Great post on Second Life by Eric Rice. His basic premise is that Second Life is disruptive to the gaming industry is a meaningful way.

Video game corps will get richer while you ‘don’t get’ Second Life

prime passages:

“Contrast this with the open-ended styling of Second Life, where there are car makers that can easily out-design and out-engineer cars that don’t even exist much better than the major automakers who have hired top design firms to bring their vehicles in world.”

“That’s why SL has been such a big deal to me– because it represents a disruption in The Way Things Work in a certain media space.”

“The people I’ve met in the 2-3 years I’ve been around SL are amazing and talented at levels I could only hope to be. They are able to make beautiful things in a not-so-beautiful environment. Some folks tackle that code and re-write their code everytime Linden Lab makes a change. Some folks do things in Photoshop or Maya or all these other apps I don’t have a chance at mastering (as an aside, the next version of SL has new technology that will make those with access to the 2000 USD version of Maya, be some of the most ominious forces in 3D world creation).”

“Who cares? Do what you WANT not what you’re told. Do what your told, only if it suits you.”

“We have choices in this world. We can be produced at, and told we have to consume. If that’s your thing, cool. But it’s not my thing.”

Philip Rosedale has always been obsessed with clouds and trees. Well, today Second Life took a step to make the virtual world even more realistic by acquiring a Boston-based company focused on rendering 3D environments. It’s their first M&A activity (i think).

The NBA, F-1 Racing and now Playboy (don’t worry the link goes to an article, not Playboy.com). One might guess that the Women of Second Life are about as real as the women featured in Playboy anyway so it’s already a perfect match.

Queue the hard(drive) jokes.

NBA announces a Second Life presence. Best part of the press release:

David Stern Avatar – The Commissioner joins Second Life. An exclusive avatar of NBA Commissioner of David Stern was developed by The Electric Sheep Company. Stern will use his avatar in Second Life for media events and to interact with fans in NBA Headquarters.

Wow, David Kushner (excellent tech writer incl a book on Doom), covers Second Life on RollingStone.com — hope it makes it to a print edition. Kushner calls Second Life the “hottest spot on the net,” a characterization sure to enrage the doubters. The article though goes beyond the huff and puffery of Second Life as a business and spends several paragraphs on the genesis and culture of Linden Lab. And it’s in the “Politics” section so the real question it poses is who will control the 3D internet – Philip Rosedale (Second Life founder) or the inhabitants of SL?

The headline to the press release reads “Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A ‘Second Life’ in the Virtual World by the End of 2011.'”

Even though they note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that 80% will be using Second Life (proper noun), this is a pretty big statement. Hyperbole? Not with products like GAIA Online and Club Penguin growing at a rapid rate.

There’s also a little bit of ego here in seeing ‘second life’ as a way to describe people’s identities in virtual worlds. I coined the name at Linden Lab and it’s exciting to watch people adopt.

At the recent MIP TV conference in Cannes, a marketing chief at BMW explained their involvement with alternative media like Second Life with the following fact:

“In 1965, we needed three spots to reach 80% of the U.S. population. By 2004 it was 117 spots to reach the same amount of people, which is why we also have to be active with these below-the-line channels.”

Here’s news that Barbie might be getting a virtual world. Good for Mattel but we’ll see if it’s too late – it’s not that Barbie doesn’t have a sizable footprint but rather that the brand is about everything but technology. Well unless you count the cheap PC games they dumped on the market in 1999. Seriously, it literally killed the girl-game PC game space – releasing a large number of budget Barbie titles they took over shelf space and knocked prices down to where other software providers like Purple Moon had trouble competing.

I spent that summer in an internship at Mattel as part of a very small corporate new products group. My job specifically was working with Mattel Interactive on a video game strategy. What became apparent to me over the course of the summer was that Mattel lost their definition of core competency. Instead of saying “we’re a company that brings entertainment and education to kids ages 3-13,” they settled on “we’re a toy company and that means plastic dolls and diecast metal cars sold into specialty retailers.” The former would have left them flexible to thinking about technology as an important component of their target consumer’s experience. The latter was stagnation.

Problem was that every single part of this statement was under attack by 1999: kids were “growing older younger” and turning towards the Internet, video games, etc. Specialty toy retailers founds themselves undercut by big box stores and the online retailers. And Mattel got chomped in the middle.

An interesting side note to why Mattel was so hesitant to pursue video games: they tired it in the early 1980s (Intellivision) and it almost bankrupted them. So the organization built up this amazing fear, a loadstone that weighed them down and, ironically, almost cost them their company a second time.

wow, a bunch of interesting Second Life stuff today:

• Daniel Huebner, a customer support guys, speaks at Stanford’s Humanities Lab
• Over 200 employees? Geez, I feel old
• Daniel wrote our first police blotter (which i loved — we did a bunch of non-standard things – this was to publish a roster of those anonymous users that broke the ToS and what we did to them – inspired by my love of the Palo Alto Daily at grad school)
• BusinessWeek did another online special on “The Coming Virtual Web” with a heavy focus on Second Life (and a cool slideshow on SL’s top earners)
• BBC did an in-world newscast
• AP story on the virtual gold rush
• Coke is doing a cool in-world promotion
• Joe Laszlo at Jupiter says Second Life will not remake CRM 😉