Commodify me! After saying no to academics and journalists, Lindens say Yes! to “cool hunters”
by Alphaville Herald on 12/07/05 at 3:24 pm
The Linden Brain Trust: Cory, Philip, and Robin
Thanks again to Zero Grace for culling this from the GLS Conference video feeds. After the Lindens raised a stink about academics and journalists hanging out on second life, and after insisting that the usual academic human subjects committes and safeguards were not enough and that the Lindens with their vast training in this area would be the arbiters of ethical academic reserach in game, it appears the Lindens have thrown open the doors to marketing firms to prowl Second Life with impugnity. Lindens call them “cool hunters”, but I think the technical term for them might be “idea thieves,” or better yet, “people doing ethnographic studies of us with no ethical oversight whatsoever, but it’s ok because they are doing it to make money!”
Rufus Varmint
Jul 13th, 2005
I find it amazing that none of the usual cognizanti have mumbled a single word about this.
I guess the fact that they might *profit* from it has them drooling too much to take umbrage at the idiocity involved in this decision.
montserrat
Jul 13th, 2005
ya nothin tastes as good as appropriation.
Mr F.
Jul 14th, 2005
I think Fool Hunters would be a better name for marketing idiots.
Prokofy Neva
Jul 14th, 2005
I’m having trouble getting this one, Uri, or getting why it is so horrible, such as to take the people you called “your friends” in another thread and parody them and call them the “Three Stooges”. ???
If some company in the real world wants to enter SL, and have a “cool hunter,” why couldn’t it? And if it wanted to send shills roaming around to befriend and fete designers like Aimee Weber…who could stop them? That’s the free market. I don’t think you can keep it out of something called the “metaverse”. You seem to think that it should be kept out in the name of…some scientific utopian? Or?
Would there be a line between talent-spotters just cruising around SL and observing, the way anybody observers and…savage marketing gurus culling through loads of info they’ve harvested out of avs by doing things like attracting them to third-party sites and harvesting their IPs and av keys, watching their inworld purchasing habits, luring them into economic networks through coercion and biased information, etc. (For example, in the fashion business, there appears to be a cut-throat system where you pay-to-play and be shown in top stores by top designers you hope will apprentice you, etc.)
Is that what you mean? Yeah, I’d be for reporting on and exposing that and mounting both civic pressure and alternative movements against it, but I’m not sure what I’d want the Lindens to do, then other then to stay out of the way. Are you suggesting some heavy government regulatory commission?
For one, I would probably want them to stop throwing the FIC the business, keeping the short list and handing it each time to the media or “cool hunters” — which they so obviously do because we keep seeing they same names. This is one of the reasons I got banned, because I insisted on exposing this grabbing of inworld large companies of the various streams of media, Linden attention, newbies, real estate, etc. The Lindens endorse, and it creates a vicious cycle.
Well, should the Lindens *not* endorse? I guess it just seems unbefitting behaviour for people who claim to be making not an ordinary company or a glorified high-school chat room, but a metaverse, a complex world. Then you want the federal government to be more neutral.
Hmm…I wonder if this will come down to a debate of whether you want equal opportunity or affirmative action.
Kiss
Jul 14th, 2005
I don’t play SL, and don’t read the SL forums, so help me out with understanding this story. My understanding from this article is that the Lindens have entered into some sort of an agreement with a UK based marketing research firm allowing them to come into the game and hunt for “cool stuff”. That seems pretty clear. In exchange for access the Lindens might be receiving money, or services in the form of teaching classes, or royalties on ideas that generate the marketing firm money, or perhaps nothing at all. I’m not clear on what Linden Labs receives from the deal.
Has the marketing firm been granted an absolute right to utilize anything they deem “cool”, or would they have to enter into negotiations with either the creator of the content or the Lindens in order to commercialize it? I guess what I am driving at is what (if anything) does the creator of the idea receive if the marketing firm finds something they deem “cool” and want to commercialize?
I assume your user agreement has the standard “Linden Labs owns all the content of the game” clause? If that is the case the content creator could have the satisfying experience of watching somebody(s) else reap financial reward from his/her creations. I certainly hope I’m wrong about this.
Kiss
Tony Walsh
Jul 14th, 2005
Kiss, the Second Life terms of service allow content creators to retain ownership of their creations, although this content is essentially “shared” with Linden Lab, who is entitled to use it as well. I’m not sure if the language of the license allows Linden Lab to hand that content over to third parties (I’m too lazy to look it up). But since the creators own the copyright, there’d definitely be some issues if the creations of residents were “stolen” by an outside company. I doubt such a thing would happen, as it would be a terrible PR move.
The traditional role of a trendspotter is to identify what the cool kids are doing, and advise companies on how to emulate and exploit these trends.
Prokofy Neva
Jul 14th, 2005
We don’t know the specifics of what LL gets out of the deal, Kiss. I think probably just the right to crow about how fab they are at glittery game conferences? Um, I’m not seeing more “show me the money” than that right now LOL.
But you’ve raised some interesting issues. If you google the literature on the subject, including on this website, LL went to a lot of trouble in fact to give the creators their own copyright and the idea is they can sell the content without LL getting anything out of it…though of course LL is the gatekeeper in charging subscriptions and land tier fees in controlling the cyberspace where these deals go down…and as we know they can kick someone for “any reason..or no reason” if they take a fit — and they do sometimes.
It’s not an impartial or fair or accountable democracy, nor any kind of genuine market economy (such things don’t exist in the real world either, but at least people have expectations about them). It’s some kind of…thingie…that some days thinks it is a game and other days a vaunted Metaverse.
Is LL going to start resenting it if the cool hunters make huge deals with content-creators that leave them out? Are they going to get more porky and start interfering and regulating and taxing, increasing fees for texture uploads, that kind of thing? It will be interesting to see how they behave. Already, they have a short list of who they fete. If you want to stay on the feted list, believe me, you don’t do something like what I do, which was to neg Pathfinder for having Ulrika TWICE in his “top picks” list this week (*shudder*). See, the fact that he can put her in, blindly, bespeaks the culture of entitlement and feting that they already live in. If you point it out to them (as I did) they are likely to blink in the sudden sunlight and say “Oh, I didn’t realize. I didn’t so that on purpose,” etc.
Nobody can stop them from having their favourites and having their short lists. But the general public and the critical dissenters can at least try to curb the worst excesses by pointing out that oh, socialist theme parks shouldn’t get in the list twice…even if ostensibly they were just on the list because “Old Europe” looks “interesting to newbies”. (They used to say that about the Stalin Gothics on Smolenskaya, and still do lol).
More and more I guess I’m coming to the conclusion that the thing to do with these people is ignore them. Fighting them only either draws out their legions of fanboyz and gets you banned from the forums, fighting them only gets their backs up and they either shut you off or spout inanities at you. Ignoring them and trying to walk around them might be a better idea. I started out doing that instinctively and ignored the Lindens for months and months while I did my projects. Then I had to deal with them when they all tried to get me to “tone down” my forum critiques and when I, too, tried to get them to enforce their TOS on privacy, and enforce their TOS on things like bounce scripts, which are weapons. So I tried to engage them for the last 6 weeks or so, but honestly, I think it’s probably a fool’s errand. I’m just new and naive.
What you have to hope, is that if you ignore Lindens, or perhaps occasionally critique their biases — i.e. if you don’t get in the crouch suck-up mode like half the fanboyz do — that, like any government, they’d ignore, you, too, and not get in your hair. If you can just pay your tier, and get in and out with as little jostling as possible, maybe that’s how to do it? I mean, hope that Lindens and their FIC buds will not AR you in a PG for swearing, that sort of thing.
Wen Nomad
Jul 14th, 2005
Prok, the problem with this is that academic research on the SL grid has been denied in previous cases by LL, and now they are allowing comercial research.
Urizenus
Jul 14th, 2005
What Wen said. The issue it the double standard here. On the one hand, the Lindens and the Forum Ho’s were all over Durkheim Edelbrock for his undergraduate ethnology project, taking place under the supervision of his professor. In fact, I believe that approval of his research project went all the way to Philip (whose training in human subjects research is extensive I’m sure). On the other hand now they turn around and applaud the arrival of these cool hunters.
Now what is a cool hunter but an anthropologist/sociologist in the employ of a marketing firm? Maybe they have masters degrees or maybe they have basically the undergraduate training that Durkheim is getting, but you can bank on the fact that they have no ethical oversight whatsoever. So what I hear people saying is this: we don’t want people studying us if it is professionally supervised and is going to help someone get an A on a term paper, but if they are going to make lots and lots of money from studying us and they have no ethical supervision, then it is great!
I mean what are people thinking?
Pendari
Jul 14th, 2005
Uri, could there be other reasons that Edelbrock’s project wasn’t accepted? I ask because I know other classes and research projects *have* been accepted and go on in SL.
Four I know of for certain can be referenced here:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=41772
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=39102
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=25847
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=15480
What could the differences have been? I don’t know so I’m asking seriously.
Urizenus
Jul 14th, 2005
I thought his project eventually was accepted, although I could be wrong about that. I think it became an issue because of all the carping about earlier projects. The concern here is the Lindens’ insistence that they have to approve the research project. That just isn’t acceptable (nor is their insistence that journalists must talk to LL marketing before they interview someone).
Are the Lindens also going to review the research methods employed by the cool hunters? I can’t imagine that any marketing firm would submit itself to such a review, since it would in effect amount to giving away trade secrets.
Pendari
Jul 14th, 2005
I see what you are questioning here Uri. And no, I agree that I doubt they would be asking to review the research methods of the companies (one reason being what you state about trade secrets). Why then would they do it to educational “investors” “prospects” etc.? Could it be the way the end usage of the research would be handled?
I honestly don’t know. I can only guess as to why it would be different for the two types, if it even *really* is. There could be things we still don’t know yet. I am fine with either coming into LL, but I do think it would be interesting (and nice) to hear from LL a little more on the “Who, Why, Who Not, Why not, and How much” on these issues.
nerferder
Jul 16th, 2005
Well, I know one thing; portraying the Lindens are the Three Stooges is not the right way to go, kids.
Are any of the “journalists” here capable of unbiased, objective reporting? Apparently not. I have never been faced with a more rag tag group of crybabies in my life – and that spans well over 4 decades, much of which was spent with Knight-Ridder, Cox, and The Bureau of Engraving.
Your self-loathing is starting to well up around my shoes.
You insure that you will never be anything more than a garbage rag, and the more you attack Linden Labs, the sooner you will arrive at the end of your road.
P.S., when will you losers step up to the plate and start saying this shit on the SL forums? My guess? Never. No backbone. What a lame ass way to TRY and duck out from LL’s scrutiny.
As loony as they are, at least Coco and Prok have a backbone, and have the balls to say it on the REAL forums, unlike you pantywaists.
You “journalists” make me wanna puke.