The Alphaville Herald

I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

by prokofy on 23/10/06 at 3:25 pm

By Prokofy Neva, Community Affairs Desk

Further publicity write-ups of the General Motors/Pontiac invasion of Second Life prompt this veteran Herald reporter devoted to the old press corps motto “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” to ask some hard questions. So.. they’ll give you free land on the 6 sims to be called Motorati, if you sign up for this program — quantity unknown, but we figure it has to be at least 512 m2, like the free stake you get signing up with the Linden’s premium account. Then those lucky content-creators indentured servants selected in the contest will have to produce their design in SL. Will they own the IP to their creations? Will they be able to sell all or part of them elsewhere on the grid? Will they be able to rez and delete them at will, or will they have to turn them over for $0 to a Pontiac-sponsored avatar named “Joe Motorati”?

The press blurb says GM plans to open up a “microsite” at www.motoratilife.com that will serve as a gateway to the “car culture” world Pontiac hopes to generate — and the Pontiac Garage Music Stage in New York City’s Times Square will be replicated and “act as a venue for live music performances by real artists in the form of their Second Life avatars” (and who will pay them?) Marketing Director Mark-Hans Richer says, “we want to empower the car community in Second Life and develop with them in a unique and meaningful manner. We aren’t completely creating the experience – the Second Life users are. We’re just providing the inspiration” — of course with a lot of prepping and kitting out of the space with the brand logo and multi-media event in November which, as the release hints, will “leverage several of Pontiac’s current media assets and partnerships.”

Seems like GM is copying verbatim the Linden Lab model of putting out free accounts with subsidized or even free land, and telling people to go wild with “Your World, Your Imagination” — though GM will likely go further than the laissez-faire Lindens and filter at the contest level to get the right “fit”. Will content producers stay happy merely with car talk and free land, or will they want a piece of the lucrative sales action?

Car culture in SL is a sketchy thing, with patches of enthusiasm and lukewarm and sporadic attempts to actually get vehicles to move in a world that hasn’t seen Havoc 2 let along later Havocs. The makers of vehicles and those who buy them as trophies to park ostentatiously outside their McMansions on their white pancaked private islands probably have more fun with them than hapless drivers, who complain about having to portage their cars over perilous sim seams that halt movement. Maybe when Philip talked about leveraging partnerships with Big Business to help development he meant getting Pontiac to fund the crowdsourcing to fix the sim-crossing problem?

In the United States, the federal government put unemployed Depression-era labourers to work building roads, then a National Parks System so that people would have some place to drive to — and post-war car manufacturing boomed, replacing military aircraft and weaponry. Fast-food establishments sprang up to meet the needs of cross-country drivers and eventually a new generation of teen-agers in towns and suburbs across the land got to free themselves from oppressive parental attention and go on dates to drive-in restaurants and movies. All that sex in the back seat led to the Baby Boom (ok, I’m summarizing here) and then the Baby Boomers created and used the Internet. And the rest is history; here we all are now.

My advice to car-makers in Motorati to increase traffic: tint those car windows and make those backseats comfy! And if the girls skating up to the window at the drive-in can’t deliver you RL milkshakes, have them sell poseballs maybe? And pro tip to indentured free labour: get at least virtual IP rights of some sort at least at the level the Lindens provide.

It will be fascinating to see how this all plays out. As Carlos, a poster at RL car-lovers’ blog Kicking Cars wonders, “what appeal will real world brands have in the virtual world, where anything is possible? You can already buy cars that can fly in the air and dive under water. So what is going to make people want to roll in a Pontiac Solstice?” I think I’ll stay with my Fairchang Morpheus.