wonderful optimism that frequently failed in the face of users – and infrequently, but surprisingly often, “failed upward.”

I view SL as being very much a first-generation thing – like looking at the very first practical steam engine. Useful, just barely. It seems almost more trouble than it’s worth, until you realize that as horrible and as inefficient as it is, there is no practical way to do what you are now doing without it, nor would you ever willingly go back.

So the absolute and most compelling proof of the success of Linden Labs and Second Life is the proliferation of grids, each determined to “get it right.” Most won’t. Some will – and each in different ways.

I do assume you wish to be part of that, I’d be stunned if you were not in some way.

Just remember – it IS a Zen thing. The Grid is not about doing, it is about being. So my dear Ginsu – perhaps you need to become Ginsu Linden again. Or perhaps a different last name will be needed… but in some way that is deliciously inexplicable, this is now a part of who you are. It’s not just a login or a username. It’s part of you… and I assure you, that part will keep kicking you in your hindbrain until you pay attention.

Well, at least, I know *I* would.

u just one big amazing cool dude

i wish u all the best in whatever u do

u going to make a great ceo of some big company one day if u go down that way and lots ppl will want to come work with u

“Perhaps it was always the destiny of Second Life to be an innovative niche product for a select group of people, a worthy subject of serious study, a constantly evolving emporium of edge cases.”

Indeed. So are the best universities. So is the group of driving enthusiasts who can tell you why the suspensions on last year’s Civics and Jettas are SO superior to this year’s models. So is the cadre of those who drink good single malts, read Edith Wharton with gusto, can distinguish a hint of Latakia in their tobacco, or can tell you why both well-aged Manchego cheese and Joey Ramone matter.

I like my fellow “edge cases.” The “old Internet” was full of them. I am sorry you guys did not change the world as Philip Rosedale envisioned it. That happens to visionaries all too often, but remember that the Linden Alpha-Team changed many hearts with SL. Thank you for helping us all start our journeys.

It’s natural to look back at moments where you now realize you could have taken a better path, a better direction, but it’s still useful to also reflect on the positive moments, and the efforts you undertook to help build something that had never been built before.

Mistakes are particularly unfortunate when they impact others, and to acknowledge these as personal failures in such broad company is honorable, and shows you to be a man of integrity. It also shows you to be an actual human.

Cheers, and all the best to you and yours this New Year.

And so, does this bad nature destroy the possibility of love, or is it simply the impossibility of repeating the past that prevents his happiness? I think the former is his real obstacle. He could be with Daisy again if he truly loved her in the first place, and still did with a love that was about her rather than about his own stunted dreams.

Now, I don’t think that Fitzgerald was telling a morality tale, he really did intend the story to be universal. But I think what he’s saying is that it is a universal truth that this yearning for the past springs from character defects that doom us all. That is, we all romanticize early love lost, we would all lie and cheat and steal to get it back, and we are all doomed to failure in our attempts to recover the past.

Oddly though, I never really thought the book implied that Gatsby, despite his criminal activities, was an evil man, or even particularly remorseful of what he had done. Fitzgerald, as far as I can tell, generally has a protagonist concerned with climbing the social ladder (as far as I can tell). In ‘Tender is the Night’, Dick Diver is an academic, a psychiatrist, who marries a much richer woman essentially through his intellectual prowess and academic success.

While I think that the criminal background of Gatsby was a very relevant part of the book, for me, it seemed to me as just the means Gatsby at hand to get where he wanted to get.

I think that in spite of the social mobility of America at the time, Gatsby’s meteoric rise to wealth from a blue collar background was sufficiently fantastic, especially if you take into account that it was not for simply selfish motives of personal accumulation, but all for Daisy, which is one of the central themes in the book as alluded to in the epigraph.

If anything, I think it was largely the social taboo of his criminal past that he feared, and the truth that he was not a legitimate member of the upper class. I think his desire for lost love is one of the main themes Fitzgerald writes of, not limited to Gatsby, and is just characteristic of a sentimental, or well, certain type of man. It wasn’t specifically the criminal nature of Gatsby that destroyed the possibility of rediscovering true love, or even the changed, fickle heart of Daisy, it was simply that such experiences of youth can simply not be repeated.

This is of course, just my personal belief, biased by my opinion on the general morality of criminals and sophisticated folk, and whatnot. Also, of course my own very limited experience with women. Anyway, good blog!