Not A Blog™

I prefer getting my news online for any number of reasons, but one reason in particular (which also happens to be relevant to the article at hand) is the sheer volume of bizarre and weird news that you might not otherwise hear about. Case in point: I read an article online about that well-known MMORP”G”, Second Life. I’ve talked about Second Life before; I spend a lot of time thinking about it because, as I’ve mentioned previously, it brings out all sorts of behaviors that can only be revealed in a virtual environment. The last bit of weirdness to (ahem) come out of Second Life was when someone was giving a speech and they were virtually attacked by a dildo bomb. This is the sort of thing you can’t make up. No one even remembers who the speaker was or what he was talking about, but rather than discussing the situation rationally (as, alas, no one seems to do, ever), they attacked the speaker with a script that caused instances of a dildo model to spawn around the speaker.

As if that weren’t stupid enough, the people who set off the dildo bomb later served a take-down notice to other people who happened to record the event and post it on You Tube. What? I don’t care how righteous your cause: after you attack someone with virtual dildoes, you no longer have decency. Nobody will take you seriously.

Someone else in Second Life was smart enough to recognize this. Dildoes, despite the high novelty factor, are cause for ridicule. If you’re going to attack people in a virtual environment, you have to pull out all the stops. Forget dildo bombs. You need a nuclear bomb.

The article was short on details as to the actual results of the nukes. I suspect it was just a very large model of a mushroom cloud that grew over a couple buildings. I don’t know whether you could delete (or relocate) characters with an in-game script. Regardless, the reason some guy detonated virtual nukes to begin with was to draw attention to the cliquishness and mafia-like behavior that veteran SL players have towards noobs.

Okay, let’s recap where we are at this point. The game has become dominated by people who don’t like “dumb” new players encroaching on their world. They harass these new people. That right there is already stupid, but human nature, I suppose. So some guy stands up for the harassed. He is a champion of justice, evidently. And, like all champions of justice, he furthers his aims by blowing up a fake nuclear bomb!? What did I miss?

More importantly, you might be wondering, why am I harping on this? After all, it’s a stupid “game”—in the loosest sense of the word—what does it matter that these people are spending their time in an intra-game world war? Well, it’s fascinating to me because of the impossible bind into which it puts the creators of the game, Linden Labs.

Right off the bat you have the fandom fallacy: that stupid, head-slappingly annoying sense of entitlement that fans have to the work they’re fans of. Star Trek got the brunt of this, I think; while Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and anything else you care to name that has a rabid fan base of people with nothing better to do also end up with the same sort of people attached to them. The people who think that they actually have a say as to what should happen to someone else’s characters. I understand this not at all. Why don’t you spend time making up your own characters? Too much work? Strange.

But I’m getting away from my main point which is that Second Life has a surprisingly large population who has succumbed to the fandom fallacy. They think that because they’re fans—no because they’re life long fans who’ve been there from the very beginning and pay money to access this world, that they actually have a say as to how it should be run. Note this works both ways: the people who harass the newbies as well as the guy who detonates nukes in support of them. They both think the world should be run “better”—the definition of better, in this case, meaning, “more like how I think it should be run”. Never mind that you don’t have a say.

Now Linden Labs has a problem. On the one hand, they could ignore the nuker and say that the world has been running fine with little intervention from them, and they’re just going to let it roll. They can remain silent watchmakers, as it were. Unfortunately, this highlights a problem they’ve been having for some time: how to attract new players? Anybody who could be considered a potential Second Lifer has probably already heard of the game. The problem is that the game has a rather seedy reputation at this point. It’s mostly known for its virtual sex—but it’s also becoming known for it’s cliquishness. It’s tough for a new person to break in and form any sort of “friendship” with anyone else in the game (not to mention—how difficult is it to do this on the internet already?). Most people are busy with their regular first lives; they just don’t bother. Linden is already having a difficult enough time convincing people that there’s anything to do in this virtual world (note: there’s not). By allowing a caste of veterans to harass new players, they’re not exactly bringing in the dough. The sort of masochists who would pay to be abused like this have already signed up for the virtual orgies.

No doubt Linden has already been considering this. They’re a company, and like any company, they’re looking to grow. They need new players. They can’t exactly ban old players, because they’re also paying customers. That would be counterproductive. They need some sort of system to at least curb the worst of the hazings. Undoubtedly, they were working on it. Profit motives demand this much.

But then along comes Duke Nukem and—in defense of the “little guy”—blows up virtual bombs. In a very real, non-virtual sense, he’s a terrorist, although his terror is relatively benign. It’s more like shouting really loud, but the fact that he actually blew up a bomb rather than just stood around typing in all caps means he’s trying to make a statement. The problem for Linden is that even if they were prepared to actually do something about the mafias, anything they do now will seem to be condoning the behavior of Bomber Man. Blow up bombs, get results. It sets a bad precedent.

But even worse than putting Linden Labs in a bind are the “demands” the nuker is putting on Linden. They’re not really demands, since he doesn’t wield any truly threatening power; they’re more like highly anticipated requests. He’s declared himself to be the first member of some sort of army within Linden’s little universe, with the hope that, one day, his “people” will get a vote.

Um, no.

The issue is not whether or not voting would solve anything—it very well may—the issue is that there’s no reason for anyone to get any say in the world. It doesn’t matter what little access fee you pay, or how much “land” you own, or anything like that. It’s not your freakin’ world. You pay for the privilege of being in someone else’s game. If you don’t like it, don’t pay money for it! I don’t comprehend this—in the same way I don’t comprehend rabid fanboyism. It’s not your dang property.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s a good sign that people are terrorizing in support of democracy. That’s basically what the founding fathers did. On the other hand, you’re talking about a FAKE world with FAKE money, FAKE buildings, FAKE land, FAKE nuclear bombs, FAKE dildoes, and FAKE sex. Why are you wasting time trying to fix it? I don’t get it.

Additionally, if Linden wants to fix the problem by allowing voting, this would be fine too, but the decision is theirs alone to make. Besides, like I said, blowing up a fake nuclear bomb isn’t exactly the best way to garuntee anybody gets “rights”. It’s just bizarre.

A parallel can be drawn here between Second Life, and my favorite non-encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wikipedia, as you may have heard, is also infested with newbie hating cliques of editors. The only way to not get smacked around by them is to have a high edit count; the only way to get a high edit count is by editing—an invitation in itself to be smacked around by them. But then the number of “bad” edits you’ve made shows up as very high to the same people who judge your edit merit, which means they’re even less inclined to let your edits go unchallenged, regardless of the fact that their suspicion toward the noobs is what caused them to have a high bad edit count to begin with. It’s become apparent, recently, that not everyone can edit Wikipedia; those with high edit counts can edit Wikipedia.

What we have here is the outgroup homogenity effect in action. I’ve talked about this before, but never in the context of online communities. Web 2.0 is built on the concept of the community. Get people together, have them build your brand, preach your message, and buy your stuff. The power is in groups.

Power might be in groups when they’re lynch mobs, but the outgroup homogenity effect is why the web 2.0 business model will fail. The reason megacorporations have traditionally been so successful and mega isn’t because they cultivated a community of core users. Even if you have this, that’s no garuntee you’re going to succeeed (reference Sony). Megacorps provide a product or service that everyone needs; that’s why the sell so much of it. Microsoft is huge because everyone needs an operating system. True, they cater somewhat to the business crowd and less to the artistic crowd, but they’re not trying to build “communities” of Windows users. The very idea is absurd because the “Windows user” encompasses so many different types of people that they’d never get along.

If your business model is based on bringing people together around a central idea, you’ll have your few months of huge explosive growth. This is followed by industry praise and high-profile-ness. Following this, you have two options: cash out and get bought by a megacorp, or stagnate. The stagnation follows a steady decline until you land on a core group of users who are driving the thing from the inside—but these users are completely the opposite of what you need to be successful. They’re the clique.

Once you’ve got a clique infestation in your 2.0 business model, good luck. I believe many 2.0’s will float for some time to come simply because, in many cases, the regular users can still access the site and benefit from the information there without getting involved in the site’s politics. This is also why I don’t think 2.0 will collapse like dot com. Dot com was the result of people being funded just because they were on the web, but without any sort of actual business. With 2.0, you have actual business, and a lot of people use it. (Arguably, Wikipedia doesn’t have a business model, although if they sold ad space, they would. If they sold ads, they’d also lose their integrity, so that’s probably not an option. The interesting thing is, even though there’s no business model there, they still have the outgroup homogenity effect happening in full force—and they’ve stagnated.)

So 2.0’s will hold on like a dying animal until they’re either bought up or they devolve or roll into something else—or, if the core user base is big enough, they could run indefinitely because they ad revenue (or subscriptions or what have you) will outweigh the bandwidth and hosting costs. But they’ll never grow, and the longer the veteran users hang around, the harder it will be to ever expand beyond that current state.

Web 2.0 is a viable business model in the sense that you can set up a business and it will run, and you’ll make a profit. It is not, however, a business model with room for growth. The very people you’re catering to, your users and the community you’re trying to build, are the same people who will be your financial ball and chain a few months down the road. In essense, if you want to grow, don’t alienate the noobs. As a “noob” (or more accurately, a lurker): I’ll use your product and suck your bandwidth, but I’ll never bother to stand up to the established cliques. It’s frankly not worth my time.

Although maybe if I could get my hands on some actual nukes…

-Ted

Next Page »