What? Second life for business! #DofD

I attended a ‘mixed reality’ conference about ‘working virtually’ called Death of Distance. 

Naturally, I attended it virtually, to get the full experience. This consisted of a Second Life platform and video streams from the ‘Real Life’ event in Manchester and a stream from Newcastle.

Here’s a confession for you, I used to play a lot of Role Playing Games (RPG’s) on the interwebs, which is essentially what Second Life is. Only back in my day, we just used crudely drawn pictures of our characters and wrote stuff that we were “saying” and *doing* (in-joke) on forums rather than actually interacting virtually with moving characters and what-not. Although I haven’t really used Second Life, I was interested in having a go.

I’m all for virtual working. Admittedly there are still larger companies that struggle at it because of IT rules and legislation but there are plenty of companies that do it comfortably. Especially small, creative, young companies. But saying that, the research agency I work for, Virtual Surveys (which is 10 years old) built its business on being virtual and they do it very well indeed.

BUT, what the discussion was more about was working using virtual worlds such as Second Life and this is precisely where the discussion let me down.

Even though I entered the world excited, open-minded and ready to learn, the scepticism started to infect me early on, like a disease. The software had to be downloaded, it was massive. And I needed add-ons like Quicktime. I had to learn how to use it and make my avatar (Which is a whole other story around cultural and personal issues). And this is what any first time user will have to do. Pain-in-the-arse. Especially since were all moving towards Cloud Computing, I don’t have as much memory as I used to and HATE downloading ANYTHING.

In-World (More lingo) was full of massive advocates for the business use of Second Life (events, conferences, team building, networking) but they all seemed to be developers for the platform. I got into arguments with them.

This is what led me to my first thought and question: EVENTS. I run events and would love to cut costs by running events virtually. Sounds great on paper, but there seem to be so many barriers with this and each one I could write an essay on: Technology, culture, use, in-world audience, lingo.

Sure, people are having successes with them, but is it a novelty? Does it have longevity? I would LOVE to know.

Then we move on to business use: What are the demographics of Second Life like internally? I don’t know, but would they be useful for me to network with? I can’t see myself allocating time for networking in second life. If I wanted to run conferences virtually or speak to clients or work with colleagues – I would want to see their (real) FACE (No particular reason for capitalisation, I just like the word FACE) and hear their voices. I don’t think I’m being old fashioned here, but I think some sort of collaboration software with video (which, by the way, didn’t end up working at all at DofD in-world), voice and text would be more fit for purpose.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, because companies are seeing results and there are creative agencies like Corporation Pop doing exciting things. But I am yet to be convinced - unfortunatly the platform clouded the content at this event (Irony?) . I just can’t see the business benefits of flying around a virtual world watching other virtual people (or animals or aliens) having virtual sex.  

Oooo, controversial.

FOOTNOTE: Just a thought: Virtual networking was almost nill on Twitter for this event. @chesha a twitter follower just tweeted this at me: "thought you had one of your I'm-a-massive-social-media-hipster parties yesterday? I just checked and you were only one virtual-hipstering" Maybe Second Lifers don't virtually network that well?