or both?
Anyone who’s kept an account in SL for a while will have experienced an overall theme of negativity when it comes to overall operation, pricing, policy change, availability of alternatives, management of intellectual property, scalability, stability, interpersonal drama, so on and so forth.
A lot of it is even warranted.
I will be the first to admit i tend to be a very negative person. But I try to be objective about my observations and as such, it’s seemed like many people think it’s the ‘cool thing to do’ to go ahead and bash every new topic that’s come up.
A lot of people have pointed to the recent efforts by the business team to improve visibility and public opinion of commercial/educational/governmental involvement in VWs, casting considerable doubts on the viability of such ventures without taking the time to consider projects on a case by case basis. As FlipperPA Peregrine mentions in his article here, there seems to constantly be the allusion towards a ‘death watch’ over Second Life. Realistically, we hear way more about the companies that are storming off in a huff – usually, however, it’s because they didn’t take the time to consider just how best to use the resources given to them.
But there are a plethora of developments throughout Second Life that have provided (and continue to provide) help for their target audiences:
– The University of Denver is providing theory, procedure and safety training on nuclear physics to their students at Science School II.
– The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration informs the public about its services around the world, in the Meteora, Okeanos and Thetis sims – (You can even play a crab fishing game there).
– The MacArthur Foundation space at Foundations provides information about its services as well as meeting spaces for non-profit organizations.
– The US Navy offers information about its operations at its 8 sim complex located at vNUWC.
– Nokia and Orange both sponsor in world discussions, exhibitions and events on their sims as well as roaming throughout the grid.
– Various universities use their virtual space to allow students the opportunity to learn remotely from their own homes.
– There is a huge science continent out there under the collective name of SciLands
– There is a continent specifically for non-profits provided by Annenberg.
– There are a large number of military sims now hooked up with the Navy vNUWC sims.
– IBM has been and continues to be very closely linked to OpenGrid development, as well as numerous other projects designed to train both staff and visitors in scripting, be used as meeting space, etc.
I really could go on and on and on. And yeah, at this point I’ll disclose that I did work for UDenver, NOAA, MacArthur and the US Navy. It doesn’t make me any less enthusiastic about their usefulness to their intended audiences.
There are a lot of other areas for complaint though. Like the recent restriction on 1000 prim coalesced objects (there are alternatives to taking objects primmed 1000+ aside from taking them as coalesced objects, and they are far more reliable), or the removal of a bug that inadvertently caused some creators’ content to break (even though said effect was never acknowledged as a feature and creators were advised *not* to market products which relied on said bug.
The one about the coalesced objects in particular sparked much ire, causing participants to break off in a tangential discussion about leaving SL entirely for other Opensim-based grids. That particular tirade I’ve heard more than a few times, yet time and time again, we are almost all still here, and SL still holds the market in terms of VWs that allow their users to keep IP rights over their creations. If you don’t like it… shut down the program… uninstall… and walk away. It’s called voting with your wallet and we do it RL all the time. But to continue to complain about things that aren’t necessarily in your control (or perhaps really don’t even affect you if the change affects something you don’t use in the first place) is really just making the overall SL experience worse for everyone. Negativity without just cause becomes a self-proliferating disease that ultimately can be very difficult to stamp out.
So i guess what I’m really coming down to here, as I begin to tie things off, is that it’s really become tiring to look at everything new we hear about SL through emo glasses.
I’m not going to claim that everything is rainbows and unicorns, but I DO think it is important to not only look at VW issues with a skeptical eye, but with an objective eye as well. To not behave as though positive change is out of style or out of the question.
That’s all. :shrug: