Editor's note: All content on troymedia.com is free to use. Please credit Troy Media Corporation.

June 26, 2009

Second Life's founder responds to criticism

By  Bob Weinstein
Writer
Troy Media Corporation

NEW YORK, June 26, 2009/ Troy Media/ -- Philip Rosedale, the mastermind behind virtual reality phenomenon Second Life (SL) , predicts that SL technology will make great strides in the near term. If “near-term” is typically defined as under a year, this means users will find that it’s a lot easier to master SL and get into its virtual world, according to Rosedale.

At the moment, Rosedale says it takes about five hours to understand and get your bearings in SL. With software and hardware refinements, he says that it will  take only five to 20 minutes to get the lay of SL’s virtual terrain. That’s about as close to user-friendly as any technophobe can hope for.

Rosedale never loses sight of Linden Lab’s function. “For the most part, we are a product development, design, and software engineering firm,” he explains. “We’re just trying to make the whole thing work better.”

And being able to work in a virtual lab with technology’s top minds who are scattered all over the globe will likely make that happen. “We’ve proven that people don’t have to be physically together in order to work together,” says Rosedale.

It’s normal enough to ask a straightforward question like, “Where do you work?” but to get an answer like, “I work in Second Life, a virtual, three-dimensional world where team members can be in a dozen different places on the planet,” can be strangely off-putting.

Second Life’s critics

While SL has taken technology to new heights, the platform also has been severely criticized for mesmerizing many visitors and turning them into Internet junkies. In June 2007,  The Washington Post reported that an animated SL character allegedly raped another character. While some bloggers dismissed the virtual attack as “digital fiction,” police inBelgium, according to newspaper reports, opened an investigation to determine whether an actual crime had been committed.

Commenting on the story at the time, Rosedalesaid SL is intended for adults, and its activities should be governed by real-life laws, for the time being . "In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place, and not citizens of their countries," he said.

Responding to being asked whether SL can have adverse effects on its visitors, Rosedale recently said that the question of whether people should be sitting in front of their computer screens or out in the physical world with their friends isn’t a relevant question. Says Rosedale, “The question should be, ‘Is SL making you a better person?’ ‘Is it helping you evolve and improve?’ and ‘Is the thing that you are doing in front of the computer more or less challenging and enriching than what you might be doing in the real world?’”

While vocal bloggers have ranted about SL’s addictive qualities, they’ve failed to point out that the Internet itself can be addictive. Rosedale isn’t the culprit. First, his influence isn’t as broad as many think, and second, thousands of computer users were getting hooked on the Internet long before Rosedale entered the picture. And the term “Internet addiction” has been bandied about since the mid-to-late 1990s. Several scholarly papers have been written about it; and in 1998, psychologist Kimberly S. Young authored  Caught in the Net: How to Recognize the Signs of Internet Addiction – and a Winning Strategy for Recovery.

Rosedale says that there is legitimate concern about computers being addictive “because there are experiences that you can have on the computer, like playing and immersing yourself in a fighting-based role-playing game12 or 24 hours a day.” The life lesson learned is that “everyone is either an elf or a troll or a human, and the way to get ahead is to kill them,” he says. “This is a monochromatic life lesson that ultimately will not teach you skills that will help you be successful in the real world – nor will it make you a better person.”

SL, however, offers a different kind of Internet experience, Rosedaleinsists. While some residents have had negative experiences, most report positive and enriching ones, where learning takes places on many different levels. Judging by SL’s statistics, the SL environment is diverse, balanced and conducive to both personal and financial growth. Says Rosedale, “SL represents a greater intellectual challenge than the actual real world around them. And in a few years, we’ll argue that if you are not spending a lot of time in virtual reality, you’re probably impoverishing yourself in some way.”

Is Rosedale hyping his creation, or predicting the future? Only time will tell. Tomorrow’s historians might very well include him among the great technological giants of our time, in the elite company of technological visionaries like Microsoft’s Bill Gates; Apple Computers’ Steve Jobs; Intel’s founder Andy Grove; and IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson Sr.