Picture by DangerRanger on Flickr,
Watch out when Philip Rosedale, Chairman of Linden Lab, participates in Burning Man. It was at Burning Man that he once found the inspiration and energy to build something which would become Second Life. Now he could very well have returned from this year’s edition with a new drive for radical changes.
Burning Man lives also in Second Life, as Burning Life. I never participated in either of those events, even though I’d love to do so one day and will try to participate in Burning Life. However, I do realize this is, even amongst the Second Life residents, not exactly a mainstream interest.
Now Philip is back again from the (very real) desert. He even experienced some sandstorms! In a blogpost he acknowledges that Burning Man most probably won’t grow much above the about 50,000 participants. As Wagner James Au points out, that is roughly the number of Second Life users in-world at any given time.
Philip likes this futuristic settler-aspect of Second Life. But what he wants even more, is that the world grows from a small village to a gigantic metropolis.
That means that a lot will have to change to make Second Life into a compelling experience for a much more mainstream group of future of residents. The changes will make some early settlers complain and long back to the early days. But that is the way things go, I guess.
I think we’ll have to prepare for big changes. Those changes are wanted by many residents, by the investors in Linden Lab, and will be appreciated (I hope) by future residents. It’s also important that the man who had the vision and made it all possible wants to let aspects of the Burning Man ethos go and embraces a more mainstream future. This is how he concludes his blog post:
But I think Second Life is different than Burning Man. To reach it’s potential, it has to grow, probably more than 100 times larger than it is today. If all the people working on Second Life are right – if virtual reality really is the future of the internet and a big part of our collective human future, it’s gotta get a lot bigger. Like I said recently at the SLCC conference, we should try and realize that we are working together on a small village that in a few years will be a gigantic metropolis. Everything will change, and needs to. Try not to cling too tightly to what we have now. The design, the UI, the orientation experience, the tools – all these need to change, a LOT, for Second Life to become accessible to hundreds of millions. Those changes are sometimes going to be disruptive and painful. Coming back from the desert heightened that feeling of empathy – in many ways I don’t want Second Life to change either. It is magical, and it is cool to feel like you are one of the brave and visionary few who came early. But a bigger part of my heart wants to see it reach everyone, and so we must evolve. Onward!
Roland Legrand