from levittown to blumfield

levittown is a controversial town from north american history. it is at once a fine example of mass production and and 5% down mortgages being brought together to provide affordable housing to the working class of north america and the worst example of free expression and individuality. i could write for pages about my disdain for levittown, suburban sprawl, and institutionally engendered erosion of democracy in north america but this blog is about second life, a medium where we can leave behind the mundanity and anonymity of our every day existence. second life is my world. my imagination. i can be an astronaut, a millionaire playboy, or a cute little bunny.

to help new players along the way to realize the freedom of expression the second life allows, to get their first taste of fantasy, Linden Lab created a wonderful community for noobies, a first land oppurtunity that comes with a house. a wonderful gesture and an inspiration to us all! welcome to blumfield, also known as linden town.

if this is a boardman inspired project, it missed all the important feautures. instead of homes that evoke bourgeois modern living, these are the working class homes of factory and office drones, nostalgic of simple and boring times. instead of a few winding streets for residents to wander in, it is an relentless and uncaring grid that informs players that they are just as much a number in SL as they are in RL. finally, rather than using high quality prefabs as advertised in the bidding process, what we see is mediocrity and less then mediocrity.

i mean no slight to the builders, who offered way more value than one would be expected to risk for a shot at a 5000 L$ reward (one of them quite impressively was only a month old and when he entered his winning entry). LL got quite a deal. im sure that the inworld market would have given some of these designers much better returns for their work over time from sales that are now less likely as noobies will be getting these houses for free from LL.

unless the nature of this pilot project is to impress new residents with flicker full, camera colliding low ceilings, awkwardly small doorways, and poor texturing (most houses did not have all deficiencies though each had at least one glaring one) LL really missed the boat with setting up conditions for high quality submissions. the train station competition, which had much simpler requirements, had double the pay off. my personal view is that the best way to retain players is by impressing them with amazing content. if LL wants to unload some of that content creation work on the community that is an excellent and welcomed oppurtunity for the player community. but LL must recognize, and very much like their own staff, at the end of the day quality costs money, and many of the represented builders cut their work short because of the risk to reward ratio, while countless others didn't even submit an entry.

“The long straight streets and avenues of a gridiron city do not permit the buildings to cluster like sheep and protect one against the sense of space. They are not sober little walks closed in between houses, but national highways. The moment you set foot on one of them, you understand it must go on.”

Jean-Paul Sartres on Manhattan, 1811

how immersed will a players from another virtual worlds feel as they step out from their homes on to an oppressive grid? a grid does not end. in the abstract conception of our minds it continues forever. a grid is not only easy to build, but easy to scale. layered geometrically on the SL grid, it can be extended infinitely to accomodate the explosive growth that second life is experiencing. if this pilot project succeeds, tens of thousands of new players in the coming year could be beginning their second life in a vast unrelenting grid of poorly fabricated dwellings as LL attempts to technocratically manage the population by throwing them into these noobie ghettos.

lordfly digerdoo made a post today identifying 3 popular reasons why people log into sl: sex, money and socializing.

A mature sim kinda helps those along. Nothing says "howdy neighbor!" like a BDSM torture rack.

Lordfly Digeridoo, SL forums

As we discussed the mature angle Lordfly brought while standing on the front stoop of one of the houses, Crystalshard Foo decided to test if SL Sprawl could really support SL "socializing" .

CrystalShard Foo: Lets run a quick experiment.
(Crystalshard walks across the street to the front door of the opposing house)
CrystalShard Foo: Kyrah, can you read me?
Kyrah Abattoir: yus
CrystalShard Foo: I've rest my case.
Jauani Wu: hehe
Jauani Wu: what is the range?
Jauani Wu: 20m?
CrystalShard Foo: Yes

the positive aspect to this is that LL has realized they need to actively address influx of new players. many players need a place to tie themselves to to immerse themselves into a new game world. my confusion is why LL didn't pursue the very succesful (200 L$/m2 kind of succesful) boardman sim to emulate. infact, why not hire skilled craftsman like ingrid or barnesworth or others who made boardman such a desirable location as consultants or work for hire? why instead emulate a technocratic dystopia like levittown? if this model is indeed intended to be scaled up, wouldn't it be more fruitful to invest the necessary resources to make it as compelling and immersive as possible? finally, wouldn't it be more fruitful for noobies to more easily acclimatize into their second life if they weren't segregated into dehumanizing ghetto? was the old method of mixing noobie plots unsuccesful or was it discarded to downsize the LL side land management in the full sim sales? will this kind of sim, if found to be succesful, be mixed in with the regular grid or will the be extended infinitely as their morphology suggests?

my concern is that unlike communist china or post ww2 north america, players do have a real choice when faced with institutionalized forces that homogenize and compartmentalize human lives. they don't have to remain indentured to this ghetto. they can leave lindentown and build there own dreams elsewhere in the gridsverse. but they can also log off.