ETech - Web 3.0 And Second Life
Notes from the Web 3.0 talk by Cory Ondrejka of Linden Lab. Second Life is a massive multi-player online role playing game.
It is very hard to create stuff in Second Life, but participation rates are very high.
Attention in virtual worlds
20% self-identify as residents of virtual worlds
35% of adults spend more time online / virtual worlds than "working"
Where virtual worlds came from
Apranet
MUD1
Habitat
MMORPG
Second life is a unique online world
- not a game
- completely built and owned by the residents (Ed: edge competencies!)
Not a subscription
- pay for permits to build
In the last 30 days
70k residents
240k distinct items bought & sold
5M p2p transactions
$6.5M in internal economy
$800k exchanged
Unanticipated consequences
Alien abductions. Players were abducted once a week, ppl in forums didn't believe the abductees ("you're too stressed").
Taxation structure built in initially. ppl burned their stuff, new users were scared of angry protestors, so Linden Labs got rid of taxes.
25% of users' time is spent creating
4100 person content dev't team would cost $400M / year
15% of residents are writing code in a difficult language.
-users writing 2.5M lines of code / week
- second life is 800k lines of code total!
Residents own virtual property
- Schringo? (a game) was created, tested, and marketed in a virtual world. Since creators owns property developed within Second Life, Schringo will appear on Gameboy Advance.
Demographics
- 50/50 gender split
- women & older residents dominate lists (top 10, etc), non-technical, stay-at-home moms
- median age of 36
- real world skills translate into virtual world skills
Good learning practices
- amateur-to-amateur
- 100s of classes / week on how to use second life
legitimate peripheral participation
- best way to learn is by being around ppl who know how to do something very well
performance before competence (apprenticeships)
- woman made $150k USD last year doing real estate, speculation, etc in Second Life
play vs. work
- assumption that play is bad, and work is good
- not always true!
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