Tags: Games   Virtual Worlds   Web


Second Life isn’t my type of “game”, if I can call it that. I played it for an hour or two, so my opinion of it is mostly as an outsider.

But increasingly it is popping up in discussions on and off-line. I even attended a meeting at work where top decision-makers presented the company’s strategy to get involved inside the virtual world of Second Life. The meeting received mixed responses, with some people clearly against devoting any effort to this game.

As a marketing platform, we’ve seen various efforts this year to use Second Life. My favorite example is when George R. R. Martin held an event in SL where he answered questions and did a book reading. His avatar was modeled after Tyrion, his favorite character from his books. It looks more like a chubby boy with premature facial hair, but close enough.

Hosting the event was a pale, undead gentleman. In attendance was a pony girl with wings in a pink dress, a panda girl with breasts and red hair, a panda girl with breasts and pink hair, a green orc with a sword, Enya with red wings, and some generic human males staring blankly in the wrong direction. Wings are in style this year, I guess. Here’s the video:

My eyes! My eyes!

After watching the video, it seems to me like a conference call, except that you get to see some insane cartoon characters. Is a Second Life event more immersive than a conference call, or a recorded phone interview? For the very few players who attended the event, it probably was. Still, I’m not convinced there’s much value in such Second Life events, except to promote Second Life itself.

Other events held in Second Life: an interview with the cast and crew of Transformers, an interview with Bruce Willis (in which he looks horrifying), and a party with Fatboy Slim (attended by many drag queen avatars).

I think someone told businesses that the internet was on the way out and virtual worlds would take their place. Build your virtual stores now, or miss out on virtual reality! No one will want to shop on web sites in the future. They’ll want to use their virtual selves instead to shop in virtual malls!

Just imagine it: instead of shopping for books using a boring search engine on Amazon, you can walk your virtual avatar to the Amazon mall, then walk your character to different sections of the store using the mouse and WSAD keys, find the books you want, right-click to put them in your inventory, then walk your avatar into line at the cashiers, buy the books, and carry them back to your virtual estate. Yes, in the future we will want things to take a long time, be more difficult to use, and require good graphics cards. And companies will have to hire 3D modelers, texture artists, animators, and script-writers to build their virtual stores.

I’d like to say that it ain’t gonna happen, but I’m not so sure. It would be a great way for big companies to cut out a lot of competition. It’s far too easy to build a website today. Any company and individual can create a website and sell their products to millions of potential customers around the world. Creating a virtual, 3D, interactive store is a much bigger technical challenge that small companies would not all be able to afford. Like mainstream TV and film today, only the biggest players would be able to profit.

One thing Second Life proves: big businesses are interested. Second Life is being used as a testing ground for virtual world sales and marketing. It might be ugly and awkward today, but it’s just the ancestor to future non-game virtual worlds that will evolve and grow into something that everyone might want to join, like the internet, and where big businesses can use their muscle against the little guy. Or maybe this is just my cynical opinion as a modest blogger.

Long live the world wide web!