The last 2 weeks have been pretty intensive for the virtual community of Vulcano.
Or maybe, as I notice reviewing my calendar, it’s just me who’s starting to get a glimpse of the quite awesome/hectic/frantic activity that is on the Grid (Grid is how residents of Second Life usually refer to its virtual land) nowadays.
For instance, last monday we hosted the Local Government Study Group meeting. I eagerly attended because interested in if/how local governments should be implemented in SL and to which extent. I think the fact of being able to delegate control of land to “users” and allow for flexible ways of redistributing rights is one of those aspects that really differentiate SL from other MMOs. Something that makes it probably the most innovative environment since the age of Ultima Online.
That said, I was quite disappointed when realized that what LGSG is pursuing is the institution of a number of small scale but full fledged miniatures of RL (Real Life) governments.
Governments that will be empowered with tools that act more in the way of restricting user rights rather then enhancing their experience.
I’m sorry, but I’m all for the latter: if on one side SL admits mistakes and it is a good playground to fine tune such tools, I still don’t see the point in reproducing RL clumsyness in an ecosystem where the media/environment allows for lighter constraints and more flexible tools.
Local Government for what I see is an advancement for sure, a quite significative one even, but it’s still no quantum leap.
A quantum leap is what the Vulcano community is trying to achieve.
Vulcano is a sim (as regions are called in Second Life) with 2 characteristics:
Anybody can build (houses, monuments, clothings…), script (special effects, vehicles, services…) and obviously wander freely.
This makes it essentially a giant sandbox (a didactic place that is left open to everybody to play with, and that is periodically “reset” to its original status) with a difference: what is made there is meant to stay for an indeterminate amount of time (i.e. the region is never reset).
As soon as the news spread across the Grid (mainly the Italian speaking part of it) Vulcano attracted a lot of host of very different people that created a very lively community.
Awesome, so what? you say. Bear with me, because there’s a thing you should know about SecondLife: there you can look the way you like, you don’t need to feed and can travel wherever you want… you can even fly for free… but there is (at least) one scarce resource: prims (or Primitives, the SL equivalent of LEGO bricks) are limited to a maximum of 15000 per sim.
These 2 things (different opinions and limited resources) obviously generated some friction, so we had a major gathering last thursday to discuss the situation, to share everybody’s vision of the project and find new way of regulating (if possible) the land.
What follows are my consideration on these two topics based on the discussion we had that night:
Spirit of the Land
It emerged that Vulcano is inhabited by at least three types of people:
1. Many residents are there to tinker, wrangle and experiment with tools.
These tend to be quite idealistic and have a strong “do-it-yourself” drive, but are also quite willing to explain how-to do things, or to help with general maintenance and duties.
2. Some (but those with the most heavy impact on Vulcano’s ecology) strive to build a cool place to hang out, learn, have conversations, maybe open a small business.
Apparently are also the more concerned about the lack of prims and how are we going to “allocate” them.
3. A few are there to study SL as a technosocial platform or to provide services/structures to residents (so far these include: an InfoPoint / Learning Centre, an Art Gallery, a conference centre, a Language School and my floating Social Interaction Lab). These also are among the “heavy weights” but tend not to express too much concern about the status.
It would be nice to have a meaning to communicate with newbies and travellers alike this variety and its interactions. The prop we’re going to use to this extent will be a proper spirit: a ghostly bot that will wander through the land targeting visitors and residents alike, and acting both as a memento mori and as a useful, interactive information resource…
Prim regulation
At the meeting I gave a speech on resource management pointing out that the Vulcano community must aim at creating a sustainable sim and that, so far, it has ben some how self regulating itself without too much effort on the single user end.
In fact, since a month, the number of residents grew steadily, while the number of prims used was constantly maxed out.
I have not (silly me!) exact data for the whole period, but here you can see a qualitative graph:
What triggers the continuous light ondulation in Prim quote is the volunteer cleaning service that some residents started to get rid of the garbage left by tourists and other less aware residents.
But, what triggered the major decrease was a simple effort in communication when some resident actively asked for prims for a good purpose.
Hence I suggested to try and raise awareness and communication by installing screens and/or booths all over the sim that announce land occupation status, as well as a campaign to explain everybody the value of a prim.
Then again, this is quite a passive approach to the problem, isn’t it? No quantum leap here.
We can do better.
So a couple of days ago, during one of these “cleaning mission”, I was chatting with another worried resident who pointed out that a lot of trouble comes actually from abuse of prefabs.
A prefab is an object (usually a house or other building, but can be anything) that can be bought (or found) and then rezzed (used) wherever you want…
Now, prefabs are usually designed to be sold and thus their designers put more effort in aestethic than optimization.
As a result, a “prefab oriented” building behaviour tends to hog considerably more resources than a DIY approach.
How to address this?
It is not possible to force all residents into becoming builders, just because most of them simply couldn’t care less, as we saw in the previous chapter. We then need to find another way to discourage the use of resource intensive prefabs.
How?
Well, for example by starting to provide highly optimized, open sourced prefabs!
This will force local enthusiastic builders to hone their skills. Moreover, other residents will probably be more than willing to support the R&D with some L$ (Linden Dollar is the SecondLife currency).
Also, sculpties (sculpted prims) are coming to SecondLife, giving a whole new dimension for improvement and optimization.
Sculpted Prims are to standard Prims what modeling clay is to LEGO bricks: they can be (almost) anything!
The problem is that, at the moment, there’s no “easy” way to edit them.
But this means that probably most of the current builders won’t engage into sculpties, at least not in this early age. But Vulcano builders have a fairly good motivation to do that: sculpties can dramatically reduce prim count on the land!
As a side effect, if they get good at sculpties, their use will spread quickly through the grid, making Vulcano builders popular (and maybe well-off) but more than that making the whole Grid much more sustainable.