The Gentrification of Second Life®

As most of us are these days, I too am much preoccupied with the recent developments regarding the new pricing of Openspaces. This is not something which directly affects me at the moment but I can see that it is seriously shaking up a world which I hate to see subjected to such tremors.

My contacts list: There are maybe 10, - 15 at the very most, that I can count on to be online more or less everyday - and every single one of them is someone engaged in creative activity of one kind or another. A good few are builders, some of whom are artists and others designers, while the rest is made up of writers and bloggers. So, what is so remarkable about that you might well ask. After all, I am myself a builder and birds of a feather do tend to flock together and hardly surprising that quite a few if not indeed all of my contacts in Second Life are engaged in creative activity. Right?

Wrong! My contacts list in Second Life® is enormous. I have hardly ever deleted anyone that I have befriended from my newbie days onwards. There are names in there that stem back to my days on Help Island, women I met in the changing rooms of NCI Plaza, people encountered in malls and at concerts, in the distant days when I had not even yet managed to purchase my first AO. I have kept them all. Avatars whose handlers came from every imaginable walk of life. None of them around anymore. Only the builder/writer folk seem to have stayed the course.

And now, every then and again, while logging in I get this little notice from Linden Labs calling out to the business world to use Second Life as a virtual platform for meetings, product simulation and so forth. Needless to say, I am talking totally out of my hat here: I have no data, no market analysis or stats to know whether any of my assumptions hold up in any way. But, I really wonder whether this strategy is paying off in a big enough way to get Second Life out of the red? Does it really work?

Can it really work even? It would seem to me that for Second Life to survive and to prosper Linden Labs would first need to deal with the colossal fall out rate, of which my friends list is but a humble example. Makes for a most unattractive sales pitch you know? Most of my "friends" are gone for ever. And as for the precious few others that do make the rare appearance: A person who logs in every 3 months or so to attend a virtual meeting doth not a true Resident make. Cultivating the involvement of a strata of society from which would emerge true hardcore Residents would seem to me the only way to salvage the situation here.

In other words bring in the artsy crowd...

And no, I am not talking about the "full-time-acknowledged-in-Real Life-professional-artist" here. I know a few of those, and they seem to me to be even worse than the business types. With them it is all about running in, rezzing a "project", shooting a quickie machinima or two, to be shown on an LCD display at some "important" Real Life art event or other, and then rushing back out again. And all of this faster than you can chat the word "biennial" at that!

I am not talking about going to art educational enterprises either. I happen to be smack in the middle of all of that particular malarkey and trust me - again, it would be a huge big waste of your time. For my idea to really work, the artistic individuals in question would need to be motivated enough to stick around, to become part of the social, which would mean the metanomic fabric of a virtual life. And those would be the ones that are doing so already - only elsewhere.

What I am talking about is Web 2.0 creative activity. Web communities that gather around portals such as Deviant Art. How many subscribers does Deviant Art have? Millions for sure, but exactly how many millions? And how many more of these communities are there the world over? Hundreds? Thousands? That, I think, is precisely where your potential client base resides oh ye good Lindens! And maybe you have already made outreach efforts and I am just babbling on about the obvious here? But then again maybe you haven't?

Now, this is of course a long-term strategy: Small budget Residents, as these persons will in all likelihood be, may or may not be in a position to buy land. Or those that do may only manage to be modest small parcel holders - initially. So, in terms of land purchase activity, obviously getting some wonder corporation to sign up and buy 20 islands straight off the bat has a glamorous ring to it that my little plan here could in no way match - initially. And what's more, you may even have to provide quite a few more sandbox islands - initially...

However, my guess would be that a good portion of this new blood would very quickly start designing stuff to be sold in-world. (Just take a look at the 3D modeling pages on Deviant Art and you will see evidence of what I am talking about right there). So, maybe not straight away but in due course they would seriously be bolstering up metaverse economy, which would necessitate the purchase of land for shops and entertainment venues where the purchased goodies could be flaunted; which would brighten up the real estate market, and so on and so forth... And who would be purchasing all of these nice new products, you want to know? Well, that is the beauty of the whole thing: They themselves would, of course. Isn't that precisely how all of these portals survive? Members sell things - prints, posters, skins, widgets, gadgets - which other members - who in their turn sell things also - buy! Teeeeee heeeeee...

And then secondly, artists also do this wonderful thing called the gentrification of decayed city spaces in Real Life. You turn loose a sizable group of artists in a totally run down inner city area: They fix up, they renovate and of course - indeed most importantly - they also bring style and coolness to the place. Next thing the realtors step in, the artists get ousted out - the neat little cafes and things stay (of course) and the fat wallet types move in. The earliest example I guess would be SoHo, NYC but there are literally thousands of examples of this the world over.

Thus, once bitten twice shy, all of these communities would be wise to demand some serious reassurance (preferably in writing) that land prices would be guaranteed and that policies would remain stable. In other words, that what happened to their counterparts in Real Life would not also end up happening to them in a virtual world.

So, Dear Lindens, this was my two cents worth of input to your, to me fairly obvious, conundrum. If you promise to not to throw us all out on our virtual ears once we have gentrified the place, please do take advantage of what our ilk has to offer! Anything we can do to help - really and truly...