I haven't blogged in two weeks! I haven't been around much at all: the Other Personality's terrifically busy, and my time's been drastically limited.

Which sucks, because *I'm* terrifically busy.

Extropia's gone from one to six sims this month, and it's my job to get them rented up. I'm organizing two major events, each, oh, five times the size of anything I've done before. I'm paying tier on a gorgeous empty mall, and need to get commercial tenants in. I've got a page-long list of people I need to meet with on various things. And, I have a family that means the world to me, who I want to put first - but some of putting them first means working to keep me and the Chairman solvent, and get some other people paying tier in Extropia! So, not a good time to have my time squeezed to practically zero.

Anyhoo, I had the honor of participating in a panel debate yesterday at Orange Island, on Augmentation vs. Immersion. I was thrilled and a little intimidated to be included (and many thanks to Lillie Yifu for recommending me!): the moderator and panelists were people I deeply admire: Tom Bukowsky (Tom Boellstorff), author of the upcoming Coming of Age in Second Life, who moderated; Gwyneth Llewellyn and I represented the Immersionists, and Hiro Pendragon (Ron Blechner) and Giulio Perhaps (Giulio Prisco) showed up for the Augmentationists.

We'd discussed a number of debate questions in advance, from the narrow and legalistic to the political to the abstract - but we ended up being given five minutes each to speak freely, then time to respond. Between the makeup of the panel (all friends, all easygoing people), the lack of questions that got at disagreements, and the enormous amount of unmoderated audience participation, nothing really came of the hour. The best thing to be said about it was, everybody got to talk, and nobody left thinking that one "side" or the other was weird, hostile or illegitimate.

So, I'd chalked up the experience as "pleasant but insubstantial," and went fishing. Now fishing? That was a good time ($L1 scripted rods and open fishing on Tycho Beach, right by the flagpole)! But, argent_bury  asked for a chatlog, and responded with a critical analysis of the issues that *should* have been raised yesterday.

Go read her post. I'll wait right here. It's really worth it.

I think her first point cuts to the heart of the real distinction in perspectives: is SL for you a place or a tool? Everything else, from standards of identity and trust to "A/S/L," follows from that.

Despite the huge differences in our personalities, and in our lives in SL, Argent and I see the world in just about exactly the same way, so her nine points are mine as well. I'll just add a few paraphrasings:

• I live here. Maybe to you it's Vegas, or Tijuana, a place to avoid responsibility. To me, it's home. So, if you treat me and mine like you're on Spring Break? It won't go well. Also, I have a responsible job with a group that's made a significant investment in SL. You want grounds for trust? There you go: I'm a stakeholder here.
  

• You can talk to me about your life and whatever's important in it. I'm happy to listen and to help. When I reciprocate, I'll share about my life too - which, see above, is *here.* I'm not holding back; I'm giving you all I've got. And yes, I may freak out on you about how busy I am, how I'm feeling the burden of my job, how I wish I had more family time, how I wish I had a weekend to spend tied up, gagged and fucked brainless. You ask for it, you'll get it. :P

• I think the business community, where I spend a lot of my time, is the wrong place to look for people who don't respect immersionists. The business people who don't get SL, who talk trash about  finding, say, a goth chick with wings and neko eyes at their meeting?  They're not inworld. The people who are, they understand that SL is a foreign market much like any other, and when you do business in one, you learn and respect their customs if you want to make a sale.  The business and content creation communities get that, and I've never had anything but respect in them.  Government and education?  You'll find a lot of two year old playdo avs, ignorance and disregard for customs. They don't have to respect or serve their customers in the same way in their first lives, and they seem much more likely to be oblivious to the culture in SL as well.
  

That's all I've got.  If your principles or perspectives are different, please answer Argent's meme call, and drop a link in the comments to her post.  *This* is the discussion we didn't have yesterday at Orange Island, and the one that needs to be had, for us to build trust across differing world views.

Yesterday Virtual Worlds News released the results of a questionnaire about the coming year in virtual worlds that was sent to a bunch of industry  leaders. Aleister Kronos, shockingly overlooked by them, gave us his own and challenged us to reply ourselves.  Here's my list of answers:

1. What are your top 3 trend predictions for 2008?
1. Along with everybody else, I think kids' worlds are going to be where a lot of the action - in numbers and controversy - is going to be.
2. But, not entirely. The first sports MMOs will blow WOW out of the water and see *serious* mainstreaming.
3. There's going to be a significant shifting of the balance of power towards users/residents/citizens.
2. What business goals have you set for 2008?
1. Creating and enacting a business plan that keeps us expanding and a tiny bit profitable.
2. Within that, 15 sims by our anniversary.
3. On a monthly basis, see Board-organized events making up less than 20% of what goes on in Extropia.
3. What challenges do you expect 2008 to bring to the virtual worlds industry?
1. I got nothin'.
   
4. A number of platforms will be launching in 2008. What impacts will this have on the industry?
1. A lot of these worlds that flunk the Bury Test will fail.
2. Open source worlds and design-your-own worlds will be *much* bigger than the pundits recognize.
3. The overall quality of mainstream reporting will increase, as the coverage moves past the half-hour visitation and sex/pedo/griefing coverage, to regular beats.
5. How will the changes affect your industry segment in 2008?
1. We probably won't have the time or capital to take advantage of people's disillusion with packaged-product worlds.
2. OpenSim is a big wildcard.
   
3. There is no 3 :)

Predictions for the metaverse in 2008 and beyond:

• Kids' worlds are a natural focus for community. Kids naturally form communities, and are used to some structure in doing that: play dates, teams, and so on. Of course, there's so much money to be made from them that there will be companies willing to invest the time in community formation, and trying until they get it right.

• Once they do, watch out! Already there's a generation that fully expects the social ties of childhood and college to continue indefinitely - that's a big part of what drives Facebook. Once a generation grows up in Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, they're in synthetic worlds for the next century - forever, if we get that pesky mortality thing licked on schedule!

• Broadcast media, and "bowling alone" are dead, fading away along with all the other mistakes and horrors of the 20th Century. Just as it's been through all the rest of human history, our entertainment will be primarily social again.
  

• Government will be taken back by the people. By professionalizing creativity, the broadcast media contributed to the personal disempowerment of 20th Century society. A generation that makes its own movies, builds its own houses, tells its own stories, maintains its own communities - will govern itself too.
  

• All this means that despite the weirdly gleeful predictions (perpetuating the cycle of psychic abuse?) of a number of pundits, the frontier isn't closed. We're not about to get paved over by the old atomic-world order. If the dinosaurs don't stomp us right now - and I actually think it's too late for that - we small mammals of Digital community are just going to replace them as evolution's next big thing.
  

Predictions for our little corner (the Extropia FemtoVerse?):

• 15 sims by our first anniversary should be no big deal. If Caledon can be in the mid-30s and make money, Extropia can too. We're in remarkably the same market - positive, polite community - but we might have lower barriers to entry. There's still a perception that you have to dress and talk differently to be in Caledon, and, gods know, *anything* goes in Extropia (as long as it's positive and polite!)!
  

• Once we really connect our network with the people building the future - the groups of the SciLands in particular - we'll be unstoppable. They know building, we know community. One of the things we geeks want most is to *belong* - and belonging is what Extropia's all about. We just need to reach the nodal points that'll enable us to spread the word.
  

• It's all about a mix of social events and hangout spaces. That's hard: I've seen wonderful hangout spaces that don't draw and keep a crowd, and been to great events that get people talking to each other, but then disperse them all, with noplace to hang and chat, or to come back to and find them around. Dr Dobbs Amphiteater + Diversionarium = WIN.
  

• It seems to me - from thinking and from The Diamond Age, rather than from any experience of Caledon - that one of the attractions of Victoriana is the combination of politeness and the willingness to bust heads to maintain it. That's a hard balance, between freedom and gentility. I predict we'll have some High Drama in Extropia before we find the sweet spot.

• One anti-prediction: we're not going to go the way of the City of Rapture, any similarities notwithstanding!

• Our mission in Extropia is to enable people to build a fun, future-friendly community. But, like our friends in Al Andalus, another goal is to set an example, to show atomic-world people they don't need to settle for crappy governments, communities, livelihoods. It seems that Wired might get behind our message.

I went to a *great* event today!  The Metanomics lecture series is affiliated with a class taught by Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University's business school. Today's session was on fashion, featuring Raven Pennyfeather of Rfyre, FL to SL designer Nyla Cheeky, and virtual worlds consultant and author Jack Myers. 

Despite a very late start due to sound problems, and a fresh-baked n00b stuck on the runway, the event began with a tremendously professional and effective runway show of Rfyre designs.  I've been to a few fashion shows in SL, and this was among the best, with very effective product descriptions and clockwork timing. It would have been nice to have kept the models onstage longer, but considering they had to make up time, the crew did brilliantly.

The panel was *interesting,* despite the moderator's frequent interruptions and somewhat ignorant questions. Raven and Nyla were both engrossing, in talking about their backgrounds, their approach to design and to doing business in SL and FL.  

One of the drawbacks to the Metanomics series, and something that makes it, for me, inferior to the Dr. Dobbs events (and, gods know, to Sophrosyne's Saturday Salons!) is the suppression of audience participation - they require questions to go to a moderator, and then to the host, before being asked.  This time, Nite Zelmanov called them out on it, and we got a bit of backchat going. The quality of the audience at this sort of event is usually at least as good as that of the panel - and it's a real credit to this week's group that they *weren't* outshone by the brilliant audience!

Highlights? The mini-insurrection when Professor Bloomfield scorned Residents for being taken in by cartoons as if they were real people (I'm paraphrasing - the panel was all in audio, so I don't have a chatlog).  More than one of us stood up for our own reality - and all of the panelists backed us up!  They all also ran with a discussion of "entertainment" in virutal worlds as drawing on pre-broadcast customs of peer-to-peer entertainment: both designers said that the unique value in synthetic-worlds fashion was having direct, mutual relationships with their customers, rather than just pushing stuff onto the market.

It was a brilliant, brilliant session, and I just wish it could have run much longer (and that *I* hadn't had to run as soon as it was over!)

And, I got to friend Lillie Yifu (who agreed to do a Salon! weeee!) and Cybergrrl Oh - *and* panelist Jack Myers friended *me* out of the blue (even if I did turn him down at first for having a day-old av with a blank profile!  go me!  :P  ) Special thanks to Raven's assistant Harper Beresford for her unnerving, but deeply appreciated, offer of assistance! Today was the first time I've been *recognized,* and it was kind of weird but really nice :)

	the Metaversed conference facility, with runway
	Rfyre fashion show
	Media Blessed (Jack Myers), Raven Pennyfeather, Nyla Cheeky, Byers Sellers (Robert Bloomfield)

So the CMP Metaverse panel yesterday *rocked!* We had better than 30 people, and had a non-stop rapid fire discussion about everything from feminist theory to fast cars!

The panel was me, John Zhaoying of CMP, spokesmodel and designer Callie Cline, and our own dandellion Kimban! Callie is a *trip* - she makes me look practically comatose, and omg I adore her!! It was *so* much fun hanging out with her!

It was a real discussion, too, and the podium was a total formality - *everybody* there jumped on in and swatted around avatar identity, the difference between a spokesmodel and a mascot or logo, whether alts are real - all the good stuff.

I think for our hosts, this was more about living the message of listening and learning together, rather than delivering packaged answers. 

For me - I'm still *almost* speechless!  :P  So many people came out to engage with the issues of digital personhood!  There were some challenges, but no mockery, no disrespect, no "not getting it," just some good disagreements over perspective and meaning, which made it so much more interesting than just preaching to the choir! 

There is something powerful emerging in these worlds, an opportunity to transform who we are, to change the rules of discourse and meaning.  We know it, we feel it, we live it.

But hot guys, sleek blondes, fast cars?  Forever!!!  :D

I've been asked to do my first corporate presentation, tomorrow at noon, for CMP Metaverse, the sponsors of the Dr. Dodds Life 2.0 conference from a couple weeks ago!

Tomorrow at noon SLT, come check me out on the *other* side of the podium at the Amphitheater on Dr. Dobbs Island (215, 117,26), along with Pontiac spokesmodel Callie Cline and others, discussing identity and fame in synthetic worlds!

And, for the important stuff!

Suit:          "Evelyn" by Mischief Designs
Shoes:      "Leather Vixens Liquorice" by TESLA
Wings:       "Scalpel" by jenshikami
Jewelry:     "Irina" by Lassitude & Ennui
Hair:          "Saturated ice-kiss" by !TAUNT
Eyes:         "EyeFidelity IdealEyes, Gunmetal" by ShapesByZada 
Skin:         "Charmed Silver 1" by Celestial Studios
Glasses:   "glass 2 BLACK" by elle
Sputnik:    by galatea_gynoid (Happy 50th Anniversary!)

So, I've been thinking a lot about community in SL, since it looks like I'm going to be building and nurturing one.

I'm trying to talk to everyone who might know something, or have ideas to share, and reading everything I can find.

Sometimes, that's not such a good idea...

Take this article today -Why Virtual Worlds Are Overtaking the Game Industry...

Why? Community, of course!

Oookay.... that started off *very* well, but how does "online entertainment-with a virtual world tied to it" equal "community"?

It doesn't. In fact, they're *opposites*!

Community is lateral, equal, mutual. Entertainment is hierarchical, unequal. Twentieth century media was about entertainment - shoving product down the mouth of a "consumer" like food into a foie gras goose. 21st century media is about community - peer to peer content sharing. The role for big corporations is as an enabler - in building the marketplace, not in selling the day-old fish.

From there, the article goes into a death spiral of Old Media That Doesn't Get It:

"How many games have a strong community?" asks Kaneva CEO Christopher Klaus. "If you go to a lot of the game sites themselves, the website for the games, almost all of them are microsites. In most cases, what's happened is that the community has created their own websites around the game. That's fine, but ultimately I think that it would be stronger if the game producer thought about, 'Why not build that overall community into the game site itself?'"

Even massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings: Online haven't kept up with the social needs of their community. Instead, a virtual cottage industry of MMOG-themed social networks has sprung up to fill the void, with one, Curse.com, seeing 3.5 million unique visitors per month. That's great for Curse, but less than ideal for Blizzard. Kaneva is solving that problem by creating Web interfaces for when players can't sign on to the virtual world.

OMG, the *community* created the community! And Kaneva is "solving that problem"!

Which is it- are people really *that stupid,* or is the impulse to control others that strong in the human psyche? I don't know which answer I fear most!


OTOH, here's someone who gets it as profoundly as the corporate zombies don't: I'd mentioned last week that Tateru Nino gave a brilliant talk at the Life 2.0 Conference, and posted the chatlog. The whole final text of her speech, with graphs, is now available, and it's worth reading, to rinse the taste of cluelessness right away....

In my previous post, I really disagreed with characterizing SL as a tool.  My dearest vidaltripsa replied in comments that it *is*:

 I liken SL to a pen. The the pen allows us to write and to express whatever we want in paper form for others to re-interpret with their own imaginations. We can draw with it, creating pieces of art or designing fine fashions, but if the ink runs out, all creativity stops.

Here's why I disagree with her.

A lot of businesses see SL as a tool for marketing their products.  They come in, find that SL fails to meet their expectations, and leave, concluding SL is a bad tool.  Some programmers see SL as a tool, and conclude, LSL is lame, so SL is a bad tool.  Some people come in thinking SL is WoW or Halo, that it's only an entertainment tool, a game - and bump up against the reality there's no structure, no quests, no NPCs here, that all us digital beings have souls.  And conclude SL is a bad entertainment tool. And so on. 

What they miss, and why the pen metaphor doesn't work is, we're all using this thing, whatever it is, for wildly different purposes, and it's *persistent.* It's like, if you were writing a romance novel, went out to lunch, and came back to find your pen had drafted a corporate prospectus, or a treatise on art, or a swords & sorcery novel.  You could go, "bad tool!" and abandon it.

Or you could abandon your metaphor and ask what's really going on, which is what I think the speaker today, Eureka, failed to do, and what I know Vidal has done.

SL is a network.  A city is a better metaphor, but still misses a lot of what's going on.  I could say, "I'm going to move to the big city!  I can do... (my work, my socializing, my art, my crime, whatever my own goal is) so much better there!"  But then I get there and I bump up against millions of people, some of whom share my goal, some of whom are dead set against it, and a whole lot of whom couldn't care less. I *could* move back to the farm and give up any gains the city could offer me - *or* I could realize that my agenda is one of millions, and I can't pursue it effectively alone, that I can *only* be effective to the extent I recognize other people's goals as being as legitimate as mine, and work with them or around them.

Some businesses don't do that - that's where Disneyfication comes in.  They say, no, the Goreans, the RPers, the sexual experimenters, the wild creatives - their goals aren't legitimate. It's us or them.

Some people aren't *hostile* to others and their goals, they just *never see them at all,* which is where I think Eureka is.  I almost find that sadder.

And, does SL not work sometimes? Sure. Do cities not work sometimes? Construction blockages, floods, strikes, power outages, crime sprees - yeah, all those things "break" places sometimes. But life goes on even when we're stuck in the suburbs and can't commute in that day.  It goes on even if it sucks for some people. Cities are *other people,* and so is SL.

Inanimate tool to enable my will and my goals? No.

Place filled with souls, with agendas, that still exists even when I'm not a part of it?  Yeah.

*asks plaintively* Does that help?

I went to an event this morning that promised to be terrific, and just irresistible to me:

Dr. Dobb's/InformationWeek Gridtalk – The Book of Rissa Maidstone

Join photojournalist and entrepreneur Eureka Dejavu (Rita J. King) and CMP's Rissa Maidstone (Kim Smith) for a discussion of their upcoming collaboration: a book of photographs celebrating Second Life avatar style, scene, fashion, mood and pose, and exploring how notions of self, identity and objectification central to the feminine mystique translate to virtual realities.

It *ended up* delivering on its promise, but it took a long while to get there. Now, I absolutely adore Rissa and her colleague John Zhaoying, so I'm commenting instead of keeping my mouth shut, in the spirit of friendly constructive criticism.

( hopefully constructive criticism )
My point here isn't to go, "I get it and you don't, neener neener neener." I think the only way I get is that I know I *don't* get it, and that *my* experiences aren't the sum total of what the world "is." I recognize there are people who *don't* have searingly hot sex, or go shopping or dancing, frex. :D
I guess my lesson from today for my own event planning is – if possible, don't work with the clueless. But if you *have* to, you've *got* to balance that out with *serious* planning and structure!
I hope John and Rissa take this in the spirit it's intended – because I'm *so* going to wheedle for an autographed portrait of Rissa to hang in Home 5.0! :)

I was just at a presentation at the Life 2.0 conference, which was the single best thing I've ever heard in my life in SL  (excluding, of course, various moans of passion! :P ).

Here's the full text of Tateru Nino crystallizing the experience with stunning insight:

 

From the Terra Nova blog:

Areae's Metaplace Announced

Mike Sellers

Yesterday Raph Koster's group Areae finally took the wraps off of Metaplace, the project they've been working on for some time (this has now been covered by Boing Boing, the BBC, and Slashdot, as Raph notes on his site).  The announcement was greeted with much applause, along with a bit of head-scratching by some (and I'm sure more than a little relief for the Areae team).

Metaplace is not just another virtual world: they're doing their best to break down the walls around  the currently walled gardens.  This is a huge development that could change how we think of virtual worlds... if they can make this cool flying machine actually take to the air.

I applied to be an alpha tester, biting my lip and supplying some more or less accurate atomic-world contact info.  I doubt I'll get chosen - they seem to be looking for programmers/game developers/experienced MMORPG players - and my programming mojo doesn't even extend to TiVos!  :P

If you do have what they're looking for - and yes, I'm looking at *you* and *you*! - maybe apply and see what there is to see there?


(oh, and, while I was reading the box on the login page about the "optional viewer download," my login failed because that "option" was actually mandatory.  And what's with cut/paste being disabled on the new TOS too?  I'm *not* impressed!)