Cinemassively: Persephone Milk interview

by Moo Money on Apr 15th 2008 12:30PM

Real life, Video, Events, real-world, Events, in-game, Second Life, Free-to-play, Cinemassively, Machinima

In real life, Tim O'Connor plays his keyboard, hoping to catch a break someday as a musician. In Second Life, however, he is Persephone Milk, a piano crafter. A local Fox station in Florida interviewed Tim to find out why he was in SL and whether it pays off emotionally and financially. While we applaud the news station for highlighting entrepreneurial residents, we do take issue with how easy they make it sound.

Ever since the Anshe Chung press release announcing that she was a millionaire from SL profits, we've faced a barrage of sensational news reports about people making money. Sure, there are some residents who actually make a nice living off of the virtual world, but that's not even one percent of the population right now. The rest just scrape by, if they make anything at all. Of course, I'm sure most have realized that by now and continue to log in for the social interaction. We can only hope!

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

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Tags: anshe-chung, cinemassively, fox-focus, fox-news, interview, linden-lab, machinima, persephone-milk, pinellas-county, second-life, sl, tim-oconnor

Reader Comments (3)

Thanks for posting this Moo. I certainly agree with your sentiments. As a mentor I was frequently asked how a new resident could start making money right away - and of course the answer is that you really cannot. There are a lot of misconceptions about Second Life, and the simplistic overviews provided by the media absolutely contribute to this.

That said, I am not sure a two minute piece about Second Life will ever be able to convey the complexity of the world in which we live, the steep learning curve a new resident faces, or the time, effort and skills required to make real money from virtual products and services. I spent hours with this team. I talked about the hundreds of hours it took to build each product. I showed them the building, texturing, animating and scripting processes. They did understand. The problem is, none of it really makes for an interesting two-minute story for the evening news. So I think this is kind of a losing battle for us.

In the end, I was pretty happy that the piece was positive and conveyed a sense of creativity and opportunity within Second Life. I was very afraid that this would be a "hit" piece that focused more on my identity, or spun my identity in a negative way. To my delight and surprise, they did a nice professional job.

Finally, I would just conclude by saying, I certainly do not consider myself to be the "foremost" piano maker in Second Life. I just want to be known as one of the better instrument makers. I absolutely adore the pianos made by my competitors and believe there is a market big enough for all of us to prosper with products that are all beautiful for different reasons.

Again, I just think the reports wanted to tell a compelling story and they did that without much fudging of the facts - even if the facts they presented don't tell the entire story.

Well said, Persephone. I really liked the piece, other than the part where money seemed to flow easily. I might be a bit touchier than most people, given the fact that my LAST NAME is Money, therefore I'm begged for it all the time. :P

Anyways, I don't get out much these days and your pianos looked so pretty, so keep up the good work!

Thanks for offering a behind the scenes view on the interview for us. :)

Reply

Oh you are welcome Moo :)

You know if I had any disappointment over the piece, it was that it focused so much on the money. While my business is important to me, there is so much more to my experience in Second Life. And I shared all of this with the reporter. They really seemed fascinated and want to do more stories in the future. But ultimately, at the end of the day, they had a story they wanted to tell. I am just glad it was positive because I think we all benefit from that.