The Alphaville Herald

Dynasty Building

by Pixeleen Mistral on 20/02/07 at 1:41 pm

SL name retirement policy evolving – Daniel Linden’s dynastic plight

by Fiend Ludwig, Metaverse Genealogist

In real life, millions of people might share the same surname. A quick review of online census data reveals that there are about 4 million Smiths on the planet, that 300,000 Norwegians are called Jensen – 6.6% of Norway’s population, and that 1.4 million people in Spain have the surname Garcia. Don’t forget China – estimates place the number people with the last name Li at almost 8% of the Han Chinese population, or 95 million people. Popular names spread and grow in prevalence. Unpopular names die out – when was the last time you met a Scabbemayster or a Launcelevedy down at the pub.

But Darwinian name evolution holds no sway in Second Life. The list of last names for us to choose for our avatars are generated by Linden Lab, and as with everything else these days, scaling will be a bitch as the hunger for names grows. “In 2003, I added, perhaps, 20 names per week. A good batch now runs closer to 200″ reports Daniel Linden, LL Director of Community Affairs, who has been doing the names since 2003. Assuming the growth in number of subscribers to SL continues unabated, Daniel and his colleagues are soon going to have to invent many hundreds or even thousands of unique names per week to keep up with new avatars. To tame the increasingly urgent scaling demands, LL is implementing a new name-retirement policy.

Daniel explains, “Initially, names were retired after 100 uses. That grew to 150, then 300, and now it is about 1,000. This is changing soon as well; we’ll retire well used names on a weekly basis rather than according to a per-name numerical standard.” This change would seem to address Tateru Nino’s observation in the punctuation-challenged Blingsider that the 1000 name limit is often exceeded when popular names are chosen very rapidly by new residents. One might conclude that the current ‘name assignment machine’ is actually a hands-on, manual task performed by Daniel. [or is Daniel actually an NPC? - Editrix] Imagine the scene Monday morning at the Lab: ‘Oops – 3000 people signed up using the surname Wind on the weekend, better retire that name post-haste!’ [is this before or after they look for Philip’s lost hash pipe? - Editrix]

Perhaps the new weekly retirement policy will be a more automated affair where some percentage of the most popular of names on the list are arbitrarily retired regardless of the number of avatars to which they are assigned. Unfortunately, because “the tools that manage last names are being reworked for scaling purposes,” no exact numbers or details were available from Daniel at press time.

To ease the burden, perhaps Linden Lab should offer residents the opportunity to build a family dynasty; the ability to pass their avatar’s last name on to friends or relatives who also subsequently become residents of SL. Much like being able to invite a friend to open a Google Gmail account from a pool of invitations, a prospective dynasty builder could pass along one of, say, 12 copies of their last name. Each of those dozen new Ludwigs (for instance) would also be able to bequeath 12 of their own, and voila, instant dynasty. This would require the ability to change your avatar’s last name – a service for which I am sure many would pay a small fee. Especially if the only name left on the list was Scabbemayster.