Showing Second Life to Discovery Channel With Sean Voss & Torley Linden

If you had a chance for your avatar to get on TV, it would be a great day. But that was just one of a few things that made that day one to remember. I ran into an old friend, and also met a Second Life celebrity - Torley Linden.

I had recently gotten a message in a stored IM from Sean Voss, the first I had heard from him since he went on hiatus after suspending his SL Tours. He told his group, me included, that he was going to be on the Discovery Channel, and invited us to join him.

On Tuesday Sept 30, I logged in and got another stored message from Sean Voss. He had started about a couple hours ago. Porting to Landmark Island, it was empty. But after IMing him, he soon appeared. Things were a bit awkward as my voice was off at first, (I had turned it off while in a place where it was causing trouble), and a few other details. But after some minutes, he asked me to invite some friends over. Most were busy, or too embarrassed, but I was able to get Firehorse Rearwind and one other friend over. I introduced them, as they had never met, then Sean asked us to port over to Paris, so we did.


And as things slowly rezzed, I heard voices, and it was soon obvious we were in a group. As Sean showed us around, it soon became clear a couple avatars were with Discovery. There was a Linden in the group, one whom had a watermellon-colored necktie and a very familiar voice, but I didn't recognize the name. When someone called him “Torley,” I knew whom it was, the guy whose made a name for himself with his helpful videos for SL newbies and more experienced residents alike. He was using an alt account for this event.

Sean described the sim, focused on Paris as it looked around 1900. He led us to the Moulin Rouge, where we were invited to dance. One lady invited me to dance, and it was one that had us strutting about like chickens, which had us chuckling. After that, we headed to the Eiffel Tower, went up to the summit, and parachuted down. Once we were all down, the two with Discovery told the rest of us they had enough footage, thanked us, and ported out.

Sean Voss and a few others left as well (Sean still had yet to tell us when the footage was likely to be shown), which left the rest of us with Torley Linden. Torley was happy to talk with us, talking about in his early days of SL people would often charge ridiculous amounts for lessons, and making a promise to himself if he ever had the power, he would show people what to do for free. He also talked some about the development of Windlight. When he began talking about his cat, I rezzed a SL pet pug dog that a friend had given me, which got a few chuckles from Torley, him telling us he had yet to see one of those in Second Life.

Eventually, Torley had to go, and we all went our separate ways. And so ended a very interesting afternoon in Second Life. Thanks again to everyone.

Bixyl Shuftan

9 questions for ... Morpheus Linden

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!"

What Second Life means to me.

By Reporter Yonsay Gontineac

Ok, so this might sound a bit like the title for a high school essay, but if you are prepared to put that side for one minute it's just that I have a story I want to tell.
There is a lot of talk lately about what is wrong with Second Life, and I am not saying any of that is wrong, but I just want to point out something I have found to be very good about it, apart from the usual bring the world together stuff.
I think second life is fantastic because for some people it is the only life they have, maybe permanently or for the lucky few temporarily, but the only life they have all the same.
I, myself in Real Life, am a carer. I have a wife who has become victim to an industrial ailment, whom the courts have failed for one reason or another, some of which is because we are not important enough, I'm sure, then my son Jacob, has just recently been diagnosed as on the Autistic Spectrum. Ahhhh, you might say, but frankly I'm not after sympathy. It's been a while now and I'm used to it. The point is I don't have a life as such. I can't leave them for a minute, and even when everybody is a sleep I still have to be around. Second life has stopped me from going cabin crazy, has perhaps saved my life. But you know I'm actually one of the lucky ones. My wife, is little by little, getting better and Jacobs autism isn't all that bad and he may even lead something resembling a normal (whatever that means) life. There are others for which Second Life is even more of a lifesaver.
I will only mention one person, anonymously, as I think she does not wish this knowledge to affect her Second Life. Oh, it is a she, but I won't say any more than that about her. She is also autistic, quite severely, to the point that she can only understand spoken conversation with extreme effort. Not only that, she also has another condition that means she looks like a child even though she isn't. In real life conversation's with her are a trial as she needs to speak through written text, but her uniqueness often so confuses so called normal others that they are unable to talk with her. This is not the case in Second Life. Here as she uses text her speech difficulties are unnoticeable, and she looks like, well, how she wants to look.
My avatar has blue hair, is young, good looking, and a bit effeminate, but in RL I'm bald, fat, broken nosed and old, and....Who cares! She, she, ahhh, your not getting me that easy!
I have used these two examples to make the point, that in these times of knee jerk reactions from Linden Labs where they are shutting down avenue after avenue of expression within second life, Second Life is still an object of value and not just frivolously, at that. That I think Linden is being a little slap dash with this fantastic commodity to the world, this a shared self created universe, it should protect itself. Second Life should have it's own laws, decided by the citizens of Second Life.
Ok Yah, it's a dictatorship, theoretically, and virtually, but what's that got to do with what's right! Also, and more pertinently, Second life should be based in more than one country, it should be a distributed system with appropriate fail safes. It should, in short sell itself, whilst there is still something left to sell! Let other companies run the sim, parts of it, nationally. There should be built into this overhauled design the ability for these sims to run alone, or in conjunction with others to avoid crashes or attacks from real world governments.
Sure, Linden could keep the copyright and perhaps charge ridiculous fee's for updates to prospective buyers, but then any one country on some whim couldn't close it down.
Could you close down the Internet?
Maybe once upon a time, but now?
I know companies can buy the code and can choose to link it to the sim but this is not the same. These companies are running it for themselves, as platforms for their expression. Areas could and should be run independently. Issues of who you pay could be worked out on a percentage system, and if one node is closed down, fail safe financial issues could be planned for in advance. It isn't an impossible task, just one that requires intelligent planning.
All that I am waiting for, dreading, is some politician, looking for some publicity ticket, to focus on Second Life, and that would be it, the end. Because they could do it.
The USA Government could shut down Second Life tomorrow, but not if it was a distributed system run in various countries. Even a UK politician could do it. They could raise issue about VAT or purchase tax on transactions within Second Life. Sure, a lot of us pay purchase tax to buy L$, but since when does that matter to the tax departments of the world. There are a lot of ways they could do it.
All I'm saying is; Linden Labs, protect your own interests, and ours. You bring something of value to the world, with or without realising it and don't let it go down the pan trying to milk it of the last possible dollar.

MEET Cogsworth Linden................

During some of my frequent treks to live music concerts on Second Life I've run into Cogsworth Linden. I Recently asked him for a interview and he gladly obliged. Some of the questions I asked were recommended by friends. Here is what he had to say..
Delinda Dyrssen: Hi Cogsworth. I understand your one of the newest Lindens, however you were a regular SL user before you were hired by LindenLabs. What has this experience been like for you?
Cogsworth Linden: Well, I have found it to be a lot of fun. I'm big into virtual worlds, and was a long time EQ + EQ2 player. Second Life, as a Resident , allowed me to do things I couldn't do in a prefabbed game world. As a Linden, well, I've worked in QA and Release management as my profession , so now I get to blend my worlds even closer.
DD: What exactly is your job with Linden labs... what do they pay you to do?
CL: I am a Quality Assurance (QA) tester. I work on testing all aspects of LindenLab products, helping developers identify root causes of bugs in SL.
DD: Great job! Big responsibilities...that brings me to an important issue with residents as I'm sure you already know. What is your position, and where does LindenLabs stand on the argument between new features versus bug fixes?
CL: Well, our big focus right now is stability, and we have several teams working on all aspects of that from network infrastructure to viewer and server code. We also have a few teams working to add features, in order to provide more opportunities and allow more creative use of the tools we provide. Many of the new features we are working on are to help make the use of Second Life easier to use as well as more attractive to be in. Many of our stability fixes we are implementing also will form the backbone of new features. Such as Havok 4 which greatly improves sim performance and stability,
DD: So Havok 4 to sum it up is an improvement in features and better stability? This sounds like quite a task!
CL: Yes. It's a huge one we are doing now. Initially, we are implementing it to improve stability, and as we move on, we will be able to take more advantage of newer features. Sidewinder (Linden) has been doing a fantastic job on keeping Havok 4 going.
DD: In the dictionary I use.. the first definition of the word “Havoc” is.. "great destruction or devastation; ruinous damage". Why was this name chosen for this project?
CL: It is not our name. Havok has been the physics engine we have incorporated into Second Life. It is used in many other games. http://www.havok.com/.
DD: Then LindenLabs is off the hook on that one. (Smiles). Two more questions about the near future of SL. 1.) Will we see a capability for more groups to be member of? 2.) Will it get easier for new people.. (in particular the non computer savvy ) to come into SL and stay around?
CL: On groups.. I expect that as we re-factor our infrastructure, we will be able to do that. Everyone here (at LindenLabs) wants to raise that limit as well. Also, our next big focus is ease of use. we have a team working on improving the UI and making it easier. I'm not sure if its the biggest issue, but we are very aware of the need to improve the casual user's experience. Just to warn ya .. we don't have any timetable for these two issues, but we are working on them.
DD: Thats good new to our readers I'm sure. Now few more questions about Cogsworth....
CL: Heh sure..
DD: I met you at a live music event and have seen you at a few. Your obviously a big fan! Tell me a little about your love of live music in SL?
CL: Attending live music is always great fun, but more so in Second life, as I don't have to worry about driving, parking, dinner, where's the bathroom.. etc. I have heard more live music in a month on SL that I have in RL plus, I get to hear musicians from all over, not just local. There is a huge variety now, and getting bigger. I get to listen to stuff that I might not normally seek out and it is very interactive. as most the musicians monitor the chat, and respond over their stream so its usually a lot more intimate than a RL venue.
DD: I'm with you 100 % on that! What was your most embarrassing moment in SL as Cogsworth or even before you were with Lindenlabs?
CL: hmm... have to think about that. (Cogsworth pauses for a moment). I tend not to get embarrassed too much. :) I like to laugh, and don't mind laughing at myself.
DD: Thats a good attitude! ...Have you ever Googled your SL name?
CL: I did, just this week. Found a nice few blog posts and pictures. :)
DD: Well your very photogenic with that av of yours... did you design it?
CL: Nope. I would love to build my own AVie at some point.. but just don't have the time. This is the Steam Hatchling from the cathedral in the dragon lands. It's made by Daryth Kennedy. I added the hat and wrench.
DD: Last question. What can you me Linden labs and the residents of SL do to combat the negative press SL gets from the Real World... especially on websites many of us have been seeing lately?
CL: Well, there will always be negative stories. The best thing we can do is let people know what can be done, and how it enables people to explore their creativity, and how it helps many people who might not otherwise have a chance to be creative and socialize to reach out. The Early show on WBZ. TV here in Boston has run a few segments on that.
Delinda Dyrssen: Thank You Cogsworth.. now I know your busy so go ahead and get out there... keep turning those wrenches and finding those bugs! Were depending on you out here!!Cogsworth Linden: Thank you very much!