The creator of Second Life talks about the Metaverse
Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life | Second Life |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/10/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life
Rosedale, who responded to The Guardian's interview on ZOOM from Linden Lab's office in San Francisco, looks like a genius inventor boy at the age of 54, with colorful glasses and gray hair like a cartoon character. It is said that it keeps Mr. Rosedale, who grew up familiar with both science and science fiction novels from an early age, said, ``Even before science fiction writer Neil Stephenson coined the term Metaverse in ' Snow Crash ,' there was an 'accessible digital utopia. I had a vision of '.'
When Mr. Rosedale was presented with 'Snow Crash' published in 1992 by his wife, Mr. Rosedale said, 'It's a science fiction novel written about what you always do, so you should definitely like it. It seems that he was told.
Two years later, in 1994, Mr. Rosedale, who moved to San Francisco, first wanted to use the Internet to create a large pool of server machines and simulate a huge world in it. However, the technology was still underdeveloped at the time, and Rosedale said, 'Even I would have thought of doing it in the early '90s, when the internet was still incredibly slow and computers couldn't render 3D very well. I wasn't crazy,' he recalls.
A few years later, Rosedale felt the time was right and founded Linden Lab in 1999. By this time, online games had become commonplace, but Mr. Rosedale said he thought, 'Second Life will not be a video game full of quests and errands.' Instead, Rosedale envisioned Second Life as a place to experiment with new identities, self-expression, and ways of escapism.
But it's also true that Second Life's economic system was modeled after online games. In particular, the online game 'EverQuest', which started service in 1999, is actively buying and selling items between users, and this is the second life economy where 'users create their own content and sell it to each other'. It became a prototype.
Rosedale said, 'EverQuest had a common room, it was a marketplace, and players were selling items by text. That's why I was convinced that Second Life needed an open economy. I developed Second Life while trying not to get in the way of people being creators of stories and content.'
Second Life, released in 2003, was initially a system that charged a monthly fee. However, one year after launching the service, Linden Lab will shift its pricing structure to a real estate model. This allowed any user to visit the world of Second Life for free, but had to pay if they wanted to own a piece of it.
“In the end, it turned out to be a great business model. People buying land in Second Life were willing to pay to start something new on the land and make money.” says Rosedale. Second Life has made virtual space real estate, allowing users to build skyscrapers on land, establish and run companies, post advertisements, dig mines, and do anything. .
For example, one opened a store full of digital clothing, while another became a realtor selling and renting prime properties. In this way, the economy in Second Life is getting more and more active, and in 2006, a person who succeeded in Second Life and became a millionaire will be featured on the cover of the economic magazine BusinessWeek.
However, there were twists and turns for that much. One event that particularly impressed Mr. Rosedale was the auction of an island in Second Life. When the island was bought by Rivers Run Red, a marketing company in London, Mr. Rosedale said, ``I remember everyone was furious when I learned that the buyer was a real company. It was,” he recalled.
Another reason Second Life was revolutionary at the time was that, unlike online games set in fantasy worlds with the scent of Dungeons & Dragons, mainstream journalists wanted to spread its appeal to non-gamers. It was easy to tell, and it was able to tell a story that was sometimes human and sometimes crude.
For example, the British tabloid Daily Mail wrote in
Second Life also has aspects not found in many other online games and services, being both a glamorous place for the general public and a gathering place for enthusiasts with special tastes. For example, according to The Guardian, the Second Life marketplace has more than 18,000 items tagged with ' Furry ', that is, anthropomorphic animal characters.
Regarding these points, The Guardian said, ``Second Life, which was not called Metaverse at the time, was just one of the online spaces for geek-minded misfits to find a community, but it was blatant through its rough graphic representation. It was also a place to reveal sexual digital expression.”
Some argue that Second Life's ability to be a creative outlet is why it has survived as other projects have closed or scaled back. Virtual worlds journalist Wagner James Oh told The Guardian, “You rarely see a lively and fair creator economy on your average Metaverse platform. You can earn as much as the employee's salary, ”he commented.
Second Life has survived due to the strong support of users, but the number of new users has slowed down since the city blockade due to the pandemic has calmed down. In 2006, Mr. Rosedale boasted, 'We think Second Life is a better platform than reality in many ways,' boasting. Second Life didn't develop as well as it did.
Rosedale admitted he was naive in believing that Second Life would be ubiquitous , but said, 'Everybody wants to have an avatar, do interviews like I do now, shop around. I thought I would spend part of my life in something like Second Life, hopefully in Second Life, just to hang out with people. ’ he recalled.
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One of Rosedale's miscalculations is his reluctance to become an avatar. “I had the utopian idea that most people would be comfortable with moving their objective selves into the digital world,” Rosedale said. 'The difficulty of maintaining a second identity was considerable, and fewer people were willing to do it than I thought at the time.'
Also, from this failure, Mr. Rosedale said about the future of Metaverse, ``For example, I don't think Metaverse will grow enough to keep Facebook's business alive.For that, we need 1 billion users. '' he said.
On the other hand, Rosedale also believes that the Metaverse has a charm that social media lacks. This is because, compared to Facebook, where like-minded people get together and cause polarization, in Second Life, where people are forced to interact frequently with many different people, there are fewer divisions and prejudices, and users can build good relationships with each other. Because you are building a lot.
A unique advantage of the Metaverse is that there are no physical collisions despite sharing space. “Someone can hold an extremist rally in Second Life, and because it's happening in the same landlocked space, other people can pop in and challenge it,” Rosedale said. It's much healthier than the echo chamber phenomenon that occurs on social media.'
Another advantage is that activities in the digital space have less environmental impact than activities in the physical world. “One of our biggest environmental impact concerns is travel.The cost of creating and ‘shipping’ virtual goods will be negligible as we begin to express our tastes in the digital realm. No.” “It really pisses me off when I see people saying that running an avatar in Second Life is a waste of energy. It's only 1%,' Rosedale pointed out.
The fact that Second Life has survived for 20 years suggests that the very human qualities of social interaction and self-expression are key to the Metaverse's success. Aufwie, a musician who has been bullied at school and has been enjoying second life for 14 years since he started second life at the age of 12, said, ``I'm sure there's no more excitement than when I started my second life. And yet, I am still grateful to this Metaverse pioneer for teaching me all the wonders of being human: expressing yourself, making friends, learning, and sharing ideas.' I talked to
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