This time we've interviewed someone from the Linden family. Linden Lab has sent us one of the best people they have, Morpheus Linden. He leads a team, called Studio Lux, that works on the back-end billing integration. For example, he and his crew have worked on the infamous but necessary technical part of the introduction of VAT to Europe's Second Life residents.Please note that some of the usual 9 questions seemed a bit inapropriate for an employee of Linden Lab, so we had to change them a bit for this occasion. Thank you Morpheus, for our pleasant conversation and answering these questions so openly and honestly. And thanks Dee Linden for setting it up. I owe you at least a virtual glass of fine champagne. :)
That said, let's get to the 9 Questions and Answers ...
Question 1: Why did you choose THAT name for your avatar? Do you still have a picture of your newbie days?
Morpheus: Morpheus comes from the name of the Greek God of Sleep. I'm fascinated by sleep, and dream in particular and the implications they have on epistemology. Dream is very much like an alternate reality. In that reality, how do we know what's true or real? Given that uncertainty, how can we then make assumptions about knowing reality in this life?
I'm also a big fan of Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman' series of graphic novels. I feel like they are an excellent example of the dangers of categorical behavior. To a casual observer, "it's just a comic book" but in fact, there's a tremendous amount of depth, interplay and thought there such that I would categorize as literature in a way that most novels published today are not. I feel the same way about Second Life and the way it might seem like "it's just a game" to a casual observer, but the depth, complexity and potential here dwarf the category "game."
There's a quote from a Nineteenth century French poet, Gérard de Nerval that goes, "Dream is a second life." So, when it came time to choose a Linden name, Morpheus, god of sleep, was the obvious choice for me.
Of course the bad-ass from the Matrix didn't hurt the decision either. :)
Question 2: How long were you in SL before you felt you could function and work your way in SL? Did you go through some kind of training at LL in this aspect?
Morpheus: I've been involved in virtual worlds in some way or another for a long time. In 1991, I was one of the founders and administrators of an "LP" MUD. My graduate computer science work was within the Virtual Reality group, and I went into the games industry shortly after graduate school. So, while the particulars of the interface were (and sometimes still are) challenging, the fundamentals of a virtual existence are fairly well ingrained.
There are a couple of ways that the Lab trains incoming Lindens, but I didn't get anything more than an initial shopping trip with Jeska Linden upon joining. I remember when someone first pointed out how to create a landmark in order to return somewhere. I was astonished, because up until that point, I'd pretty much gotten around in-world without those pesky menus. To me, having to go "out" to a menu broke the proverbial "fourth wall." I was surprised that something so fundamental was outside of the immersive interface.
It was over a year later that I finally attended Char Linden's "bootcamp" for new Lindens. I picked up a few tricks from her like turning off the online friend notification. What a blessing that turned out to be. As a Linden, one accumulates a lot of "friends." (Preferences > General > Uncheck: Show Online Friend Notifications)
So, how long? It was probably a couple of weeks before I felt like at least a comfortable tourist. I don't know that I yet feel like a native though almost two years later.
Question 3: Did you know about SL or did you even have an account before you started working for Linden Lab?
Morpheus: I was peripherially aware of Second Life from shortly after it launched, but didn't pay close attention to it until I was job hunting in spring of '06. At that point, a friend-of-a-friend had blogged about her new job at Linden Lab and how they were still hiring (We still are! See this link). I decided to check it out more thoroughly. As a virtual world with strengths like user created content where users retain the intellectual property rights, I thought that Linden Lab might be a good match for my skills and interests. At the time, they were celebrating their 100,000th resident. Of course, now we have grown by two orders of magnitude and have a concurrency over half of what was then the total number of accounts!
So, I spent some time in-world in preparation for (and during) my interview process, but I was not a "proper" resident before becoming a Linden.
Question 4: Where do you hang out most (in-world)? What is special about that place?
Morpheus: I wish I had a better answer for this than I do. A large percentage of the time that I spend in-world is meeting with other Lindens. My team is split between multiple locations and so all of our meetings are in-world. The same is true for the other teams and working groups I'm in. Acknowledging the distributed nature of our organization, Linden Lab HQ is actually comprised of 4 connected islands in-world. So that's where I spend almost all of my in-world time.
Question 5: Can you still go into SL just for leisure, or is it all work? What kind of leisure do you like best in SL?
Morpheus: I can and do spend time in-world for leisure both as myself and as an alt. Not nearly enough, of course. The world changes around me so quickly, I rarely manage to get my bearings before I'm lost again, but that's actually a great thing. I think the strength of Second Life is in its residents, so when I'm in world, I'm either just chatting with people, or exploring. Sometimes, I like to just pull up the world map, pick somewhere, TP there and wander around. Sometimes I'll just go to the top classified ad from the search page and start there. Otherwise, I'll just find my way to a club and hang out for a little while, and hope they have a good dance ball b/c I've still not really loaded my AV with animations.
Question 6: How do you feel the original concept of 'your world, your imagination' works in today's SL?
Morpheus: I think it's still strong. After all, what Second Life is today is due to the creativity of the Second Life residents. We try to keep Second Life as open, available and accessible as we can. All of our work is about enabling the residents and trying to do so in a way that allows us to remain a viable business entity.
Question 7: How do you see your future within SL and Linden Lab?
Morpheus: Alas, I'm famously poor at predicting the future, so I'll keep this one brief: "Long, engaging and challenging!".
Question 8: There's a rumor that Lindens try out all the new poseballs when access is restricted for Lindens. Is it true? And if not, what do Lindens do when they are alone in SL?
Morpheus: LOL, I love that! It cracks me up because in one sense, it seems perfectly reasonable, but little could be farther from the truth. In my experience, if the world is "Lindens Only" then it's because one of two things is happening. Either
A) we're in the early part of bringing up revisions to the server architecture in which case we're doing what's called a "Smoke Test" in QA parlance; A test which tries to cover a broad range of activities, but does not probe with much depth.
or
B) something has gone horribly wrong with some piece of back-end infrastructure, and we're only willing to risk corruption on our own accounts while we're troubleshooting.
That said, I simply love this Haiku from Jeska one "release day" back when we would regularly be down for 6-ish hours every other week as we pushed out a new server release (link here):
Internal testing
Sit on your pose balls, laughing
Eating your ice cream
Question 9: What oneliner or thought would you like to share with our readers, that reflects how you see SL?
Morpheus: It's a great time for Second Life. We've made some amazing changes since I got here: Flexi prims, sculpties, voice, a usable search. We open sourced the client. We've got windlight just out and Havoc 4 and Mono on the way. And yet we still have an amazing set of challenges in front of us in the realms of stability, usability and openness.
So my one liner for how I see SL? "May you live (your second life) in interesting times!"
