I read with interest Heidi Ballinger’s blog post about the Danish media who were saying Second Life was as good as dead. There seems to be a great deal of people trash talking Second Life in the media and on the Internet in general. I’ve also seen videos on Youtube where people share their projects in Second Life, but instead of people applauding people’s creativity the comments are filled with overwhelming negativity about Second Life. (Here’s an example).

The fundamental problem is ignorance…

Websites used to suffer the same issue until people realised it has positive uses too. In the early days people associated the Web with geeks and perverts, but even though there’s many thousands of seedy websites today, nobody associates it with that anymore. People came to realise that the Web is an open platform and therefore most every day analogies also apply to the Web.

For example, if you pass a sex shop on the street on your way to the newsagents, nobody is forcing you to go inside the sex shop. Likewise, nobody is making you visit websites selling sexual material on your way to the New York Times website.

The Web is an open platform. It has its positive and negative aspects. Freedom is a good thing. Do what interests you and ignore the rest.

Now we have 3d platforms which offer even more potential and flexibility than the Web itself. But we have the same issues with ignorance all over again. Second Life, because it’s the most popular, is getting the brunt of the negativity.

Second Life offers the same analogies to every day life, just like the Web does. It hosts social events, university experiments, live music gatherings, business conferences, gaming, role-play, combat - the list goes on. It has been embraced by IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell Computers, Amazon, Cisco, CNN, and many other forward thinking companies.

To apply a similar example to the analogy I gave earlier - if you want to attend a news gathering in Second Life which is located by a sex-themed location, nobody is forcing you to visit the seedy area. There are plenty of seedy areas in Second Life, but there are also plenty of seedy areas in real life and on the Web. It would be plain ignorant to make a one-on-one association between the two.

Real life, Second Life and websites all have their pros and cons. But the cons come from society rather than the underlying platform. Freedom brings with it idiots who abuse the freedom, or merely those who think “outside the norm”. That’s just how it goes.

Second Life is far from dead. It continues to grow in users and content and that will not change any time soon. The statistics shown recently on Second Life’s website emphasize this.

Another issue people have with Second Life is the quality of the content. The thing people need to remember is the vast majority of it is created by the users themselves and varies quite a lot. This can’t be compared directly to games like Crysis which is optimized by hundreds of professional game developers with a budget literally comparable to a Hollywood blockbuster. Even with online play, Crysis keeps all the 3d data and texture maps locally. But with Second Life all the 3d objects and textures (plus animations, sculpture maps, sound, and so on) are downloaded on-the-fly as you visit each area, so it’s going to be a different experience and allowances need to be made.

And probably the other issue people have with Second Life is the stability. But again it’s important to realise that Linden Lab have many engineers dedicated to improving this. They’ve been fairly transparent about what they’re up to and how they’re trying to make the platform more robust to meet growing demand.

Most people who trash talk Second Life either haven’t used it, or couldn’t get past the first few minutes either because they found it too difficult to use or couldn’t find anything to do from the outset. With it being an open platform you can’t expect to be hand held like with traditional games. A bit of patience goes along way.