by: Ilya VedrashkoInspired by KZeros map of brand presence in Second Life, I thought about compiling a more usable list with SL URLs and everything, but then I found a fairly complete one over at SL Business Communicators wiki. Instead,…

by: Ilya VedrashkoInspired by KZeros map of brand presence in Second Life, I thought about compiling a more usable list with SL URLs and everything, but then I found a fairly complete one over at SL Business Communicators wiki. Instead,…

The flying Leo Burnett pencil was built by My Millionsofus, (who also crafted the Sea Monkey and Sharkey,) and scripted by Candide LeMay.

The TV in one of the the small birdhouses was the brilliance of Versu and Lucky Millionsofus, during a chill moment of the build, who realized that’s exactly what was needed, static and all.

And credit for the gardens and landscaping is due to My Milliosnofus and Botany Black…including the secret hot springs, and the reef….

Enjoy!

(from the producer, Kathleen Millionsofus)

It’s really a question of genres and tastes. There’s the Sistine Chapel. And then there’s my bungalow. I don’t feel I’m dissing my bungalow builder if I say the Sistene Chapel is awesome, and the guy who built it has been snapped up by the Medicis — when he has.

Indeed, the best builders *are* snapped up. Forseti Svarog, Barnesworth Anubis, DNA Prototype and all the other builders in the metaversal companies — these *are* the best builders. They have technical brilliance at this point that few others can match. Even people you might associate in the old days with quality homes for avatars like Sam Portocarrero does custom builds for clients now — maybe not Fortune 500, but he’s not somebody just making Victorian prefabs anymore, he’s evolved far beyond that.

Right now, my latest house builder of choice is Ace Albion who does great work — not a metaversal developer but I could care less. The houses are excellent, low prim, easy to operate, tint and lock on command and can be turned over to others to tint and lock on command. So it’s an excellent product. As I already noted, I have your houses up everywhere and they rent everywhere. There’s a fellow named Galls Cain, he has made a few dynamite little 512 prefabs, I have his house everywhere. As I try to think of the great builders out there, I can’t think of anyone who is great who is also not a metaverse developer. Perhaps you could think of Desmond Shang’s homes — yet he, too, has evolved into having an entire continent of developed infrastructure and atmosphere — it’s not just your mansion prefabs in one store anymore. There are literally thousands of house makers in Second Life. I admire many of them. I have to sort through a lot of them with a really brutal criteria that I can’t affect: do they rent or not? There’s now accounting for taste. Some things that look good never rent, and visa versa. But this is a little world that is worlds apart from these mega builds of the meta verse.

I’d like to think that there’s this rich network of villages with amateur to near-professional builders who sustain a rich fabric of inworld existence with a bustling economy. I really would. Maybe it does — for now. But I think more and more, we will see that world erode, and in its place, will come companies prepared to pay for lots of sims, *staff*, and builders — and RL wages. They will simply figure out what you or I figured out: that you need to wait on customers. Once they figure out you need to wait on customers and not just build showcases, away they’ll go. They will be shaping a lot of the online experience because they will have the funds, the people, the resources to sustain what could very well likely get more expensive, not less.

When island tiers jump to $295 US, yet another generation of amateurs on this platform will be shaken loose, and only a few will stick. People currently paying $25 US for their island 4096s cannot be persuaded to suddenly pay $50 unless the builds, the services, the atmospheres get a whole lot better.

Ordinal has said it very well. Sure, we all know people who keep logging in and doing very good work, but not for MTV or Sony or Warner Brothers. They still count! They count even MORE for us. Indeed, Ordinal is one of those creators herself. But…the reality is, this will erode. It will erode because the worlds will become more expensive, harder to maintain, and LL will open source the whole thing. Only those that can afford to host their own servers AND noodle around with content-making on them will have that luxury to go on being amateurs. The rest of us will be shaken loose.

I continue to insist: far from being something that enables the poor of the earth and democratizes an evil capitalist game company, as all these opensourceniks claim, opensource merely creates an archipelago of egos, and silos, and on each separate island, will be someone prepared not only to pay probably twice as much as he is paying now in tier to run a sim, but who will have to become more aggressive in merchandising than he already is in SL to succeed. An unpleasant prospect.

All those forums FIC like the Midnights will only gloat, and imagine that they have prevailed in their “create or die” ethic (they’ll be among those shaken, too).

The new media explosion is supposed to make artists out of all of us — but guess what, what I’m seeing is just the opposite. This is the dirty little secret of the new media. New media favours the FIC — the FIC levels up. Some brands of worlds even deliberately favour a “developers elite” perspective; others have it unstated but present. The media owners who govern our future won’t mind if our “user content” or “co-creation” or “participatory media” is a screenshot, a legal clip of a song, a t-shirt. But they won’t sustain the environment for us to make entire houses and infrastructures because then it would crap up the world’s look. Only the Lindens may be left doing that — but you wonder for how long.

To me, all these developments stare us so baldly in the face. Just like the little independent bookstores that had all the wierd old used books in them and funkier new books were forced to close, even in New York City, by the advent of Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon.com, so all the little independent creators of SL will be winnowed out, forced out of business by competition from professionals or bigger companies, and sucked into working for those companies.

You weren’t supposed to have to compete with Coldwell Banker, Cocoanut, because they weren’t supposed to want to bother to make virtual houses. You thought making virtual houses would only be something individuals would bother with. Perhaps you underestimated the power of greed.

I do hope the Coldwell Banker people wake up to all the issues we’re laying out here. Conservative companies like they seem to be aren’t likely to admit they made any kind of mistake in their choice of partners.

coco

1. There are a many good builders and designers in SL, and my personal favorites haven’t been snapped up by anyone. Some of those are better than some that have been hired by corporations.

And I’m not talking about just buildings. Consider clothes. That’s a HUGE world there that doesn’t even have much call for use in these outside businesses. And I most certainly would not say that all the good clothing designers, skin creators, animation people, you name it – have all been snapped up. (One might say “bought off,” but . . . I won’t, lol.)

You happen to know some very good builders – no surprise many of those have been recruited by corporations. But it’s unfair to suggest that all the “best” builders and designers are now working for corporations or development companies. I know too many I would call among “the best” who are not.

2. Secondly, this suggests the corporations and the development companies actually KNOW everyone who is supposedly “the best of everything” in the first place, when actually a lot of it is simply who they know already, who they have heard of, etc. – and of those, selecting who is best, who has a good track record, etc., (not to mention will do the work).

In other words, the whole thing is riddled with networking – and though it is true that they get many of our best builders, scripters, and other people, it’s absurd to act as if they get them all.

I object to creating a defining dividing line between the “best” creators – defined as those who now work for corporations and developing companies; and the not-so-good, second-rate ones (defined as anyone who doesn’t). There are too many good people who don’t work for the companies.

3. I also think you are a little dazzled by the scope of it all. You are like Lewis Nerd. You THINK big. You love to do big projects, whole neighborhoods, themed neighborhoods, all that.

Take Lewis Nerd and me. He is on the developer’s directory, and he LOVES doing the big things. I don’t. I have almost zero desire to design a whole sim. I could do it, and I would do it, given the right circumstances, but it just isn’t normally my bag.

You aren’t like me, or like others who prefer more detail on a smaller scale, who prefer smaller, individual projects, and maybe sweat and slave over each clothing item they design, because that is what they love to do. (In fact, you don’t KNOW where this will take them. Working for a corporation is not necessarily the holy grail, or the pinnacle, of what can be achieved through SL.)

You know some builders who like to do large builds – well, no surprise many of those have are working for the companies. I think where we disagree is that those with this larger scope are automatically “better” than those with different interests and visions.

That would be kind of like comparing a commission of city planners to a guy who specializes in gazebos, and deciding that the city planners are automatically more talented than the gazebo builder.

Or – deciding if you are a gazebo builder and you DON’T work for the city planners (or large corporations), then you obviously aren’t the best.

4. Remember, too, that a lot of people who are very good at what they create don’t WANT to work for corporations. They want to work for themselves. Perhaps they aren’t team players.

I think you are operating from a premise that of course everyone wants to do this sort of work; therefore the corporations automatically get “the best” of everyone. That’s a faulty premise.

There are lots of people who prefer smaller jobs (not to mention more self-selected jobs). To deem them automatically not as good as those who like working on bigger projects, with other people, is ridiculous.

5. The reason we HAVE these development companies in the first place is they are much more efficient in doing whole sims and large projects, especially for outsiders.

They can employ people (people they know, or have heard of) to take care of all the jobs they want done.

They do employ the people they know, or know of, but unlike their choice of Foolish, those people chosen aren’t always the best in SL (and sometimes very far from it).

Consequently, very few of these development companies consist of one person who does it all; who has all the skills from building everything, to scripting everything, to thinking up all the cute aspects of the campaign, to making the t-shirt or dancing shoes, to marketing it all. It’s a group effort.

They do get pretty much of their pick of people to work with (usually through networking), and they do generally get good people. But that doesn’t mean they have gotten “all the best people,” or that some of the individuals working alone, for peanuts/Lindens, just aren’t as talented.

That’s like saying that the person who designs and manufactures a small line of handbags is by definition not as talented as the people who create them for the Macy’s brand line of handbags. Or that the free-lance artist or writer can’t be as possibly good as someone on staff somewhere.

6. “Amateur” and “professional” status don’t depend on whether corporations have recruited you and whether or not you have accepted their offer, any more than some concept of “the best” does.

If you want a definition, try mine: Amateur is when you don’t make enough profit to report it to the IRS , and they consider it a hobby, rather than a profession.

Professional is when you make money at it, not who you work for. Not everyone works for corporations; and whether or not you work for someone else is hardly the definition of whether or not you are professional.

In sum, the corporations get some of the best, yes. But they don’t get all of them.

The gulf that has opened up is there, yes. But it is not a gulf of the good people all being taken by corporations, and the less talented being left behind.

It is only a gulf of those who are working for corporations and making more money at what they do (in most cases), and those who aren’t, and who don’t make that much money (in most cases).

So it’s true to say they have gotten “many” of the best builders and designers. It’s not true to imply they’ve taken all of them.

coco

P.S. The Coldwell Banker sims and houses are very definitely not the best of what is available in SL.

Meh, it was my choice, but it wasn’t you who pissed me off about Motorati itself. I don’t plan on making any connection work with them anymore. Besides, something gotta be said from inside where you haven’t been to.

It isn’t universal or dominant though. I know so many people – the vast majority of people on my friends list – who continue to run SL companies, do SL products, accept payment in L$, produce SL products which are paid for and used entirely in-world. That economy is still going. The ones who rely on outside cash are still the unusual ones.

There’s a good reason for this: if you enter a virtual world and get interested enough in it to gain the skills to manipulate it, as do builders, scripters and so on, you have to have some interest in the world itself, or you’d just leave because you were bored. There are very few pure augmentationalists who actually have SL skills.

A huge gulf has opened up between those who just design and build prefab houses for end users, and those who can build out islands and do everything needed on them, from designing sim-wide builds in all their features from teleforming to landing to traversing the sim, to scripting (like Frost scripted various features of the tournament on the Hammer Cooper build and also at one point made a train for a now-defunct Wild West build I had hoped to write about before my computer crashed and took my folder of pics — talk about lost worlds! it’s gone!).

Yes, it hurts to think that. I know it hurts for me to think that my amateur status is really burned in too, now with the advent of Coldwell Banker supposedly “professionalizing” the rentals industry with all kinds of scripted thingies and supposedly better prefabs.

But you know what? We’ll show ‘em. We still count. Amateurs are still needed. We are professional amateurs at this point lol. We have customers and knowledge of the world. I think we can still prevail in our niches. Indeed, if the world chases off all the people like us, it will kill the concept a lot of people still have that it’s “Your World/Your Imagination”.

I’m so glad I wrote something that Nacon disagreed with and that we got news out of it. He’s so contrarian and trolly — I should use reverse psychology like this more often.

No, Onder, this isn’t the best thing I’ve ever written, don’t be silly. It’s just something you happened to like. I’ve written a lot better stuff. You know, I write as I please.