Listen to the old Paoer of the Metaverse talk about 19 years of industry lessons
Original title: "Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse"
Original author: Charlie Warzel
Original source: The Atlantic Newsletter
Original compilation: Kxp, Rhythm BlockBeats
In 2003, Wagner James Au was a young freelance writer in the Bay Area Contributor, covering massively multiplayer games such as The Sims Online for Salon and Wired. During that time he was tasked with reviewing a new virtual world game called Second Life by a company called Linden Labs. So he started to learn about this nascent digital world, and soon after, he met the developers, who made him an interesting offer to work on the game as a journalist. AU covers everything Second Life, including weirdness, harassment and cybercrime. Eventually, Au wrote the definitive book on the game, The Birth of Second Life: Notes from a New World. Today, he still reports extensively on the development of Second Life on his blog New World Notes, the longest-running metadata news site. His most recent article was about Russian Second Life players who ran digital businesses in the game and are now trying to evade sanctions by fleeing the country.
In short, Au is one of the few people who has a real perspective and experience with the metaverse community. Ever since Facebook changed its name to Meta, the concept of the Metaverse has been eaten by a sudden hype cycle. Brands flooded into this space one after another, and people began to publish various news about the metaverse, and many people dismissed the metaverse as "useless". But as Au's experience shows, millions of people have been dutifully working and creating in the digital world for decades.
Au is a keen observer of the field and, to some extent, an advocate for the digital world. But at the same time, he is also a reporter and critic. He's hopeful about the future of the Metaverse community, but also digs into the excesses that could set everything on fire. He also has his own unique insights into Meta's entry into the metaverse.
Charlie Warzel: The popularity of the metaverse has not diminished for a while, and Facebook has also been Committed to building the metaverse. You’ve been documenting the evolution of the Metaverse community over the decades, can you tell us how big Second Life is today?
Wagner James Au: After 20 years of development, Second Life currently has many active users, about 600,000 monthly active users and approximately 200,000 daily active users. The reason why I have always been interested in this game and I am willing to spend energy to write related articles is because I see that there are many things worth digging in it, and users have always been very interested in these contents.
Warzel: When people talk about the virtual Internet, there are often all kinds of wild guesses. As a journalist, what have you learned from visiting Second Life?
Au: Two major things happened. First of all, if you give a community of users powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be more interesting than what a large company can create, as you can see from Second Life.
Secondly, we have somehow reconstructed all the grand challenges and complex social structures of real life in the digital social space. For example, the issue of race is one of them. In the metaverse, if you could set your avatar arbitrarily, what race would you choose? Will there be any restrictions, and will there be issues of discrimination and harassment? In Second Life, these issues have led to long-running controversies, and Meta will have to address them. No matter what avatar people choose, racism is not going away. People often say that the virtual world is more free than the real world, but the reality is that the virtual world will become more chaotic because there are no constraints, and this is also the challenge facing the Metaverse.
Warzel:I often hear people say that users can sometimes create more interesting things than companies, and I feel that this is The same goes for a lot of social media. Twitter is probably the best example, users create a lot of new uses, and then the platform has to code them into the program. Did you see anything like that in Second Life?
Au: One of my favorite examples is that of a mathematician who built a house beyond three dimensions - a house shaped like a four-dimensional hypercube. Once you walk through this house, it keeps regenerating in some way. This idea is really mind-blowing, and no game company will come up with such a way. The first person I met in Second Life was a woman who built a mansion by the sea. In speaking with her, I learned that she is homeless in real life and built this Second Life home in an abandoned apartment in Vancouver. With a background in computing and cobbled together an internet connection, Second Life is her escape from real life. So, people who come to Second Life come from all different backgrounds, and if you give them the tools to build, they can create amazing things for you.
Warzel: The reason I ask this question is because I think a lot of people who don't know about Second Life are right It has a big misunderstanding. But I also know from time to time that these gamers are real people, not a bunch of closed-off, escapist people.
Au: People may be prejudiced against Second Life partly because of its name, and I think Linden Labs also Knowing that you can be blamed accordingly for helping people avoid reality. But you also know that no one can say anything bad about things on the Internet. Some users on Second Life build things they've seen on TV, like the Kardashians' big house—people tend to recreate things they're familiar with but out of reach. Of course, this is only some people, and some, such as the mathematician mentioned earlier, will use Second Life to do physics experiments. As for the homeless woman, she has now made it her career to build things in virtual worlds.
Also overlooked is that in the early days, Second Life could be integrated with a real economy, so people could earn money by producing content for the game. Philip Rosenadale, one of Second Life's creators, noted that 1,600 Second Life users make $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. What I've learned is that some people have even made millions of dollars. Not only Second Life, but also other games like Roblox and Fortnite.
Warzel:It's no surprise that Second Life has such a vibrant game economy, it's truly amazing Surprisingly it stays fresh all the time. Why do people stay on the platform, is it because they put time and energy into it, or is there something else that attracts them?
Au: Time investment is very important to them, many Second Life users have been playing for 10 years , 15 years, even close to 20 years. They've spent thousands of dollars on virtual content and made friends in games. But the specific user behavior still varies from person to person. Some monthly users will be less active. They just log in to the community occasionally, or visit a favorite place to check the latest changes. Many people are now using VRChat, an online virtual reality platform. So when I say 600,000 monthly active users, it doesn't mean that all of them are active on the platform the entire time. They might log in for an hour on Second Life and use VRChat for a while, or organize a party with friends on Discord. Simply put, they migrate back and forth between different platforms.
Warzel: Sounds interesting. My idea is that Discord could become something like US TV Guide, where each platform is a different channel that people can switch back and forth based on what's on.
Au: I think this is what Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the metaverse builders should be working towards. Compared with the platform itself, the community is the key. Generally, there are very few communities that can use a fixed platform all the time. Once they feel that they have not been treated fairly, they will leave.
Warzel: Can you tell me about the unfair treatment?
Au: Take Meta's Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform for example, the creation tools and monetization The tools are very limited, and a community has barely been built. From what I've read so far, Meta isn't working with any community teams yet. Linden Lab instills in Second Life a culture of creativity and free expression, and respects the anonymity of its users. Linden Labs understands that some rules cannot be enforced and need to hear from community members. Horizon has caused hundreds of thousands of people to leave after experiencing it because they did not pay attention to the community.
Warzel: How does this community nurturing work in practice, with dedicated staff welcoming people in Second Life?
Au: There are indeed welcome people, sometimes volunteers who do it. Second Life also had large-scale social and community projects in its early days. Philip Rosedale had the initial idea for Second Life when he was at Burning Man, and one of the first events they had in the game in 2003 was a Burning Man event to help keep the community on track. The game puts a lot of emphasis on chance and free user participation, and to do this requires not only a corresponding community environment, but also a lot of management and direction work. Ultimately the game appealed to a diverse range of gamers, including mathematicians, hippies, and people from all walks of life.
Warzel: In a sense, Facebook or Meta try to foster healthy communities. Companies that care too much about growth ignore community building. Also, I'm shocked that they haven't learned any lessons from past iterations of the platform.
Au: It's also surprising that some of Meta's team are Second Life employees, such as Former CTO of Linden Labs, and former Linden Labs employee Jim Purbrick. Just before Meta launched Horizon, he warned the Meta team that it needed guidance on harassment on the platform, and the company did not follow his advice. Of course, we've also seen some well-documented examples of a woman being sexually assaulted on their platform (in November 2021, a tester reported that she was being harassed in Horizon Worlds]) . Building the Metaverse platform is not an easy task, and many problems need to be solved, but it seems that Meta Corporation only cares about throwing money into it and ignores the importance of strategy.
Warzel: Thanks to Facebook, we are in a metaverse hype cycle right now. What do you think about this? How do you feel when you see people who are thinking about the future before they learn to reflect on the past?
Au: Generally speaking, the situation is optimistic, because I have seen the development of the metaverse The prospect, and the wonderful transformation it brings. Still, this wave of hype is quite similar to the one in 2008, and everything seems to repeat itself—same stories, same perceptions, same mistakes. During that hype in 2008, the technology wasn't ready for the mass market. Today, though, with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms, the metaverse has entered the public eye. At present, there are already more than 500 million active users on the metaverse platform in a broad sense. I'm also very excited that everything is on the right track.
Warzel: In your opinion, what mistakes are being repeated?
Au: First of all it must be the issue of harassment, but then there are other issues. Between 2006 and 2008, a number of companies set up shop in the Metaverse, including Intel, IBM, American Apparel, Nissan, and NBC, all of which created their own space in Second Life. But in 2008, Second Life's user base wasn't big enough to support these stores, and most brands thought their stores in the virtual world had the same reach as their offline counterparts (which they didn't). So they spent tens of millions of dollars building stores that were visited by only a dozen people.
People at the time lost faith in the metaverse after witnessing something like this, and I'm really worried that this will happen again. But the problem is not with the users, but with these companies not taking good care of their Metaverse community and truly taking into account the feelings of community members.
Warzel: Just now you mentioned that humans will reshape old social structures and problems in the digital world. What saddens me is that a lot of metaverse companies just want to make money and make a profit, but they can create more infinite possibilities and realize any vision, and the result is that Meta and other companies say that we are going to use the metaverse to develop video Meeting, to collect high mortgage loans by selling virtual land. How do you feel about this situation?
Au: I feel that these actions are doomed to failure, and the losses will be high. Once people only focus on how to make money quickly, they will miss many opportunities. I love watching the younger generations do what Gen Z did in the metaverse like the early Second Life users did, but on a much larger scale. What people should realize is that young metaverse users are not trying to recreate a second space, as the virtual space is already real enough for them. When you watch people play Fortnite on Twitch, they're already bragging about each other, talking about issues in geopolitics or pop culture. The virtual world is just a way to participate, and it is still closely integrated with real life. In the future, these generations of Metaverse users will grow from these experiences and innovate on top of traditional social media.
Warzel: I like your statement that the virtual world experience is closely integrated with real life. I think this also fits with the point you made earlier, that the virtual world is not an anti-social or escapist world, it is just a derived part of the real world. In your opinion, what kind of experiences do people want from the Metaverse?
Au: They just want to create, socialize or have fun in it, some people want to create the New social experiences that cannot be obtained in the world. As long as you are willing to spend enough time in the virtual world, you can always form some interesting social relationships in it. Mark Zuckerberg thinks that people will only form relationships with friends on virtual platforms, but I actually think that we now have the opportunity to build global connections, communicate and interact with anyone.
Warzel:When I hear stories like this, I think about my biggest fear of this technology , that is, it will become lifeless, soulless, and financialized by platform companies trying to build over-commercialization. I know Web3 and the metaverse are not the same concept, but what disturbs me about Web3 is how it tokenizes everything it touches and turns it into some sort of financial instrument. Are you also worried that this will play out in the metaverse realm?
Au: The metaverse hype you mentioned about NFTs and Crypto-based currencies really surprised me. In general, very few people are collecting NFTs, and many more people own content in Second Life than own NFTs. And metaverse platforms like Decentraland that are linked to NFTs have a very small user base, most of which are people who invested in it. If you buy land in Decentraland, you want people to live in it.
In my opinion, those Web3 platforms that want to enter the metaverse have put the cart before the horse. If you launch a speculative product, such as releasing a new coin, so that people can enter the digital world, people may participate, but they may not always stay engaged. From a basic philosophical perspective, a thing has value only if a group decides it has value. However, these Crypto metaverse platforms do not put the community first, including Meta, they only want to collect user data for marketing, but do not consider the interests and feelings of the community.
Warzel: What do you think the chances of winning are now? If the company screwed up their metaverse project, wouldn't that set the whole development process back or completely bog down?
Au: Now the most important thing is Meta, many observers think that since they invented the Metaverse, then they All current achievements are part of the Metaverse. Of course, they're just newcomers to an old system, and Meta has the potential to succeed if they act, but they're not doing it yet.
However, I also don't think society has fully realized the far-reaching impact that most children play Roblox these days, and they are creating value for game companies and trying to make money . Many of Roblox's monetization models are questionable, and may even involve child labor. But there may not be many people in Congress who know that this is an issue they might need to pay attention to.
What I want to say is that the development of the metaverse has encountered many real problems. The problem of space is already real and huge. There have long been concerns that the Metaverse is a threat to national security. In the early 2000s, I interviewed a terrorism expert who told me that jihadist groups at the time had been planning and attempting terrorist attacks in Second Life. The Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had investigators in Second Life trying to unravel the conspiracy. I think after Ukraine there will be more focus on the role of platforms in that conflict. People have started to worry that there will be anonymous people using the system in Second Life to transfer currency, so I worry that the Metaverse will be destroyed in the hands of big companies like Meta who don't understand it, and I'm also worried that big institutions don't realize the seriousness of the problem now.
Warzel: You are right about that, and the reports about P2E games these days also reveal some problems. One of the very dystopian ideas is that we are about to enter the era of "garbage jobs", where people work on these platforms, doing repetitive jobs as a whole, and ultimately earning less and less money. Are you worried that the digital economy will eventually disappear as a result? Ethical issues aside, do you think that if these platforms are allowed to grow without effective regulation, people will end up losing themselves and disconnecting from the real world?
Au: To be honest, it was a real challenge for us because we needed to use various equipment. In a way, smartphones and social networks may be more problematic than Metaverse platforms. The metaverse platform has infinite possibilities, but as you said, it does have many problems, so when we explore and build these platforms, we must pay attention to the balance between platform functions and community participation in real life. In fact, Facebook and Twitter are still better at running social media than building the metaverse.
Warzel: Why do you say that?
Au: There is still a difference between social media and the virtual world, because in the virtual world, you can get a A sense of immersion, a real sense of interacting with real people. The virtual world can truly realize user participation, rather than the interactive participation of the illusion of social media. While this may sound utopian, in virtual worlds people start out with fair participation, a quality not found in many social media outlets. I think that for many people, the virtual world is the best way for users to participate. On the one hand, you can experience real interpersonal communication, and on the other hand, you can also maintain enough social distance to show and express yourself in your own way. . So, some people feel they can be more themselves in the virtual world than in the real world.
Warzel: I never thought about it this way, this angle is really interesting. In my opinion, social media increases the distance between people and allows people to do things that real life would never try. However, this also lowers the barriers to entry on the network, and some users can even send some unbearable text content without thinking. In the virtual world, this situation may be improved to a certain extent, because people will participate in the personal image, everyone can see you, so people will have more consideration when taking actions. Of course, without a series of restrictions such as avatars, some people may feel more free, which is also worth thinking about.
Au: In the future, the competition among major platforms will become more and more fierce, because they are very important to digital life There are different visions, and I hope that those platforms that really consider the user experience will win in the end.
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