Susan Wu, of Charles River Ventures, doesn’t think so. She mentions the standard litany of problems with Second Life: high barrier to entry (in terms of using the interface and creating anything), closed standards, and so on. When I take the dropcloth off the giant crystal ball that inhabits my living room, I see a number of big problems for SL. Keep in mind that despite my pessimism and snarkiness about Second Life, it is growing at a healthy pace, though it’s still not profitable as far as I know. Nothing like the pace Linden or their media fluffers trumpet of course, but it is growing.

1. Scaling of business process.
Philip Rosedale, Linden’s founder and CEO, has claimed that technologically, Second Life is “perfectly scalable.” Is it? There’s really no way for an outsider to know if Philip is being unreasonably confident, but claiming that anything you do is perfect sets off my BS meter a little. Everything has practical limits, and scale always means new frictions are created. This is hardly a problem unique to them though, and the folks on Linden Way are smart people.

2. Media backlash.
Second Life is a media darling currently, with new stories (that are mainly puff pieces) appearing frequently. What happens when the journos do a little digging and discover SL’s underbelly? In particular, I’m referring to the ‘ageplay’ that goes on there. Essentially, users create avatars that look like children, and cyber with adult avatars. I don’t care what people want to do sexually among consenting adults, so I don’t object to this….but I find it takes a real application of will to avoid defaulting to the condemnation point of view that most of the public would almost certainly subscribe to. I don’t know what Linden’s official stance on ageplay is, but I’m told that it’s tolerated (which I applaud, if reluctantly). Were Linden to engage in a blanket “hands-off” policy that might fly as a defense to at least some portion of the population, but they do seem to censor some content, such as Nazi imagery (link is to SL’s Police Blotter, so the Nazi reference will end up getting pushed off it unless you’re reading this within a week or so of my posting it).

Actually, I don’t know Second Life well enough to intelligently comment on the specifics of how they handle what censorship (fairly limited I gather) they do engage in. Any Second Life devotees that care to explain what their policy is vis a vis the tolerance of ageplay but not of Nazi symbolism, for instance?

(And while the issue doesn’t seem likely to get much press, Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture comments on Susan’s post as well, and asks whether Second Life’s enormous energy requirements would render it ecologically unsustainable.)

3. Competition.
Second Life is thus far the most popular of the real descendants of text MOOs, like the now-famous LambdaMoo. It’s the first graphical virtual world that has been able to come close to replicating the capabilities of a text MOO, and of course has also gone places that MOOs never had a reason to go: the commercial realm. However, everyone including, I’m sure, Linden itself, recognizes that the implementation of the idea has resulted in a service/product that doesn’t really live up to expectation. Second Life could be a victim of its own press. All the attention has no doubt whetted the appetite of more than one venture investor, and Linden has no monopoly on creating creaky technology. A polished competitor could bury it, though the barrier to creating polished competition to Second Life’s capabilities is hardly insignificant.

4. In-world Terrorism
Sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but Second Life, like the MOOs it is descended from, is very susceptible to user-based attacks on the fundamental service it operates. Further, due to the nature of what it provides, it’s not always able to pre-emptively stop these attacks (which involve things like self-replicating objects that overload the servers) without also disabling a valuable portion of user functionality. To those of you familiar with Achaea, this can be summed up as being something analogous to Achaea’s PK system: We don’t hardcode restrictions on PK in order to stop PK offences because by doing so we would be restricting legitimate PK as well as griefing PK. The big difference, though, is that you can’t use PK to bring down our servers.

What if an organized group of users, with access to wide ranges of IPs around the world, decided they’d had enough of Linden’s courting of major corporations, and aim to disrupt the world until Linden complies with their demands. If Blizzard (which has far more resources than Linden) can’t keep gold farmers off their servers, is there any reason to believe that Linden could keep similarly motivated in-world “terrorists” off their servers?

I like to think that Linden’s management would handle things with more competence than certain other governing bodies have handled terrorism, but it is difficult to see what they’d do with, for instance, a group of users that feels betrayed and is past the point of interest in compromise. How do you stop them without locking down the ability to affect the world that is the raison d’etre of Second Life? I know you’re all seeing the parallels to post-9/11 America, but Linden potentially has it worse. Terrorists can’t “take down America,” for example. They can hurt America some, but even dropping a nuclear bomb on an entire city isn’t going to “take down” America the way a flood of self-replicating objects, for instance, can take down Second Life. (It’s harder than the movies would have you believe to start a disease/plague that kills half the world, and you can’t stop it killing half of your part of the world as well very effectively.)

5. The Shiny Wears Off
I think this is the biggest risk Second Life faces, and it’s certainly not unique to SL. I just don’t think the platform provides intrinsic value to very many people who aren’t entertained by simply creating things in world. Thus far, as an entertainment product, it’s failed to really capture the interest of the public in the way a Runescape or World of Warcraft has.

I don’t think SL is looking to or capable of growing all that large on the basis of an entertainment/socialization product. But what is there beyond that? The commercial angle? Few people make anything beyond pocket change with Second Life, and from a non-SL user’s perspective, there is absolutely zero reason to create an avatar and enter Second Life to order a pair of Nike’s when it is simply easier to do it on the web. It doesn’t add any value to the process except for those who are interested in the process (doing it in Second Life) rather than the result (getting your shoes). Any of the big companies entering Second Life to make money in it (rather than to just generate a quick and cheap press release that shows the company “gets it” or some other cliche) are in for a disappointing surprise, I think.

And what is Wells Fargo or NBC going to think when people start asking them, “Why are you associating with a company that encourages paedophilia?” Those kinds of questions are going to get asked at some point, and Linden is not going to have an easy time defusing that bomb. People don’t tend to be all that reasonable where this subject is concerned, and I’m not sure they’re going to listen to the reasons for Linden’s toleration of it (which again, I applaud them for, but very quietly.)