After reading an article about Showtime's persistent presence in SL (You can read it here- http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/01/10/showtime-mulls-expansion-of-sl-presence/)
, I came across another article about Coca-Cola moving their SL presence to a competitor, www.there.com. This got me thinking about other SL competitors, and how Second Life intends to stay ahead of the competition. In addition to direct competitors such as IMVU, There, Active Worlds, and Kaneva (list taken from Wikipedia's article on SL), how many others can be considered indirect competitors? Does SL see itself as a business competing with MMORPGS, such as World of Warcraft? What about Sony's Home environment on the PS3 (thanks to another poster for info. about Home), or the Sims Online?
How popular are any of these virtual environments, anyway? I've seen articles boasting the number of registered accounts on SL, but to my knowledge nobody knows how many accounts are active or how much time the average user spends in-world. I'd wager none of the virtual environments (SL and its direct competitors) are as popular as WoW. Could this be a reflection of the preference for goods consumption over creation? Reflecting back on some of our past readings about virtual worlds representing human utopia, what does this say about our ideal world? Perhaps we feel more comfortable with rules and restrictions rather than an open environment. Sure, we like to try to bend the rules sometimes, but just like children, perhaps we prefer having boundaries in place.
3 comments:
This is straying a bit from your topic of which VW will eventually win out, but regarding your question of "what does it say about our idea world," I think Agent Smith explains it all:
"Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."
For our project, we are currently studying and evaluating TV shows that have virtual worlds. I was surprised to see that not many were on Second Life. All MTV shows with virtual realities, for example, have their worlds set up on there.com
As of now, I really don’t know why, but I will soon try to figure it out when I start exploring those other virtual worlds.
To answer your question, yes I think second life is competing with other virtual world providers. In terms of the technology, it seems like that most providers are lacking and are currently trying to figure things out. With regards to promotion and advertising, Second Life is way ahead of other competitors.
For virtual worlds today, media exposure is beating technology, but I assure you that when a competitor reaches a widely acceptable technology advancement, technology will eventually triumph.
Take search engines for example. There were lots of them at first, and people experimented with almost all, but not until recently did one of them—google—became the most accepted one.
It seems inevitable that in the future there will be one dominant VW. Participants in these worlds put a lot of effort into developing their avatar and learning how to navigate. Think about it, most people can't even handle both a Facebook and Myspace account. Those sites sites don't even require much participation.
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