New York Times, Dream Houses, and SL
by Alphaville Herald on 10/08/07 at 8:41 am
by Espresso Saarinen
Shopping in SL is not quite like RL
Yesterday’s New York Times had a very positive article about Second Life, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/garden/09second.html that helps explain the appeal of the metaverse to an audience unfamiliar with the concept. Instead of sex and gambling, or the mega-corporate flopping while trying to duplicate RL marketing in SL, this piece was about realizing your dreams of suburban luxury and comfort. Yes, it was about real residents, albeit the upper middle class. I had to wonder if the unexpected had occurred and Linden Labs had suddenly realized who is paying the bills, and actually grasped the idea of ‘customer’.
The story told of houses, private sims, furniture and interior design stores, and the glories of upper class suburbia. On a whim, I decided to visit one of the stores. I cut the name of the store from the article and pasted it into in-world search, and miracle of miracles, in-world search actually worked! Fearing a reversion to normal SL behavior, I immediately teleported to the destination. Well, not immediately; it actually took two tries, but what the heck, it sure beats walking.
When I arrived in Ramos Designs, the place was plastered with large signs about asset server problems and warning customers to be very wary when buying. Only in SL would one see this kind of warning not to buy from a store. The owner should be credited for honesty. Sometime when you feel safe buying in SL, drop by Ramos Designs to show your appreciation for someone who cares about the customer.
All this was on a day when hundreds of sims were down because a single point of failure switch in a colocation facility fracked. My friend Elisha, also an old network operations dog, well, cat actually, and I were visualizing the rack monkeys trying to move the cabling from the old switch to the new one. Only in amateur hour would hundreds of servers rely on a single point of failure. Ah well.
But the times article was cheering, if lacking in lurid sex or the details of the latest SL dramas. I am sure we’ll all see more of this than we may like if SL is up tomorrow when we try to log on. And it is reassuring that all is well in suburbia, even here in SL. Do be careful while shopping.
FlipperPA Peregrine
Aug 10th, 2007
I liked the article – it was a nice break from the near-tabloid nonsense that is coming out these days. Sure, SL was overpraised by the press initially, but now it really is getting overslammed. This was a nice change of pace, and it was nice to see some new faces get attention in the press, such as Troy Vogel, who’s a great guy.
Anonymous
Aug 10th, 2007
… and then there’s Time Magazine itself…. which time is the right time?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1651500,00.html
Reg Baxter
Aug 10th, 2007
Seems like the Time Magazine article writer was a little biased and peeved that she “spent my first hour on Second Life wearing both sneakers and high heels because I couldn’t figure out how to discard one pair. And yes, I passed Computer Science 101.”
That SL is was not instantly intuitive and perfect probably made her see SL in a negative light. She states statistics etc. in such a way that it appears she probably looked up news and blog articles rather than spend any time in SL.
The NY times article seems to be by someone who actually spent time in SL and and actually talked to regular players not just griefers and whiners. Both articles are probably “factually” correct but the NY times one is much more informed. This is also shown in the lengths of the articles.
espresso saarinen
Aug 10th, 2007
the nyt is clearly the right one if you are into the last remnants of news reporting in the states as opposed to murdoch-like sensationalism. the contrast between the nyt article and the time mag article is just sooo qed. while the time mag article merely jumped on the negative bandwagon and probably did her research by reading the first three hits on google (she clearly has no real experience in SL), the nyt reporter very clearly spent serious time in-world, detected and expressed a lot of nuance, and wrote an article which seemed, at least to me, to be a much more balanced view of SL, and one mostly representative of SL as the average grown-up resident sees it.