Second Life Community Convention

Furries, pirates, and entrepeneurs

by Surfdaddy Orca

ARTIFICIAL ISLE—The crowd at Artificial Isle (128,128,0) looked like the usual assortment of Second Life (SL) avatars – with the occasional set of fairy wings or samurai sword.

On the other hand, according to Carolina McCarthy of CNet News, the real-life scene at Chicago’s Hilton ballroom was a “lace and leather masquerade ball” with furries, pirates, drag queens, and Goths.

Of course, not all convention events were quite as colorful as the gala ball at the third annual SLCC August 24-26 at the Hilton Chicago. At 800 participants, the convention was sold out, with more than five times as many people as attended the first event in New York City. The real-life people attending the convention, according to Carolina McCarthy, were “largely a mix of geeks and art-school types.” A few attendees even wore “flat-out business casual in dress pants and button-down suits.”

McCarthy said she wasn’t sure if people were mostly introducing themselves by their avatar names or the ones they use in “meatspace” (real life). The average age was somewhere in the early- to mid-thirties with Macs as the computer-du-jeur.

Those of us not so fortunate to attend the conference in Chicago were able to teleport to Artificial Isle to view live video streams.

There were four tracks: business, education, machinima, and social. Philip (Rosedale) Linden provided a keynote address and a candid interview with Eric Reuters.

The convention, as Philip Linden stressed in his Saturday morning keynote, was packed. As reported on CNet News, many of the panel discussions and lectures were so packed that attendees were standing in the back of the room or sitting on the floor.

• The business track covered the potential for retailing physical goods through the virtual platform (by far the hottest subject) to the evolution of intellectual property standards in-world.
• The social track touched upon event planning, translating virtual relationships to the real world, and the viability of launching a music career through Second Life.
• The machinima track featured a number of classes and tutorials to help people capitalize on a form of film making, “that’s growing mainstream enough to be used in Coca-Cola ads and South Park.”
• The education track covered the use of Second Life as a platform for emergency-preparedness training, for nonprofit causes, and for enhancing the classroom experience of a generation of kids “who have already shown a penchant for virtual worlds like Zwinktopia and Club Penguin.”

When questioned on Linden Lab priorities during the Reuters’interview, Philip Linden stressed bug fixes over new features: “I think that voice is exemplary of a very important significant platform feature that’s necessary for people to do everything they immediately think of wanting to do. But beyond that I don’t see a huge imperative feature.”

During the interview, Philip stressed the importance of platform stability, uptime, availability, and quality. As Sibley Verbeck, CEO of The Electric Sheep Company put it, “When you look at an industry that’s as new as open-ended virtual worlds are, and a platform that’s as new as Second Life is, we’re all going to sink or swim together.”

Or, maybe if we all paddle hard enough, we can catch the coming wave of 3D virtual world integration with the 2D web as furries, pirates, and entrepreneurs.

For the complete text of the Eric Reuters’interview with Philip (Rosedale) Linden, see: http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/08/25/exclusive-philip-rosedale-interview-from-slcc/ v For pictures from Chicago masquerade ball, see http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6204587-1.html

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