Hi, Katt Linden here with a roundup of our main methods of communicating with you. First, I want to acknowledge that I have heard your concerns and complaints about the changes to the blog and the login screen. In answer to your questions about where to find key information, please see:

• Second Life Grid Status Reports. We are collecting all information about the status of the Grid — known issues, new server and viewer software and, very important to those planning events, a calendar showing planned outages, such as rolling restarts. We collect this in one location so that those needing this level of update can find it easily, without having to sort through blog posts on unrelated topics. You can subscribe to this by RSS or Twitter, which means you can have updates sent to your mobile phone.

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The Guidelines for Blog Comments have moved here.

And now, for something a little more relaxed.

You are here. You may not know what to do…

Don’t be afraid, everything’s going to be alright!

Words were insufficient, so I’ve done a narrated video tutorial of how to use the Official Blog of Linden Lab (what’s a blog?).

===> DOWNLOAD “HOW TO USE THIS BLOG”

kindly hosted by blip.tv

===> ALTERNATE DOWNLOAD LINK

It came together really smoothly except for the final leg of encoding and uploading it. :p

(Sowwies for the audio clicks, I don’t know how they got in there but I’d better learn how to get them out.)

You can also learn more about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to automatically subscribe and stay up-to-date on the latest-’n'-greatest in Linden writings. And I did mention Sage, my chosen feed reader.

Tor <3 Rav

Given how often the amateur versus expert issue raises itself in relation to Second Life — whether in terms of content creation, medical research, game creation, etc — it seems somehow appropriate to watch Raph and Prokofy slug it out over on Raph’s blog. In the blue corner we have Raph Koster, till recently SOE’s Chief Creative Office and Big Thinker ™ on Virtual Worlds. In the red corner, Prokofy Neva, undisputed heavywieght champion of extended posts, big thoughts on Second Life, and continuous challenges to authority. Go read it — it’s interesting.

I haven’t felt the need to post, but one sequence caught my eye. Raph posted the following:

I personally believe this is a mistaken take on things. I’ll be bold and say:
- no, it’s demonstrably less fun, to the vast majority of people, in SL than in most any of the gameworlds
- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven adoption in virtual spaces
- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven lasting innovation
- the future of the metaverse is going to come from gameworlds, not freeform social worlds

and:

I don’t want to overstate this, but in short, I’d issue a plea to folks like Prokofy, Jerry, and others, to let go of social world exceptionalism

To which the only reply, of course, is:
Would you be willing to give up on online game exceptionalism?
Since entering into the argument at this point would be silly, I’ll simply pour gasoline all over the place by asking a couple of questions:
- How many people use the web versus gameworlds? (Being generous to the games, it’s 20 to 1)
- Raph is quick to dismiss Second Life as “just a MUSH” — and leaving aside the separate 3D versus text debate that I’ve sometimes ventured into — I still find the claim that innovation is happening in gameworlds somewhat challenging. Given the number of announced gameworlds trying to pivot onto Second Life innovations — user creation, collaborative creation, user markets, content markets, pay-to-play, no subscription, digital delivery, single shard, streaming content delivery — what are the innovations in the gameworld space?

As to the question of fun or usage, debating it does seem a little silly. Second Life has show gentle exponential growth since it launched. Either that trend will continue or it will not. If it does, exponential growth combined with the fact that we address a much larger market than games means that we will dwarf gameworlds. If not, we won’t.

So, do you want to bet on Linden Lab’s employees plus Anshe, Perkofy, Walker, and the hundreds of thousands of other SL residents? Or do you bet on Blizzard, Raph, Daniel and the hundreds of other really smart folks making online games?

Hopefully, you won’t have to make the choice, because if we do our job right, many of them will ultimately be building games within Second Life.

Tony Walsh of the excellent Clickable Culture has a post up commenting on my Serious Game talk (or, more specifically, on Alice of Wonderland’s notes on my talk). He has some interesting points that I wanted to respond to.
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