It never ceases to amaze me how I can take an already bad situation and make it worse. And yet that is exactly what I have done with Sansar. I don’t see any way that I can come back, given how neatly I have painted myself into a corner, so I have left the official Sansar Discord server. I won’t be back this time. I feel I have made a complete and utter mess of things, and those people who are angry with me have every right to be. I’m sorry.
To those whom I have hurt, thoughtlessly and needlessly, please accept my sincere apologies.
I don’t know where I go from here, but it’s clear I need to take a break from blogging.
I will be taking the entire month of February (four weeks) as vacation time from my paying job as a reference librarian at the University of Manitoba. And I’ve got a lot of things I plan to work on during that time off:
I have to work on my 45-minute presentation on Social VR and Libraries, which I will be giving at the 2020 Educators in VR International Summit, being held February 17th-22nd on various social VR platforms: AltspaceVR, ENGAGE, rumii, Mozilla Hubs, and Somnium Space. If you want to catch my presentation, it will be on Saturday, February 22nd, 2020 from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time, from the virtual Bodleian Library in ENGAGE and livestreamed to the other platforms—so be sure to get up early and brew some extra-strong coffee to stay awake! 😉
I will be teaching myself how to use the Adobe Premiere Pro video-editing software, as I will be taking over from Andrew William as producer and video editor for my show, the Metaverse Newscast, which is currently on hiatus as I work my way up the learning curve.
I need to clean my apartment, which is a Red Cross disaster area!
I need to continue to prepare for a potential 2019-nCoV pandemic. (And I hope that you are preparing too! Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.)
My blogging will probably be taking a bit of a back seat to these first four tasks, but I will continue to write sponsored blogposts for Sinespace, and I will blog at least one update per day on the rapidly-evolving Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV situation. Click here to read all my previous blogposts about 2019-nCoV. Yes, I am going to try and cover two completely separate topics on my blog!
Welcome to the new normal, where it would seem that everybody needs to learn how to juggle priorities and multitask in the face of competing demands on their time, and factor in unexpected emergencies!
A man lies dead in the street in Wuhan, China (source: The Guardian)
Between Australian bush fires, presidential impeachment hearings in the U.S. Senate, and the Wuhan coronavirus, 2020 is shaping up as a year to remember (not in a good way)—and January isn’t even over yet! This could be a long, long year.
Over the course of one week, I have switched from being a social VR/virtual worlds blogger to a Wuhan coronavirus blogger! Welcome to the new normal, folks. Expect me to flip back and forth between these two completely separate topics for the next little while.
It’s a good thing that I branded this blog with my own name, rather than a preset topic like “Social VR Blog”. It means I can be flexible as needed. So, I have updated the tagline for my blog accordingly:
I will be continuing my daily news update on 2019-nCoV, with links to the best, most credible information resources, so you can stay up-to-date on what’s going on as this virus continues its spread around the world.
And (to get my often-anxious mind off the topic), I will continue my blogposts about Sinespace, Second Life, and other virtual worlds and social VR platforms. It’s still my passion, it still engages me, and I will certainly be continuing that coverage.
I also need to work on my presentation at the upcoming Educators in VR conference which, unlike conferences which take place in real-world locations, is very unlikely to be affected by the flight cancellations and other logistical problems imposed by the Wuhan coronavirus!
So, as you can see, I’ve got lots to keep me busy over the next little while. Stay tuned, and stay healthy!
Now, before you all get your torches and pitchforks and tar and feathers out, and angrily run me out of town, I do want to reassure you: Second Life is still going to be around for many, many years. It still reliably generates millions of dollars of profit every year for Linden Lab, it still generates a fair income for a great many content creators, and it still has—at the ripe old age of 16—approximately half a million regular monthly users. Linden Lab would be absolutely crazy to shut down this cash cow, especially as their latest social VR platform, Sansar, is still struggling to attract users.
However.
Based on what happened in 2019 with High Fidelity, and based on the recent layoffs of much of the team building Sansar at Linden Lab, it is important for people to realize that these platforms are not charities run for the benefit of their users. These are private companies that are doing the best they can to provide value and generate income for their staff and investors, and they are accountable to management, boards of directors, and (in many cases) shareholders and venture capitalists—not to us.
Do not for one second assume that Second Life will be around forever. After observing how Linden Lab is handling the Good Ship Sansar, I am beginning to suspect that when they do decide to shut Second Life down, it will be sudden, unexpected, and brutal.
So how do you prepare for the inevitable? How do you deal with the loss of a beloved virtual world, which will happen someday in the future?
Well, here’s a few tips to get you started.
First, do a little personal research on the process of grieving. Whether you like to admit it or not, you will probably go through all of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
In other words, it is normal to feel bad after any loss, even a loss that you might not see as very significant at the time. Depending on how you use Second Life (ranging from an idle pastime to an essential source of income), your reactions to the eventual shuttering of SL are likely to vary. You may go through the steps of grief out of order, plunging directly into depression rather than denial (I myself often do this).
Second, remember this harsh truth: these are businesses, not utilities, charities or non-profits. As I mentioned up top, in business anything can and does happen, and it often happens unexpectedly. Sometimes companies are mismanaged into the ground. Sometimes companies have to do things that you as a user of their products might not like.
For example, it is within the realm of possibility that a behemoth company like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft buys out Linden Lab and shuts down Second Life, perhaps even to force them to migrate to one of their platforms. (We already saw this happen when Yahoo! bought up the short-lived virtual world Cloud Party, just to grab the programming talent, and then they shut that world down completely. They did hold a lovely farewell, though.)
So it’s probably best to try and reframe your perspective on Second Life. I admit that many people feel about Second Life the way that I felt about Sansar. Hell, even I sometimes feel that way about SL! But after I processed the shock of the sudden Sansar staff layoffs, I do consider myself more emotionally prepared for when the inevitable does happen, and Second Life does shut down. It’s a matter of when, not if.
I look at SL as a hobby, a way to pleasurably pass the time that satisfies my creative and social needs, and if it all goes away tomorrow, well, I had a wonderful time, I got to know some great people, and I will have many happy memories of countless hours of (mis)adventure. (And one hell of a lot of avatar makeovers!)
Third, it’s probably time to gently begin exploring other options. When Linden Lab shuts down Second Life, there will be a massive diaspora, who will likely land up in various successor social VR platforms and virtual worlds. However, the whole process will go a lot smoother if you do not put all your eggs in one basket.
Now would be a good time to see what Sinespace has to offer, for instance. Or perhaps you decide that Sansar is for you, after all. Or any one of the platforms in this spreadsheet I prepared last November (which I will try to keep up-to-date as the market changes and evolves). Who knows? Maybe you will be attracted to the upcoming Facebook Horizon (even if you can’t be whoever you want).
So get out there are explore alternative social VR/virtual worlds. In almost all cases, it costs you nothing to get started. And you might be pleasantly surprised to find a place you quite like, and want to spend a bit of time in. Having options is usually a good thing—and having options is a necessity if you are a content creator. Many designers and creators already have their brand in several different virtual worlds, and they will have some sort of cushion when Second Life fails.
I hope that you find what I have written here to be helpful, and not see it as an attack on Second Life or Linden Lab. It’s not. But now might be a good time to start preparing for the eventual, inevitable end of SL.
Because someday, probably when you least expect it, it will happen.
