Clay Shirky’s blog on ValleyWag, “A story too good to check“, has raised a lot of discussion about the nature of the “hype” surrounding Second Life. Shirky’s sceptic approach to it, however, has some severe flaws —…

Bloglines has brought me several pro and con Second Life (SL) posts to read recently. SL is experiencing growing pains and will continue to do so considering the media’s ebullient build-up of any topic is usually a set up for a tear down. Arrows and …

Okay, so SL is definitely cool, but compared to IRC, I find my second life experience to be rather vacuous, and if I wanted to be a big naysayer, i could list the reasons why I believe that I am something like five to six times times as likely to have an interesting conversation in IRC… but who cares? Second Life is not for having an interesting conversation. (I’m sure they happen from time to time, of course.)

Anyone who doesn’t think Second Life is a game (presumably because the competitive element is absent) needs to check the Dictionary. At dictionary.com, there are 15 definitions for “game”, and the very first one is simply “an amusement or pastime”. Competition isn’t mentioned until definition 3. But again, who cares? Of course, second life is a game… but games matter! Games are cultural touchstones, economic powerhouses, and when computers are involved, technical milestones. Linus Torvalds himself has expressed his admiration for gaming technology in the strongest possible terms.

I am absolutely convinced that there are going to be uses for this technology that are yet undreamed of, but I’m equally unconvinced that Second life does any (or at least many) of the things that we’ve been using the net for any better. All this talk of “Net 2.0″ and “leaving the naysayers behind” amounts to a campaign to make unnecessary technology necessary, and I’m 100 per cent opposed to that. If SL becomes the standard for networking for education and business, it’s not just the naysayers who will be left behind. People who lack the time to learn this ungainly method of communication and those who lack the money for fancy processors and high speed connections will also be left behind, and the democratic character of the internet will be compromised.

But it is a great game. Maybe the best game ever!

As for what ‘open source’ means in this particular case, it means making the source code for the viewer (aka client) open for public modification. The server software will probably remain closed as long as there’s proprietary libraries (like Havok) involved in them.

The viewer, on the other hand is a strong candidate to open up. There doesn’t seem to be any material in it that couldn’t be opened (although perhaps there’s some proprietary library in the network code - if there is, then the libsl project would be absolutely vital to the open sourcing the client… which would explain a lot; but I’ve got no information one way or another on that. That’s just a wild-assed guess).

Making the viewer available as an open source item would certainly speed up adoption in some ways. It would almost immediately add possibilities for simplified user-interfaces (new users are presented with an interface that’s far more complicated than it needs to be), or custom branding (businesses love brands and branding), plus of course, the ability to crib from clever fixes and ideas. An open source viewer *does* also give people the information and testing basis to create their own grids and servers, in a limited way - although actually doing that would be a dense technical effort.

Is that a good idea? I’m not the right person to ask about that. I don’t have an opinion on whether it is or not.

I’m really not quite sure *what* attracted you to this quote, so I thought I’d seek an explication. While your desire not to get trapped in sectarian cul-de-sacs about SL or comment on “how the Lindens run it” is admirable — you want to stay on the broader issues, I am interested in offering you a chance to see how these *are* the larger issues.

You know as well as I do that there are some strident voices in Second Life who, it seems to me, only criticise anyone who wants to do anything in SL that is contra to their rigid view of what SL is or should be.

A good example of this would be some reactions to the launch of crayon in October, specifically relating to the ‘by the way’ comment I made in my post about crayon being the first company to launch in SL. Not the smartest of sentences I’ve written in a post, to be sure, but the hysterical reaction by some SL residents was well over the top. If the post I wrote was about that, maybe I’d understand the hysteria. But it wasn’t.

More interesting for me were the emails I received from some long-time SL residents suggesting I ignore the xenophobia and get on with things. Plus conversations in world where I had some great opportunities to talk about crayon with people who asked about that infamous sentence.

So Tateru’s quote resonated strongly with me as it exactly reflected some of my experience. Given that my post includes references and links to some of the outside nay-sayers, you actually described the reason why I included it:

The naysayers on the outside in fact have their correlary — the naysayers on the inside.

While we’re in conversation, I want to add some thoughts on one other point you make:

SL can only remain open and free if you work at it, it doesn’t happen automatically. It’s going to have a very wide range of uses and it’s important that no one political camp, whether augmenters or immersionists, platformers or worlders, developers or consumers, get to run roughshod over it and seize the reins of power.

Couldn’t agree more. Yet SL is not a democracy as the developer, Linden Lab, has had the reins of power since the beginning. Perhaps you should look at it and LL’s role as a benevolent dictatorship. In theory (maybe in practice), they can do whatever they want with Second Life. Even unplug the servers and shut it all down at any moment. There might be legal issues here if they did that; the point, though, is that they could.

I don’t see how the landscape you outline can happen unless LL gives up SL. Or there’s a revolution. Or it all goes open source as I’ve read in some blogs (although I’ve not read any consistent explanation of what ‘open source’ may mean). Or something else emerges.

Given the rapid growth in user registrations and the continuing influx of businesses into SL, I would guess that all this will be a compelling issue early in 2007.