Singapore’s enthusiastic approach to technology adoption is well known and their sponsorship of the first State of Play conference held outside the US is typically entrepreneurial. The iN2015 Masterplan outlines a vision for Singapore as the world stock exchange for digital content. It’s a vision that includes virtual worlds, perhaps the first ‘whole of government’ approach to that technology. I look forward to an involvement.

One of the striking things about the virtual world conferences I’ve attended is their multi-disciplinary nature. Researchers, non-profits, business people, educators and here, a very strong legal contingent.

An objective of the conference was to bridge west and east and some progress was made behind the scenes. In the open sessions though it was very much the westerners giving forth and the asian groups sitting at the back of the room taking it all in. The panels on intellectual property in virtual worlds included the splendidly named western experts Roxanne Christ and M. Scott Boone. Using this protocol I would be B. Robert Treasure; it’s just not that impressive. I don’t mind BB Treasure or B. Winchester Treasure or B. (the Kiosk) Treasure but I’m drifting off-topic. Nick Abrahams was also on the panel; he really needs to be Nicholas Abrahams III.

The westerners expertly reviewed the shifting sands of IP law and sat back for questions. The first man to the microphone spoke through a translator. Judge Unggi Yoon outlined his thoughts on private and public ownership of IP in South Korea, where more time is spent gaming than watching television. Half way through his discourse the whole mood of the room changed. A collective humility descended on the westerners. It was as if we’d been discussing the future of the internet without the Americans. The panelists acknowledged the need to look at developments in South Korea more closely and another little dent appeared in the wall of western omniscience. Neils Clark from Gamasutra [K. Neils BOSON Clark] noticed the same effect in another session.

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You had to feel sorry for Mike Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, a sponsor of the event. As principal of the virtual world, THERE, he had to sit through a conference dominated by discussions about his better known competitor, Second Life. Probably 80% of discussion was SL-centric. A number of people asked rhetorically which virtual environments will predominate in the future but for the most part, the future is created out of the conversations we are having now. Those conversations are about Second Life and they create their own momentum. To quote Harvard’s Charles Nesson on educational research, “Second Life is the best there’s out there. So you use the tool that cuts the sharpest”.

Ricoh is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of copiers, fax systems and printers. Our Second Life build for them is a three storey high replica of an Aficio photocopier housing a showroom with working replicas of their latest photocopiers. We’ve been dealing with the Belgian subsidiary who used the facility for a launch presentation to dealers. One employee went into the showroom and big-screened to the real-life gathering.

This is an approach that minimises the risks inherent in bringing all the dealers into Second Life as ‘newbs’. It has less impact also, but the company now has the ability to manageably host those dealers who have an interest. Thanks to principal builders Lucius Templar and Hasu Kuramoto, whose attention to detail left the client completely delighted.

Advertising began with line ads in newspapers in the 17th century. A product description and a price, for a hundred and fifty years until the technology allowed illustrations and eventually color. Illustration saw advertisers link their products to fine art, hitching their products to the emotional, so that Pears Soap started to stand for the innocence of a clean, healthy child and all the positive nuances of parenting, instead of just animal fat.

As advertising discovered the moving image, or vice-versa, the products moved still further into the background. Teenagers on the beach and a pop music soundtrack cut deep grooves into the brains of the Coke generation. A logo and some product shots; bob’s your uncle.

Self-image by association; I drink therefore I am.

And the other vital connection: the conflation in the human mind between high production values and product image. Not so important if you’re marketing a product in the third world to be culturally appropriate. If your television advertisement is prettier and sexier than the local product’s, your brand will be seen that way too. In most parts of the world, America exported its special effects and successfully positioned its brands as sophisticated and modern.

It’s the brand, stupid. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like, it matters what the brand conjures up in the mind. This has been understood by modern advertisers since Coke and the Marlboro Man. All this you already know.

I mention it as an analog for what is about to happen in virtual marketing, because in this space, the virtual products are sexier looking than the real life products. What does this mean for branding?

It might mean that you don’t need to depict your real-world product in Second Life. Don’t take your dumb plain red t-shirts into Second Life. But that doesn’t mean there is no branding opportunity. Look for a product or experience in Second Life that adds something to your brand’s story. Then export it into the real world.

Enlarge the brand’s share of brain by exercising the client’s imagination. If the person you’re advertising to already knows your brand, you probably don’t need to show it to them again. Or remind them of its features. Maybe you don’t even need to mention it. Instead, give people a virtual experience that increases their involvement with your brand. I know this contradicts a lot of marketing orthodoxy. Frequency, frequency, frequency. Burn your name into their consciousness. But the thing is, brands are stories. They need to evolve. Virtual worlds offer up that opportunity.

If you’re a fashion house, create a space for fashion parades and invite in-world designers to exhibit. Then bring your trade partners in to Second Life. Give them a thousand Lindens and force them to choose between the designs they see. Ask them why they chose the ones they did. Try the outfits on. Engage your clients; create virtual relationships with people you normally only talk to on the telephone. Expand the scope of relationships. Use the virtual world to add some style or fun to your brand.

You supply veterinary products? Take your clients dancing on the lawns among the giraffes. Then send them a real-world product presentation the next day with a giraffe soft-toy.

Don’t be too literal. You sell risk-management software? Take your people virtual skydiving. Give their avatar an animation that has them juggling knives. Fire them out of a cannon. Then give them a video of that happening.

Personalize your brand. Take the example of a health and beauty brand. Bring a client in, take them shopping, give them a make-over and put the before and after photos on a web page for them. Branding and identity are closely linked and helping someone enhance their appearance in a virtual world is a powerful bonding experience.

Properly engineered, the virtual world can supply a context for a brand that helps you tell a story. Biased I know, but Inside This World’s Holodecks are the best tool for doing this. Promote your range of luggage by constructing different hotel lobbies and airports around it, promote your beer by giving people outrageously stylish bars, promote your bank with virtual sports cars and swimming pools.

Your brand is no longer an logo. Your brand is an experience.

Second Life continues to nose cone social issues. Linden Lab recently flagged the introduction of optional identity and age verification.

Yesterday the official Linden blog included an article titled “Keeping Second Life Safe Together“; an Orwellian post that will generate a fierce backlash from what may be the most liberal community in the world. Encouraging people to notify Linden Lab about “broadly offensive and potentially illegal content” sends shivers down my spine. Who is to define ‘broadly offensive’? Mutual fantasies among consenting adults should not be the subject of censorship.

Mostly, I expect the policy changes are reactions to criticism of age play in the environment. This is a business decision. Any publicity to do with age play damages the wholesomeness that the Disneys of the world require. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were both 16 by the way. Commercial pressures are driving Linden Lab towards the mainstream and away from the interesting fringes which have the potential to influence our social development as a species. I’d rather they had a little less success as a business and a little more success as social engineer.

Here is what precipitated the changes. Report Mainz, a news program in Germany recently covered an age play “scandal” in Second Life, having taken a video of two people role-playing illicit sex. The story frustrated members of the role-playing community in Second Life on two fronts. Firstly, it didn’t mention that two willing participants were involved, i.e. they were role-playing. Secondly, neither person was under-age. Just shoddy journalism.

The story is that the two people involved in the role-play were banned by Linden Lab from Second Life. If they were two consenting adults acting out private fantasies I would be arguing they should not have been banned. In this case, it is said they were charging people to watch the rape scene. You could argue that this is a way of publishing pornography and that the ban is justifiable on those grounds. I’m not so sure. Were they charging $100 or just $1 to stop newbs stumbling in?

The problem is not that people fantasize. Fantasy is universal, stimulating and perhaps even therepeutic. The problem is that some men cannot control their behaviour in the real world. As I understand it, this has to do with aberrant upbringings where there is a lack of love. Boys who are physically or emotionally abused, boys who are not loved and boys who are ostracised are likely to become abusive in adulthood. Their attempts at rape or abuse are a reaction to their sense of powerlessness. Fundamentally that is what needs to be addressed.

Only by treating the current generation of the powerless can we hope to protect the next generation from falling into the same pattern but nothing tried to date (education, publicity, ad-hoc counselling…) has worked. Perhaps a more positive attitude towards fantasy and role-play is a way forward?

Violence and sexual fantasies are normal parts of human make-up. Let me put it this way. If you’re an adult male and you’ve never fantasized about punching someone’s lights out or you’ve never fantasized about having sex with someone underaged, just put a comment to that effect on this blog entry. We can try and suppress our violent/sexual urges and pretend they don’t exist or we can look for ways of expressing these urges which do not harm other people.

I know two ladies in Second Life who were sexually abused as girls. Both enjoy role-playing sexual “victims”. One of them explained to me that this has helped her deal with what happened to her in the real world. In role-play she has control and power in the scene. As a little girl she felt powerless and assumed that what was happening was her fault. Through role-play she has formed a positive new interpretation of who she is as a sexual being.

I haven’t spoken to any men who say they’ve abused women, so I don’t know if they are using the role-play positively.

The role-play in Second Life also creates a community of people who have had similar experiences. They can be anonymous and share openly what’s happened to them in a social situation on their own terms instead of in a serious analytical or clinical context. I submit that those contexts are not always conducive to healing.

I believe that role-play of the sort being practised in Second Life is a healthy thing, even when it involves age-play. It lets abused people externalize their experiences anonymously in a safe environment. Furthermore, stories get told to people who’ve had no exposure to such things. As such there is an educational benefit to the broader community. These stories should be heard.

Where are the psychology and research professions on this? They should be active in this debate.

Gartner’s prediction that 80% of internet users will be in virtual worlds within four years is already bouncing around the blogosphere. Don’t percentages lend a lovely credibility to a forecast? Would you believe them if they said 79%?

Their advice to clients: investigate and experiment with, but limit substantial financial investments until the environments stabilize and mature. Good advice, if somewhat obvious. Almost all corporate investments will be in the range of $20,000 – $100,000. That buys you a lot of Second Life and it’s not going to break the bank of any Gartner client.

Gartner has ‘identified five laws’ for companies entering virtual worlds. It’s clear on reading them that Gartner don’t actually have a working definition for what constitutes a law, however there is sound thinking in what Steve Prentice says. Which is to say, I agree with him. Here are my thoughts on his five laws.

1. Yes, it is a mistake to approach Second Life as a sales channel.
2. Yes, if you’re a big name, you’re going to be a target. Look what some wits did with the clothing given away to promote the movie 300. (Link via New World Notes).
3. Yes, it is a mistake to approach Second Life as a sales channel. Evidently this law applies twice. I see Second Life as an interactive 3D advertising channel, as an interactive entertainment medium and as a global micro-economy.
4. Yes, if you’re a big name, you’re going to be a target. Three laws were never going to be enough.
5. Yes, there may well be a merging of virtual worlds into open-sourced environments with a single, universal client. That process will be driven by Linden Lab and Second Life will be the underlying platform for all virtual worlds. Here’s why:

Virtual worlds rely on sophisticated user content. The users (animators, graphic artists, programmers, entrepreneurs) are already embedded in Second Life; they’ve invested a lot of time in learning how it all works and they’re not going to want to leave behind their social networks and their body of work.

When these people take their content into other environments, there will need to be rules that govern ownership and transfer of ownership. Those rules will be the Second Life “permissions”. Other virtual worlds will need to conform to these. It makes Linden Lab the legislature for virtual world economies going forward.

Here are my five laws by the way:

1. Establish a presence
2. Involve your own employees
3. Focus on the collaboration side
4. Involve your own employees
5. Focus on the collaboration side
6. Work with really smart consultants

My Second Life Development company, Inside This World, recently attended the International Technology Expo (ITE). The product we were demonstrating, the Holodeck, was joint winner of the People’s Choice award for best technology. Over sixty companies exhibited.

A nice acknowledgement of our scripting skills (pats Loki Clifton on back). We are also extremely strong in architecture, lay claim to some marketing knowledge and have an experienced machinima team.

We recently signed our second multinational client and are working with a third in the entertainment industry.

Contemplating a move to a larger city. Perth is about as interesting as cold fish and chips. It’s ironic but real life meetings seem even more important in cementing virtual world business relationships.

Email is the fire that fans the internet. Hidden amongst untold millions of boring, static web pages are tiny pockets of original content. Yes, there are RSS feeds and sites which aggregate content but how do you find most of the good stuff? It’s probably through people you trust sending you emails which link to web content.

I’m contrasting the static nature of the web page with the viral nature of emails. A good internet meme will hitch a ride on emails and travel the world in a day. It can bounce around for weeks or months, reaching huge disparate audiences, crashing web servers with unexpected surges in traffic. Meanwhile, your web page will sit there, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for people to visit.

This is true of Second Life also. Under the guidance of developers who profit from such things, corporates are making the mistake of valuing the static over the viral. Building edifices that nobody visits. See, even if you built a pretty edifice and people were excited to visit it (I hate to have to tell you this…) you can’t fit more than 40 or so at a time given the server load limitations. Aren’t you better off concentrating on sending your message through Second Life using viral means? That way you stand a chance of reaching a decent sized audience.

You can do this by harnessing the beast that is Second Life permissions. An object (invitation, animation, item of clothing) can be made copyable and transferable, giving people the ability to pass around unlimited copies to their Second Life friends and acquaintances. This is a great sampling facility if only you can design an attractive enough object. No, Sun Microsystems, a T-shirt or coffee cup bearing your logo is not that object.

Viral objects are an underused promotional strategy in Second Life.

There are a number of ways you could go about executing such a strategy, but one of the most powerful ways is to use a Holodeck, a product developed by my business partner Loki Clifton at Inside This World. The Holodeck allows companies to build indoor or outdoor 3D scenes and give them away as transferable objects. These branded scenes can then bounce around Second Life from one person to another.

Apart from its viral nature, the virtue of this approach is that you can build a scene that gives people a context for your product…

“Not a bottle of wine, a five-star restaurant. Not a raincoat, a walk in the rain. Not a range of glassware, a shooting gallery.”

When they have that 3D scene they can walk around in it, invite friends in to it, socialise using it and generally take advantage of the interactive nature of the medium. This will be a powerfully memorable experience for those who participate and we invite corporates interested in virtual world branding to consider it.

Visit the link for pictures and full details about the Holodeck, which we see as the first 3D viral advertising medium.

Okay, the Four Corners program. I don’t understand why all the Current Affairs programs in the world don’t share the same footage on Second Life. In case you’re planning to make your own, here is the format to use:

Send in a journalist who has no experience in the environment
Get him or her to report on how they put their avatar together
Interview the same people in Second Life that everyone else interviews
Talk about Anshe Chung because she made a million dollars
Talk about money a lot, and tax
Show dancing (people like colour and movement)
Show the same real-life companies who’ve gone into Second Life that everyone else shows
Interview people who spend 12 hours a day online and present them as typical
Interview Ted Castranova about the economics of virtual worlds
Interview Philip Rosedale, the founder of the business
Interview Clay Shirky, because he’s a professional critic of Second Life
Mix in footage from World of Warcraft without explaining that it’s not Second Life
Cover every controversy you can in as little detail as possible

This is not to say the 4 Corners doco was poorly researched; it was fine. But the pressure to present diverse, fast-moving analysis means a confusing picture and no depth. Quality investigative reporting of the type 4 Corners has sometimes delivered in the past requires more.

Second Life gives us a platform we can use to examine, re-define and experiment with identity, relationships, cooperation, economics, community, governance, communication and institutions. It looks like we’ll have to wait until each media outlet has done several ‘what is Second Life’ stories until they deliver any serious examination of these opportunities.

I am a big fan of the ABC and a loyal listener to Radio National. Herewith some critical comments relating to the ABC’s Second Life presence. (When will this guy say something POSITIVE?) Disclosure: I did offer to consult to the ABC last year and they declined.

There are a number of technical and navigational problems with the build I won’t go into here. Those interested can do the tour on SL Tourguides and get the full story.

The textures and build are not high quality which reflects poorly on the organisation. Compare the NBC build for example. But more important, the personality of the different ABC entities does not come through. The ABC is a conglomerate of very different media. Triple J is a youth radio network and should look KEWL. Radio National should have intellectual feel. Local radio has a ‘folky’ feel. ABC TV news should be stiff and old fashioned looking (do they do that on purpose?).

At present the island is a jumble of different areas; ecology, indigenous culture, alien building contest … these are not tied to any of the ABC’s brands; neither are they tied to a central purpose.

Is the purpose of the island to help brand the ABC internationally? Is its purpose to discuss Australian issues or to present Australian viewpoints on international issues? Is it a vehicle for re-purposing existing content or a dialogue with some of the internet’s most sophisticated users? The answers would help select content and determine a style of presentation. As it currently stands (early days of course) it’s an island in search of an idea.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to clearly think through what you’re trying to achieve before you embark on a building program in Second Life.

There are lots of visitors to the island and the ABC Friends group will provide input. The feedback will be valuable but it will be diverse. Forming it into a coherent direction will be challenging. Leadership needed here.

Clients are starting to ask their ad agencies and digital ad agencies about Second Life. Last week I did a series of presentations to Australian agencies about the virtual world, trying to explain it to people who in some cases have not yet experienced it. In those cases it was like trying to explain television to Sitting Bull. ‘No, listen to me again. The people are not INSIDE the SCREEN’.

The presentation covered what people actually do in Second Life and how their involvement changes over time. But it also addressed the fundamental: What is Second Life? Here is a summary of that section.

Firstly, it is a new medium. You can argue about how fast it will grow and how big it will get but be very clear that people relate to this medium in a different way to any other. Given that it is a commercial platform, is growing quickly and is more immersive than television or the internet, it should be of interest.

Secondly, the thing that distinguishes Second Life from other media is that it provides a shared sense of space. This gives rise to remote intimacy, the glue for virtual sex, social networking and rapid business relationships. A digression: one of the happy accidents of Second Life development was that server constraints limited most events and clubs to 40 or 50 avatars. Research by Christopher Allen into group sizes of online groups shows that 40 to 60 people is the most common group size. I believe this accidental limitation has helped preserve intimacy and has been important in the formation of early Second Life culture.

We’re up to thirdly. Thirdly, Second Life is an international micro-economy. Real world limitations brought about by transaction costs do not apply in virtual worlds and products can be sold profitably for fractions of a dollar. More so than on the Internet where financial institutions take their cut and where delivery charges apply to physical goods.

Fourthly, we have here a whole new structure under which business models can be tested. Reseller network structures can be tested. Different ways of product sampling, different ways of involving your customers, different models of product support…

Fifthly, Second Life is part of a broader trend towards user-generated content. But whereas MySpace and YouTube have pre-defined structures for the content, Second Life is much more open-ended.

Sixthly; the compelling social experience. People also form very strong social links in computer game environments, but games are goal-driven and limited by the parameters set by game designers. In Second Life, the social experience derives from shared real-world experiences (eg groups of real-world librarians) or shared in-world experiences (role-play, concerts, clubs, controversies). The lack of an objective gives people time to pursue whatever interests they have – people have been known to flirt here. Self-expression, anonymity and beauty are key factors in the equation. Are you reading between the lines yet?

Seventhly. Interactive information. The ability to walk around a piece of mining equipment, press the button, watch the chamber fill with liquid and see the consequences of not correctly matching the PURGE and the FILL rate. Educational institutions and non-profits are pushing the envelope here. There are implications for business in how to communicate more powerfully.

Eighthly and I just love the way that word is spelt: Second Life in its early stages is a replica of the real world. People unthinkingly duplicate the way that things work in the real world, not understanding that the physical limitations which caused us to act that way do not exist in a virtual environment. There is no need for Sony to sell music packaged like real world CDs. They could sell you underwear that plays music. Through the imaginative use of this creative medium, real life companies can add value to their brands. Give me a call if you’d like to discuss. 714 656 4001.