Gwyneth Llewelyn

As a side note, remember that Linden Lab is not dependent on merely the LindeX to be a very profitable company (i.e. their main service is really tier). The LindeX profits, when they exist, are merely the cherry on the top. Still, losing 1.5 million USD per quarter — no matter how big the impact on the overall profitablity! — is more than enough to send a clear sign to the Board that something is not working well!!

Tats, I'd love to get references to the sources to the "alternative reality" of GOM. I certainly never heard that version before!

Thanks to XML-RPC introduced in June 2004 with SL 1.4, this was also the year of GOM (the first L$/USD currency exchange) and SL Exchange (later bought by LL and rebranded Xstreet SL).

Thanks to user-generated animations, also included in SL 1.4, animation overriders were invented in September 2004. Francis Chung launched her own free and open source Franimation Overrider, which still powers the vast majority of all AOs out there (albeit most are derivative works).

I hope this fixes the "crisis of confidence" mentioned on your other post, Tateru :)

... or perhaps more importantly, there is no need to have faith in the company to provide us with entertainment :) After all, we care little about the partners or organisation of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and so forth. So long as what they do is aligned with our interests, we continue to consume their content.

... and my comment was that faith is not required :P

Faith? Mmmh yes, and a short attention span with entertainment. In my view, the latter is far more important than the former.

At least since the 1980s, the notion that entertainment competes for your free time is well-established. Every time something new kind of entertainment comes out, from yoga classes to skateboarding, their marketing department has to figure out how to position that product so that it draws people away from more mainstream forms of entertainment. These days, it mostly means TV, going out shopping, with body-related activities next (e.g. going to the gym, jogging, and so forth), and possibly religious practice. Obviously not all people do all these activities, and it depends on country, age, gender, and a lot of factors, but this is pretty much what most people do to entertain themselves.

Computers and later the Internet became a massive new source of entertainment, one that is very cheaply delivered (a US$40 game can provide many more hours of entertainment than, say, hip-hop dancing classes for the same amount of money...), and which requires different skills which are appealing to some specific types. TV is the great leveller — it entertains anyone, no special skills are required — but body-related activity is limited to specific talents/skills you might need to have or be willing to develop (and religious practice, of course, requires faith). Computers/Internet can appeal to a much wider range of talents and skills, and, although it's not as universal as TV, it can certainly appeal to a massive audience as well.

Even worse than TV... which has just one way of delivering information: passive broadcast of selected content. Computers and Internet-enabled applications can both be passive or interactive; creating your own content is appealing and entertaining, and easy to do on a computer than with a canvas and a set of oil paint, or a hammer and a piece of marble, or even a sewing machine and yards of clothing. Not all people have a creative spark, but most have, and computers are a far easier to handle tool to enable creativity (even if it's just to blog!) – and far cheaper too (if you ruin a marble block when doing a sculpture, you'll waste a lot of money!).

So the issue is, how do all these forms of entertainment compete with each other? Which ones will survive? I think it's far less about "faith" but in the ability to sustain people's interest for a long time, and this means providing them exactly what they consider appealing in entertainment, and repeating that experience for a long period of time. When you jog you don't need "faith" in jogging. Either it's appealing enough for you to consider taking up jogging — and then you'll do it for years and years — or you leave it forever after trying it out for a short time (days, weeks or months, depending on your expectations and how jogging fulfils them).

Now we get to the crux of the issue. The amount of entertainment options we have these days is massive, compared to what we could do, say, 50, 100, or 500 years ago. It's several orders of magnitude above what we could even dream about in the 1950s (and "dreaming about the future" — and writing/discussing it — could be seen as a form of entertainment, too!), and every day, as a new Facebook or iPhone application is launched, new venues for entertainment are created. They all compete for our limited leisure time. As more and more entertainment sources are released, a curious thing happens: we tend to become more and more demanding. Entertainment has to become more tailored, more personalised, more appealing to our particular combination of skills, talents, wishes, and expectations. This is specially true on Internet-based entertainment, because it's easy to find people with the same demands and the same expectations which will gravitate towards the same kind of entertainment — allowing entertainment companies to deliver a much wider variety of entertainment, since the audience is much larger.

But while we become more demanding... we also shorten our attention spans. There is so much entertainment around that we can't possibly enjoy it all — nevertheless, we try, hopping from one to another, hoping to get higher value for our limited time. And so the competition becomes fierce: it's not enough to attract people to something new, it requires engaging them fully, for long periods of time, spicing up that adrenaline rush from the entertainment source, keeping it going for days, months, years and years. Designing that for a large audience with a wide range of skills, talents, and expectations becomes harder and harder — and, inversely, it means that the attention we give to entertainment becomes shorter and shorter.

It also makes us jump to anything "new and shiny" in the hope that "this will be it", the thing that engages our fulfilment in entertainment for a long while. But... with decreasing attention spans, we set too high expectations, and we get bored too soon. That's why, with a few exceptions, very few games (online or offline) engage users for more than 6 months. We all know the exceptions and why they are exceptions — they become legends of things "done right". But the ratio of things with long-term entertainment value versus all the rest is incredibly tiny. 1:1000? Or perhaps even one-in-a-million? I have no idea.

So, I don't think that staying in Second Life really requires "faith", either in the virtual world itself, in the technology, in the SL residents, or in Linden Lab. What it requires is a long attention span. It requires the ability to generate your own entertainment as opposed to having someone else (either LL other residents) to provide it to you. It requires the ability to align your expectations in what you can achieve within the virtual world, as opposed to what you wish it to provide to you. But that special skill — the ability to self-entertain, the ability to adjust expectations, the ability to be stubborn — is seriously lacking in our times of excessive opportunities of entertainment. From about 20 million registered users to SL, only a bit over a million have enough "stubbornness" to be around for more than a month. After 2-3 months, interest fades exponentially. It is very rare to see anyone around for more than 2-3 years regularly.

On the other hand, if you have that special skill, the ability to get entertainment from SL is completely detached from the direction SL is taking, the existence of others to provide entertainment, or LL's policies. It exists beyond all that.

And it's not really "faith". I still regularly read as many books as I did when I was a teenager; it's not because I have "faith" in authors or the publishing companies in the world, it's because I've got the skill to get entertained by books, any books whatsoever, no matter who the author is or what they write about. And the same applies to SL.

Oh, I'm really, really sorry about all the Lindens that have lost their jobs :( It's really a pity... LL as a company seemed to be, for now, a relatively solid employer. Oh well. I'm sure that at least the experience you had at the 'Lab will give you opportunities on any other VW company or VW-related content creator!

@DD on the contrary, the announcement was actually incredibly encouraging in this regard! I'm quoting from the press release:

...a strategic restructuring to increase focus on the company's consumer business...

...will help us make Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers...

... the company aims to create a browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software...

Soooooo this means that the business über alles trend is now over, LL is doing a 180º turn and going back to residents, and become a competitor to Unity3D, OpenWonderland, and all those VWs embedded on a web page.

That's definitely not ignoring the user base!!

@TigroSpottystripes if we looked at all the "signs", LL would have been "going down" since 2002... :)

Oh, you're right, Maggie. OpenWonderland is definitely on Linden Lab's list of "potential competition" to Second Life — one of the 31 platforms they've identified as such. I just mentioned Unity3D because my own company is losing a lot of prospects to Unity3D, but never to any other product :)