Gigs Shrugged

The passage below is reminder of how far Linden Lab has gone from their original dream of being “bigger than the web”.  Self-limiting decisions such as this “adult ghetto”, banning people for “unacceptable fantasies”, and in general, moving further and further from the concept of a common carrier, and turning into something more and more like AOL in 1995…  a sandboxed playground for kids and people who can’t figure out how to use anything better.

Linden Lab wrote, in December 2006:

We could never write a set of rules that would work for all people all the time, nor could we enforce them across a population that is growing so rapidly. Instead, we believe that the best way to foster communication and expression is to put power into the hands of the people by giving you better tools for local control. And that’s what we’ve been doing for several months now. [...]
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Not being able to directly answer questions posed by players of the ARG was probably the most difficult part of running the Shanti ARG. I’m writing this so that I can document some of the thought and responses I have, before I forget them.

What is Shanti?

Well, if you haven’t heard by now, it was the development codename for what is now Meerkat, the OpenMetaverse Foundation viewer.

What was the point of the Shanti ARG?

I thought of it as a fun way to promote the Open Metaverse Foundation viewer, and also to help boost interest in SLCC itself, and my Open Source track. What it turned into was more, I think. The intimacy surprised me. People seemed to actually have strong reactions to the shanti game, at least, as strong as reactions can be over a web site.

Is Shanti just a ploy to get people to work together?

This question was an interesting one. At times I definitely wanted people to work together more. I felt like the early crypto challenges were being solved by a select few people. I wanted to come up with a challenge that encouraged a lot of people to participate.

This wasn’t only a ploy to get more traffic and exposure, though that was in the back of my mind. The result was the book cipher key that was spread out by IP address. Because you only got one part of the key based on what your IP address was, it ensured that at least 10-20 people needed to be actively involved in the solution.

Is Shanti just advertising for a shitty product?

Well, this question bothered me the most. Are these sort of things ever something other than advertising when you get down to it? Sure, it’s advertising, but it’s not really a product. Meerkat/Open Metaverse viewer is something new.

No one company or individual will own the open metaverse. I look forward to working with Linden Lab and the developer community we all work together to build it. One of the initial points of agreement that everyone had at the first meeting of the Architecture Working Group in San Francisco was that in order for the Second Life architecture to become a global standard, there must be multiple implementations.

Anyway it’s a long answer to say, “Yes, I think the hype is justified.” What we are building here is fundamentally different from what anyone has attempted to date. An independent, fully open source, community involved, metaverse viewer.

Here is the tentative schedule and speaker list for the open source track at SLCC: