Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thank You Pirates! The Real Lesson in Virtual World Content Theft

There's been a renewed outcry in the Second Life creative community about unauthorized duplication of virtual goods. Although I understand the frustration, vigilant enforcement of IP rights is at best a stop-gap measure that will neither mitigate the inherent vulnerability of digital content, nor put more money into creators' pockets. Although creators may derive some personal satisfaction from going after individual culprits, such an approach mimics the losing strategy of the music and movie industries which failed even with a seven year salt-the-earth campaign. The relentless, high-profile lobbying and law suits of the MPAA and RIAA were unable able to stop or even slow down unauthorized music and video sharing.

Today, those industry dinosaurs are finally moving from a DRM and litigation-focused approach to grudging participation in new business models adapted to the realities of a networked digital ecosystem. Companies like Pandora, NetFlix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon's new cloud-based service are breaking new ground. They are transcending the outmoded paradigms of digital content distribution that were based on physical media rather than network file transfer and streaming. These pathfinders are seeking new revenue opportunities rather than clinging to the dead-end approaches of the past.

Unfortunately, the virtual world content creation community seems to be mired in the same type of thinking that led the music and video industries into years of wasted effort and lost opportunity. Pirates are are actually doing us a favor by pointing out that our business models are behind the times and not serving consumers. The future won't be won by chasing after offenders, but through new approaches that better meet consumer needs. The cost of piracy is a drop in the bucket compared to the opportunity cost of the current DRM-hobbled stove-piped system.

Instead of wringing hands over unauthorized copies of virtual goods moving from Second Life to other grids, we should support the creation of transworld marketplaces that make it easy for consumers to purchase goods and use them in the worlds they choose. Instead of obsessing over the fear of theft, we should be thinking creatively about opportunities for new revenue channels and business models such as subscription-based and cross-platform licensing. I can share music, videos and applications I purchase through iTunes on five computers plus mobile devices. Why shouldn't I be able to use my virtual goods in the same manner across platforms?

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Monday, March 28, 2011

RANT ALERT: Empire Avenue as Hell Realm

Empire Avenue is the Social Media Exchange, where you can buy and sell shares in any social media profile, meet new people, unlock Achievement badges, and earn boatloads of virtual cash by being active and social online! Buy shares in your friends, your followers, people with similar interests, brands you love, celebrities – anyone! All using a virtual currency and all for free! From Empire Avenue Site
Empire Avenue
My Brief Empire Avenue History

After a week of being lulled to sleep in the Asura Realm of Empire Avenue, I finally awakened to the dream like Siddhartha rising out of Kamala's bed.

Social Network games are a junk food pleasure; endless rows of bottomless bowls of lard-drenched frosted pork rinds. Too lazy to plow the soil of our subconscious, sow the seeds of creativity and feast upon its ripened fruit, we instead stuff our meaning-starved minds with the crackling crunch of gamified pseudo-achievement.

Empire Avenue's Borg-worthy game mechanics assimilate player activity across all social networks. It auto-tunes the rich analog harmonics of our expressive being into hyper-compressed bleeps of commodified metrics across tweets, blogs, FaceBook, YouTube and wherever feeds can travel.

Although Empire Avenue claims to promote "value-based relationships" it rewards social network activity without regard for value delivered. Buy/Sell announcements pollute our shared stream along with unknown hordes of badge-motivated missives of mundane mediocrity.

So although it was fun while my obliviousness lasted, I decided that the free pleasures of Empire Avenue aren't worth the cost. I've deleted my account and shall play no more.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Shadowplay: The Serendipity of Second Life Creativity

I was going over some old machinima and found this short music video from November 2008. It's a good example of the serendipity of Second Life creativity.

The idea was born at the grand opening of Night Morissey's short-lived art gallery. When I arrived, I noticed that a few avatars were completely black. Black skin. Black hair. Black eyes. No visible textures. Living shadows. It looked really cool! At first, I thought it was some new fashion trend I'd missed. But after a few conversations with no one knowing what the hell I was talking about, I finally realized the effect was from an odd viewer glitch.

The look was so striking that I decided to come back later that day and shoot some video. Of course, the "problem" corrected itself when I logged back in. Fortunately, after a bit of experimentation, I figured out I could duplicate the effect by creating skin, hair and eyes with flat black textures. Night popped online when I was ready to start shooting so I invited her to participate. I didn't have anything in mind beyond capturing the effect, but The Muse was with us and a little story emerged out of the black:


Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Crap + Prokofy Proves Hamlet's FOC Theory

Crap's Influences
I was initially skeptical of Hamlet's contention that a Fetid Outer Core (FOC) of disgruntled community members were responsible for dooming Second Life. But statistics don't lie. And this graphic from objective third-party analyst Klout clearly proves that "Thought Leader" Mr. Crap Mariner is influenced by three of the most vocal critics of Linden Lab and Second Life: Prokofy Neva, Bettina Tizzy and Mitch Wagner.

This shocking new evidence reveals that so-called arch-enemies Crap and Prokofy are actually in a secret Linden-hating web of change resistance. Hopefully, this incontrovertible evidence will silence naysayers once and for all and move the Silent Majority to resist the siren song of the FOC.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

More Fun With Deep Tweets

Deep Tweets - Art

In the spirit of both a Transworld and Transmedia approach to the Deep Tweets project, I thought it would be fun to extend the concept to sketch-based images. The image above is my first go.

Below is the newest Deep Tweets video. The image on the movie screen was shot in Edloe through the courtesy of Mr. Crap Mariner.

Monday, March 21, 2011

SLdrama Alchemy: Transmuting Combative Crap into Creative Compost

After a week watching the detritus from the latest SLdrama slurry down my Twitter stream, I woke up Saturday morning and entered the Church of the Empty Page to see what She had to say. What emerged was a Twitter mini-rant imagining the posts we might see if only the unvarnished truth could be told.

By the way, if you think none of these apply to you, you're probably mistaken.  I sure was:
  • Of course I don't think I'm Nostradamus! I just make guesses about the future and argue as if they're inevitable truth.
  • Geez! I just can't understand why my ranting and personal attacks don't persuade you to see things my way.
  • I believe that I know exactly what you're really thinking, and nothing you can say will ever convince me otherwise.
  • Your logic will never compete with my delusions!
  • Don't bother explaining. I'll only respond to the parts I can argue against.
  • I did listen! I listened to my own thoughts, right up to the point I interrupted you.
    • It's so much easier to rage on and on about this external issue than deal with the unresolved personal issues I'm really mad about.
    And finally, here's one I used for the latest installment of Deep Tweets by Botgirl Questi


    Sunday, March 20, 2011

    Having Our Cake and Eating it Too

    My human counterpart and I had a blast presenting the VWBPE opening keynote. Hopefully, we not only provided some interesting food for thought through the content, but also communicated some of the joy and creative juice of our relationship through the live interchange . . . and demonstrated that there's more to post-pseudonymity than avatar-aka-human.

    I'm going to be busy the rest of the week watching the great VWBPE presentations I missed as they're posted in the Best Practices in Education archive on Treet.TV.  Here's our keynote in its entirety. It starts at about 5:00 into the video, after the introduction.





    Friday, March 18, 2011

    The Rift Between The Second Life Community and Linden Lab II: The Openspace Fiasco

    This post continues The Roots of the Rift Between the Second Life Community and Linden Lab

    While the trademark policy was angering many Second Life residents in March 2008, another policy change was making many others very happy. Linden Lab began offering OpenSpace regions to estate owners at $75 per month, which was about a quarter of the price of standard private islands. The light-use sims supported 3,750 prims instead of the standard 15,000, with about one quarter of the processing capability.

    The program was phenomenally successful. Perhaps too successful. By October, it was estimated that 50%-60% of all regions were Openspace sims. Instead of increasing revenue by allowing estate owners to add a few light-weight sims for oceans and forests, savvy owners were using them in creative ways to replace standard regions. It's likely that financial projections of this unintended consequence portrayed a drastic, possibly life-threatening decline in revenue for Linden Lab. So in October 2008, Linden Lab announced a 66% increase in Openspace pricing.

    The trademark policy had only minor financial impact on a handful of Second Life residents. The Openspace price increase would cost the community hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.  Not surprisingly, the community was outraged.

    Instead of admitting that they made a mistake and couldn't afford to lose so much revenue, Linden Lab blamed the community:
    Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing.‘
    While the trademark policy strained the relationship between Linden Lab and Second Life residents, the Openspace fiasco blew it to smithereens. Although resident furor eventually led to Linden Lab offering an extremely limited version (750 prims, 10 avatar limit) of the $75 per month Openspace region, most owners ended up either abandoning their Openspace regions, paying the higher rate for the newly named Homestead sims, or converting them into standard private islands.

    So if Hamlet's contention is correct and Second Life's survival is threatened by the community's hate and fear of change, this is another clear reason we have good reason to be cautious. What positive changes have occurred in the last three years to offset even this one calamitous change? And I've only covered 2008. The story will continue in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.

    Thursday, March 17, 2011

    The Roots of the Rift Between the Second Life Community and Linden Lab

    (This post continues yesterday's rebuttal to Second Life's Survival Seriously Threatened by Second Life Users' Hate and Fear of Change.)
    Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Proverb.
    If the Second Life Community has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to change, there are good reasons. Over the past three years, Linden Lab has instituted a string of decisions that changed its relationship with the community from a feeling of trusted family to an atmosphere of cold-blooded commerce.

    The shift started in 2008 when Linden Lab decided it was time to grow up and act like a "real" company. In March, 2008, it issued a new Trademark Policy negatively impacting hundreds of the most active and committed community members who had commercial sites or blogs using "Second Life" or "SL" in the title or url. As Gwyneth Llewelyn recounted at the time, the decision reversed a four year history of Linden Lab actively encouraging the community to use the trademark. The unilateral decision galvanized the Second Life community to hold a three day bloggers strike. (It also inspired the creation of @SecondLie, the fourth ranked Second Life Twitter personality who posts multiple times per day with humorous commentary Linden Lab and Second Life.)

    Although I didn't understand it at the time, the community's heated response to the Trademark Policy was much more about a perceived breach of trust than the actual issue of Trademarks. After years of Linden Lab encouraging the belief that community members were equal partners in the creation of Second Life, they pulled off the gloves, brought out the lawyers and reminded everyone that it was their world, not ours.

    I'm busy with final preparations for today's VWBPE Keynote, so I'll stop here. Stay tuned for Part Two.

    Wednesday, March 16, 2011

    Video Rebuttal to NWN's "Users Hate Change" Post: Big Ball of Change

    Hamlet posted a strongly worded editorial today blaming Second Life's woes on the community's intransigent resistance to change. As much as I love a good rant, I think it's pretty misguided to blame customers for not liking changes in a product. It's the seller's responsibility to develop and deliver compelling new capabilities. And it's also their job to practice effective Change Management to counter whatever underlying issues contribute to customer resistance to change.

    Fortunately, my human counterpart had a video in the archives that dramatizes what change feels like to stakeholders when it's dumped on them from above.

    Keynote Preparation Comic: Pedagogy Rhymes With What Again?

    Practicing For The Keynote
    Practicing For The VWBPE Keynote
    Just one day left until the VWBPE Conference kicks off. You can get the full schedule here. Fourworlds and I will be performing our keynote at 2pm PST tomorrow (Thursday, March 17) at the Central Forum. These SLURLs for Viewer One and Viewer Two users are good anytime after 6am PDT. Get there early, so you'll have a good seat to heckle from.

    Monday, March 14, 2011

    Damming Twitter

    No typo in the headline. I meant damming as you would a river. Or in this case a stream.

    I love Twitter. As of today, I've been using it for exactly three years. It's now my primary source of both interesting new links and people. As a matter of fact, I've met more Second Lifers through Twitter than I have inside Second Life.  But although tweeps stick around, tweets are extremely ephemeral. Even the coolest threads get lost downstream within an hour or two. Twitter is designed that way.

    I've played around with some practices to reel some of my favorite tweets back in. I decided to list a few of them here in celebration of my 3rd Twitter Anniversary:
    • Micro-rants: I sometimes think of Twitter as a performance venue. And one of my favorite forms is the micro-rant, which consists of a series of tweets on a particular topic. Here's one from last month on creativity:
      • A creative project, like a marriage, only gets real depth after the honeymoon is over. #creativity
      • Be all embracing in brainstorming and ruthless in editing. #creativity
      • Any in-progress work of mine that gets cranky is sent to bed for a nap. #creativity
      • Most machinima I've seen would have been better off at half the length. Cool ideas are often spoiled by self-indulgence. #creativity
      • Be easily amused, but hard to please. #creativity
      • To truly worship the Muse, transcribe her every whisper. To be clear, that's "transcribe", NOT "share". #creativity
      • An ounce of context is worth a pound of isolated facts. #creativity
      • Transforming tweets into blog posts:  Expanding tweets from a micro-rant into a blog post has been a great way to carry them over the typical tweet event horizon. Although I schedule them to be posted over a number of hours, Micro-rant tweets are usually written in the first fifteen minutes after waking, so they're fresh from the subconscious and often full of juicy potential.
      • Deep Tweets: This is my newest experiment. I take a tweet, match it up with some New Age music and atmospheric video from a virtual world, and create a 30 second parody of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy parody. Here's the latest:

      Friday, March 11, 2011

      Death and Pseudonymity in Virtual Worlds

      NightLight
      Night's last tweets
      The sad news of Sabrinaa Nightfire passing away earlier this week made me think of my missing friend and collaborator, Nightflower Morrisey, and the impact of pseudonymity on both personal relationships and virtual communities.

      Sabrinaa was very open about her human identity. Night's was completely opaque. Both shared stories about their human lives in personal conversations. The difference was that Night never gave away personally identifying details.

      Although I had a much closer friendship with Night than Sabrinaa, I never knew which, if any, of the stories Night shared about her human life included obfuscations designed to prevent me from intentionally or inadvertently discovering her human identity. Interestingly enough, my skepticism about the details of her human life didn't extend to commitments made within the context of our collaborative work or a feeling of genuine friendship. Until she disappeared.

      I've had a number of Second Life friends vanish without a trace over the last few years, including Rheta Shan, whose reported death is still uncertain in the fog of pseudonymity.

      As in RL, loss within virtual world relationships and communities is an unavoidable fact of life. Death can bring a community together. It reminds of us of the fragility of life and can make us appreciate our time together more deeply. But when avatars simply disappear, it can have the opposite effect and lead us to question the authenticity of our pseudonymous relationships.

      I don't know whether Night is dead or alive . . . whether leaving without a word to anyone was a strategic act to avoid the stress of disclosure or the unavoidable result of coercion, illness or death. We may never know. In any case, I think there's still a lot more for us to learn about the impact of pseudonymity on both our individual relationships and collective communities.

      Wednesday, March 9, 2011

      Deep Tweets by Botgirl Questi - New Video Series

      After having such a blast with the @rodvik video, I thought it would be fun to do a twitter takeoff on the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy series. My plan is to do an ongoing series of :30 second clips featuring my favorite "Fortune Cookie Philosophy" tweets. Here's the first:

      Monday, March 7, 2011

      @rodvik Doesn't Follow Me On Twitter (Maybe He Should) - MUSIC VIDEO

      The ongoing @rodvik (Linden Lab CEO) name-dropping craze on Twitter has been wild to watch over the last couple of months. A recent spike focusing on the topic of Second Life Forum gamification made me wonder what it must look like from his end of the stream.

      Saturday afternoon, I got the idea of trying to build a song from some of the tweets. I dumped the last few days' @rodvik references into GhostReader, exported a voice track into GarageBand and started cutting, pasting and playing with loops. The "@rodvick doesn't follow me on Twitter, maybe he should" tweet from @SkateFoss emerged as the obvious hook and chorus, and I had a finished song in a few of hours.

      Of course, the idea of doing a video popped into my mind. The problem was that given my time constraints over the next few weeks, I didn't see how I could pull it off. But I really, really wanted to release something today. So Sunday morning, I picked a Crazy Talk character template, imported the vocal track and had it crank out an end-to-end automated lip sync. After dumping it into iMovie, it became painfully obvious that there was something missing. So I cut in some dance and band machinima from past projects, added a comic template and had this finished version by mid-afternoon. Here's what I ended up with: 


      Friday, March 4, 2011

      MCF Video and Update on VWBPE Keynote

      Whew! Fourworlds made it through the Metanomics Community Forum without totally ruining my reputation. He did a decent job, but he's certainly no me, right? Since he spilled the beans, I might as well formally announce that he and I will be co-presenting the VWBPE keynote. It will be our first voiced co-appearance since the Avatars in Love video and our first live-voiced gig together.

      If you missed them, here's the archive of fourworlds on MCF and Avatars in Love (slightly NSFW).



      Wednesday, March 2, 2011

      Is Avatar = Real Person Privacy at Death's Door?

      There was an interesting thread on Twitter yesterday initiated by Bettina Tizzy. She wrote:
      Are SLers in denial? I think avatar=real person privacy is at death's door.
      Although my knee-jerk reaction was to defend the idea that pseudonymity is here to stay, I decided that the topic deserved more consideration. My question today is not whether avatar privacy should go away, but whether forces such as these are making it less tenable;

      Continued influx of people using VWs as an extension of their RL jobs, education, etc:
      • At the moment, there's no easy way for teachers and students to be fully pseudonymous (little alone anonymous) and receive academic credit. At the very least, each institution would need to have some list linking avatar and human identity. 
      • Corporate employees and people with virtual world businesses who wish to work with mainstream companies will continue to find it necessary or at least beneficial to disclose RL information. Although there are exceptions to the rule, if you want to get paid you're probably going to need to get made.
      • The new Second Life display name capability makes it easier than ever to conflate RL and SL identities. I don't know how high the percentage will get, but there's nowhere to go but up.
      • It's likely that educational and corporate use of virtual worlds will continue to increase and perhaps even become commonplace. 
      • It's likely that Second Life and other virtual worlds will eventually allow Facebook authentication. When that happens, there will be an added incentive for more people to extend RL identities, at least with one primary avatar.
      • There's a certain chicken and the egg factor at play in the maintenance of Second Life's pseudonymity-accepting culture. If at some time the balance between human-connected identity communities and pseudonymous identity communities shift, it's possible that overall cultural acceptance could swing the other way.
      Continued growth of transworld virtual identity: 
      Take it from me, maintaining pseudonymity in an actively transworld virtual life demands great attention to detail. I have separate accounts for Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Animoto, Gmail, etc.. Even though I put together a system that keeps identities separate by using different browsers, I came close to posting something identifiable to the wrong account countless times. As our avatar identities spread across multiple platforms, it will become increasingly difficult to juggle it all and keep everything separate. It only takes one slip to blow your cover. Some of us also find that our virtual "careers" become significant enough that we want to carry them over to human identity so that we can fully benefit from them.

      Continued introduction of new hacking and security technology:
      The recent RedZone controversy reminds us that we leave breadcrumbs all over the place as we surf. For instance, if I had wanted to, I could have easily connected quite of few of the visitors here over the years to their cities and places of employment. I personally chose not to. But others likely make a different choice. Although it is possible to take measures such as shielding our IP addresses through software like the TOR Project and turning off cookies in our browser settings, no strategy is absolutely fool-proof. Another looming technology involves artificial intelligence that crawls the web and makes correlations between what would otherwise be disconnected chunks of data.

      Various Human factors:
      If even a single person knows the connection between your virtual and human identity, it is quite possible that they will eventually intentionally or inadvertently share that information with someone else. Every additional person who knows the connection increases the chances that the cat will get totally out of the bag. Of course, you can make the decision to tell no one and control the secret yourself. The problem is that you are likely to meet people who you want to share details about your human life, up to and including your full identity. So you either back off from moving forward in those relationships or give up some control over your pseudonymous destiny.

      I'll leave it for another day to reconsider the personal benefits and costs of pseudonymity. I'm happy at the moment with my own middle ground, although it's fun to kick the fourth wall once in a while like I'm doing with the appearance by my human counterpart on the Metanomics Community Forum tomorrow.

      Tuesday, March 1, 2011

      Botgirl's Human Counterpart to Guest on Thursday's Metanomics Community Forum


      My human counterpart is slated as the guest for this Thursday's Metanomics Community Forum at high noon PST. The unscripted conversation moderated by host Jennette Forager will likely be a wide-ranging romp through topics such as virtual identity, Gamestorming, Second Life as a creative platform and the upcoming Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference.

      You can join the fun in Second Life or watch the streaming video from the comfort of your browser. I have one request for those who attend. If Jenn doesn't bring it up, please let him know that it's freaking dangerous to shoot a music video while driving.