An Open Letter to Philip Rosedale

By Squeebee Wakawaka | Published: 2010/09/02

This was originally a direct email to Philip Rosedale in response to his call for emails and suggestions but I’ve decided to post it publicly in case others have similar ideas.

Hi Philip;
Forgive the article format, hopefully it will make this easier to digest.

Who Am I?

My name is <REDACTED>. I currently manage a team of Sales Engineers for an enterprise software company that provides messaging solutions (email, SMS, campaign management). Previously I worked for MySQL AB doing documentation, training, evangelism and a good amount of public speaking. It was through MySQL that I discovered SL, back when MySQL featured Linden Lab in a newsletter article.
In SL I’m Squeebee Wakawaka and was in the session this morning. Four and a half years ago I gave Second Life a try and stuck around when I discovered the scripting capabilities, which I used for hobby coding to eventually build a theater dedicated to Mystery Science Theater 3000, where we now have over 1,000 group members and what I’d consider a pretty high traffic rating (about 10,000) considering the lack of any camping or visiting incentives.

Today’s Meeting

First of all, thanks for the meeting. It went well, especially considering it was Wallace’s first crack at moderating. I would suggest in the future looking at building a system where people suggest questions, those questions get voted up/down/duplicate and he presents the top questions. You could make it a generic ‘Ask The Lindens’ system even where he can point questions to staff and the answers get published on the site.
Beyond that though, I think you set a new example that hopefully can spread through the corporate culture, and that is the end of infallibility. Sometimes a spade needs to be called a spade, and public facing staff need to be able to say “this is not yet ideal, you know it, we know it, and here’s what we’re doing to work on it”. I’ve had enough experience in a public facing position to know that you lose respect and trust when trying to deny negative situations, but gain valuable amounts of trust and respect when you’re willing to admit that things are not ideal.

Suggestions

Naturally one of the core reasons why we’re going to email you is with ideas (not counting those with nothing but complaints for the moment) and I’ve got a few for future consideration.

Community Powered Catalog

I’d like to suggest that one way to get residents to compelling content faster is to implement something in-world along the lines of Yelp: a community powered system where categorized and tagged content is voted up and down and reviewed through a UI interface. This could be used for locations, products and events, with the results being rolled up into a useful service where people can look for things by category or keyword with the results sorted by that which is the highest rated. Something like this can go beyond searches and destination guides because it shows what is truly popular with the community as a whole, rather than an essentially unsorted search or a static guide populated by a committee.

Rebuilt Profiles

Profiles are really where you have the potential to introduce just the right amount of social content into the SL experience.
Consider the idea of adding a timeline to the profile, a place where people can post status updates but also an LSL API that lets scripters pop prompts to publish to a person’s wall. If you’re familiar with Facebook you’re aware that for some people the app status bits are more prevalent than their own status bits. For example, someone raising virtual chickens gets a new chick, that can pop a dialog and by saying yes, the news is posted to their timeline.
Also look at breaking out more information: many users are not using picks for their intended purpose, instead they use the picks to add lists of their closest friends, their favorite in-world quotes, etc. Consider adding support for these in the profile but in a separate tab from picks. This increases the value of picks since they revert to their intended purpose (and this data can be factored into the community powered catalog I mentioned above.

Check-Ins

Another possible area to look at is the in-world equivalent of FourSquare, which would tie into the former two suggestions. Give the residents the ability to check into locations, have those check-ins factor into the popularity of entries in the catalog, and have them become part of the timeline in their social content. This also allows people to identify areas that are currently popular by seeing where a number of people are in real-time.

Infrastructure Rebuild

This one is certainly not next quarter or two, and I’m going to lift it from my comment in the blog:
It’s time to get away from the static world to which we have grown accustomed. You’re right about having to be the leader and innovator. The low-cost OpenSim competitors are going to be offering what SL offers, so to compete SL is going to have to offer something new. To me, that means moving in a new direction and enabling professional build teams to do something that can’t currently be competently done: multiplayer gaming. Imagine if SL had the tools and infrastructure to allow a game studio to build a game entirely in SL, you could start in your favorite hangout, then decide you wanted to get a little FPS action in and head to a sim. You don’t load maps, you go to them. You play a little capture the flag in a shooter, invite some friends over, etc. Later you feel like playing an apocalyptic RPG so you head over to that set of sims and do some quests.
Imagine the retention rates for users when they can actually head off an do things like this with a professional gaming experience. I’m not talking RP sims where you have to play along or combat sims where you all have to use compatible guns and keep teleporting back from home, but sims where the developers have the tools to make the experience (client-side UI scripting, granular script controls (only these scripts can execute, regardless of owner), meshed NPCs, TP controls to respawn players, camera controls, etc) combined with large sims, instancing and a proper language for scripting everything. Add to that the ability to pre-load the sims so that there’s smooth traveling and no delays in loading sounds and assets needed for the game.
Because it’s SL, we’d even have the kind of flexibility that others can only dream of: instead of having to pre-purchase a game, players could pay for it by the day in L$, with discounts for subsriptions. The game developers win because of a low cost of entry and a pre-built platform, LL wins because of consistent sim rentals and increased L$ activity.
Would it be easy to do with the current platform? No, it would likely mean going back and building Grid 2. But it is doable. There’s competitors out there doing it, and if they succeed it puts SL at serious risk. The key will be balance: Blue Mars is going in this direction, but they are focusing too heavily on the professional developers while leaving the amateurs out of luck because of a lack of in-world tools. The key is going to be balance: keep what makes SL great, the in-world build tools, private parcels, etc. but at the same time introduce the tools and infrastructure to produce compelling content that people will pay to access on a regular basis.
This would be no easy thing, but there’s a community of indy MMO developers out there whose biggest challenge is infrastructure, tools and audience. Provide them all three and you have people developing their games in-world instead of re-inventing the wheel. They get the audience that SL provides and a low barrier to entry for potential players who just have to TP to the region and pay to play, per play (subscription optional). That means hosting revenue for you and money flow, also benefiting LL. Beyond that it means retention and new users. Does it mean turning SL into a game? No, but it does mean turning SL into a platform that allows for serious gaming in some of its regions. And hey, after killing that Orc and getting its armour, you can wear it back in your hangouts as a badge of honour and attract new players to the game you were enjoying (not to mention that achievements they get in specific games could again be published to that profile timeline I mentioned above).

Hiring Idea

Speaking of those indy MMO developers, you may want to look at some of the resources out there. Games built by talented people fail and you get those talented people looking for work. The Austin area has a number of them, and some of them are even in SL already. SL may not be a game, but these are people who know how to scale virtual worlds, and who know how to bring the technology I was referencing above into the SL platform. It doesn’t hurt to have a few more world builders on the team.

Finally, An Offer to Advise

As a last note I’m willing to help in any advisory role LL might have if the need arises. I think my background lends to some good input if there’s going to be requests for comments regarding various endeavours.

Conclusion

Thanks for your time in reading this Philip, it’s not a short message but hopefully it gives you a few things to consider.
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