METANOMICS: SOCIAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION

OCTOBER 6, 2008

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Good afternoon, and welcome to the fiftieth episode of

Metanomics. We celebrate this occasion by unveiling the results of a fascinating survey

conducted by Social Research Foundation detailing the interests and plans of over 1,200

Second Life residents, and we’ll be discussing those with Social Research Foundation’s

director, Andy Mallon, and ThinkBalm’s Erica Driver. Before we get into that, I’ll be putting

Joshua Fairfield On The Spot, to talk about issues surrounding policies protecting kids from

sex and violence in computer games in Virtual Worlds. As always, thanks to our sponsors:

InterSection Unlimited, Kelly Services, Language Lab, Learning Tree International and, of

course, Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

As you can see, we’re filming the show right here in a replica of Sage Hall, home of

Cornell’s Johnson School. But most of you are watching from one of our event partners:

Colonia Nova Amphitheater, Meta Partners Conference Area, Rockliffe University, New

Media Consortium Educational Community Sims, JenzZa Misfit’s historic Muse Isle, which I

should mention hosted a dozen or so Lindens today, looking at JenzZa’s rendezvous

animator. And also we have our newest event partner, Orange Island. So welcome to all of

you at all of those locations. You can all chat with one another and with people who are on

the web, using InterSection Unlimited’s ChatBridge system to transmit local chat to and from

the event partner Sims, the Metanomics Sim here where we are filming and the

metanomics.net website. So this technology can bring you in touch with people around

Second Life and on the web, wherever you are. And I guess I should mention the Lindens

were very intrigued when they heard about this product, so congrats to InterSection

Unlimited and the good press you just got with the Lindens.

So anyway, everyone speak up and let us know what you’re thinking.

Today we are going to start our show with our On The Spot segment and put law professor

Joshua Fairfield On The Spot. Professor Fairfield organized a conference at Washington

and Lee University’s School of Law. The conference was called Protecting Virtual

Playgrounds. It took place last Friday, and Josh is here to talk with us about it. So first of all,

Josh, welcome back to Metanomics.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Thanks very much for having me, Rob.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, it’s always a pleasure. For those who don’t remember, Josh

was on Metanomics. He was one of our very first guests, talking about the limited role that

contractual arrangements can play in governing Virtual World behavior. And now we’re

really looking at that. One of the touchiest issues in Virtual Worlds and more generally

online behavior and computer game behavior which is how it is affecting our kids and what

content they can see and engage with. So, Josh, you told me that you were about as happy

with who was at your conference as you were about what was discussed. So can you tell us

a bit about the speakers and the audience and what you were aiming for?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Well, sure. First of all, the incredibly important Robert Bloomfield

from the Cornell Johnson School of Management was there.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I did a lot of listening.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: A lot of listening and also a lot of excellent work on educational

opportunities in industry models in Second Life. But also there were representatives from

groups that I think don’t talk enough. So Yale University. Research scientist Dorothy Singer,

who’s an expert on the meaning of play and the importance of play in the development of a

child, was there. John Zuur Platten, who’s an industry insider, a video game producer, was

there. We had a real range of people from industry producers to the academic psychologists

who are really working on the effects of violent video games on kids. I think that range of

opinion and the fact that those people were in the same room together generated as much

excitement and energy as the topics themselves.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I thought we might start by talking about one of the more

memorable stories that--I think it was Brad Bushman who mentioned this--the story of

Devon Moore. He’s a young man who played countless hours of the uber-violent Grand

Theft Auto game, when he was underage. And he stole a car when he was 18. When he

was in the police station, he stole a gun, and a guy who had never handled a gun in his life,

as I understand it, shot three officers in the head, single head shots for each, and took off.

And he was later quoted as saying, “Life is like a video game. Everybody has to die

sometime.” So blaming Grand Theft Auto didn’t help Mr. Moore avoid a death penalty

verdict. But survivors of the game, I understand, are suing Wal-Mart for selling the game to

a minor.

So let me start, Josh, by asking you: What is the legal environment right now for regulating

violent games and maybe games with sexual content? Where are we now, and what do you

see on the horizon?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Well, where we are now is your standard regulatory tug. On the one

hand, the ESRB and rating agencies would like to simply put ratings on the games, that

state what’s inside them, and let parents make their own decisions. And then, on the other

hand, there have been hearings in front of Congress that have said more or less we’re

seriously thinking about regulating, especially the sale of games, even if Congress isn’t

going to regulate the content of games outright, which, for reasons we’ll discuss later, I think

they probably can’t. They certainly are interested in regulating the sale of games. And

what’s interesting about those two regulatory approaches of where we are and where we’re

going is that neither one of them really addresses the real issue, which is: What happens

when kids get their hands on material they’re not supposed to have? What happens when

they get into spaces they’re not supposed to be in or get access to violent material that

they’re not supposed to see? At that point, it becomes a lot more complicated.

And you mentioned the Devon story, and that’s a real tragic story, and it tends to divide the

community between people who say, “This is a reason to really regulate,” and people who

say, “Well, gee, lots of people play violent video games all the time, and they don’t go off

and shoot anybody.” But I was encouraged at the conference. There was a lot more

agreement than I thought on some of these very, very hard questions. Two points on which

people agreed: First, I think people agreed that context is really important. We heard people

say that, yes, even though they believed that violent video games cause an increase in

aggression for children, the rest of the family history of the child is incredibly important. And

we heard industry executives say, “Gee, yeah, good parenting is going to be incredibly

important and context as well.” So there was broad agreement on a few basic things, even

though there were some stories that obviously are going to drive the community apart.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You mentioned Dorothy Singer from Yale, who was one of the

first speakers at the conference. So she’s written no end of books on the psychology of play.

I thought she did a really nice job of setting up the discussion with this great Picasso

painting of a child taking his very first steps, with his mother right behind him, holding his

hands up. And Dorothy used this piece of art to illustrate the notion of agency, of

self-directed willful activity that underlies so much of the play in learning that goes on. But

she also emphasized the concerned assistance that the mother was showing and that kids

need agency. They need to learn to exercise their agency within their boundaries that are

set by parents and the community. And I think that really set the tone for a lot of the

discussion especially--and I think this was something Brad Bushman emphasized--the use

of play to rehearse essential life skills. And I think that is one of the concerns that you could

have about this Devon Moore Grand Theft Auto case. Here’s a guy who never held a gun in

his life, but had lots of practice with head shots in Grand Theft Auto.

Before I let you jump back into the legal things, I did want to talk a little bit about some of the

psychological evidence that was presented by Brad Bushman. He was an expert witness in

the case against Wal-Mart over Grand Theft Auto. There were two studies that I thought

were particularly interesting. In one of them, he had Dutch kids play against one another in a

game, and, when one beat the other, they had the opportunity to make the loser listen to a

blast of white noise through their headphones. It was a loud and unpleasant thing that he

played for us in the conference, and I could blow really hard into my mike, but I don’t know

that my audience would appreciate that. But that would give you a sense of what it was like.

And so the researchers manipulated whether the game the kids played was violent or not

and measured how loud the winner would play the white noise as punishment and also how

much the winner identified with the protagonist that they played in the game. Bushman

called it wishful identification. And what they found is that the more the kids identified with

their character in the violent game, the more they would crank up the white noise. We have

a graphic of this, the Brad Bushman slide with the Dutch kids playing. Hopefully SLCN can

put that up there. The effect actually went the other way with nonviolent games, where

identifying with a character actually restrained the kids from punishing their opponent so

much.

Brad emphasized that the noise levels here were pretty serious. The average noise level

chosen by those who identified strongly with a violent character were actually above the

100- or 105-decibel range, which is enough to cause some permanent hearing damage. I

should mention you can’t do this study in the U.S. This was done in the Netherlands, where

they do not have internal review boards that would probably stand in the way of a study like

this in the U.S.

And then Brad talked about another study with similar results, where the researches

manipulated how large and immersive the visual display was for the game, and, again, they

found a very similar result, that kids who played the violent games, with larger and more

immersive displays, were more aggressive in punishing their opponents than the ones with

the smaller and less immersive displays.

AUDIENCE: What games did they play?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You know, I actually don’t know what games those are. I think

that they were designed specifically for the research study, but I admit I don’t know.

When I put all of this together, I see that the same things the game makers are pursuing to

make their games better, characters that kids can really identify with, and gripping

immersive experiences are also the ones that seem to create more of a link between playing

a violent game and seeing Real World aggressive behavior. Now turning back to the legal

side, Josh, I guess I’m wondering do you see these advances in game technology

themselves forcing a more aggressive regulatory policy?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Well, one thing about advances in gaming technology is that games

are becoming advanced, and they’re taking a serious portion of the entertainment budget of

the United States. And so just by the success of the technology, that’s going to drive

regulation. Right? It’s not an immediate function of technological advance; it’s more a

function of where the entertainment dollars are going, and that means the trial lawyers and

Congress people are going to get interested in the technology.

But moving to your more direct question--will what makes games good also drive our

concern about the impact they have on children--it may well be that the better a play is, the

more we feel sad or depressed or elated, the better. If we win a football game, it may well

be that we’re going to be pumped up for quite some time as we walk outside. I don’t dispute

Brad’s findings in that respect. But I do wonder, you know, we don’t generally think that the

amping up from playing a football game, for example, lasts all that long, nor do we think it

has permanent negative effects. And the same thing with plays. We do kind of wonder,

“Gee, is this going to make me sad for the rest of my life or depressed for the rest of my life

if I watch Macbeth?” We need to study that. We need to know a whole lot more about

whether or not these effects persist or whether or not they’re just simply a result of being

immersed in creative media, just like plays, or in a game just like football.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: It’s true. In the discussion at the conference, there were two

issues that people were raising, and one was that issue of how long these effects would

last. In fact, it turned out most of these studies were allowing only something on the order of

20 minutes or less than an hour, in any event, between playing the game and then testing

for Real World aggressive behavior. And the other, which was a question I asked is that

apparently they haven’t done studies to see whether the effects are greater on kids than

they are on adults. And that, to me--

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: That’s right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I think there are some legal implications of that, but also

psychologists are using experiments typically to identify causal explanations for what’s

happening. And I think one of the causal explanations people keep putting forward is that

kids are learning. Kids use play to learn. Kids are malleable. To the extent that’s true, you

would expect to see bigger effects among kids than among adults.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: But I think there’s another side to this research, which is: What

happens if we show that, as a matter of social policy, violent video games amp adults up? I

mean I understand that everyone wants to sort of kick out when it comes to kids because

we have a sense that adults ought to be free to do what they want. But, if the effects are the

same for adults, then the social policy questions don’t go away. And on the other hand,

even if children are amped up from playing these games, there’s a serious question of

whether or not the parent should be permitted the right to let their child engage in this, at

least some portion of the time. Right? You may not want your child playing football all the

time, but once every couple of weeks or on a fairly stratified schedule seems to be just fine.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Gives a whole new meaning to being a hockey mom, huh?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Right. Exactly. Given that fighting is sort of part of the game, and

every team has a brawler.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I wanted to ask you, Josh, about your own rather novel legal

theory on self-regulation. As I understand it, the key impediment to more restrictive

regulation of violent games is that it would be an abridgement of free speech. And you

argued that, by providing an effective private solution-- self-regulation like the ESRB

standards for example--game developers could make it much harder for public regulation to

actually be Constitutional. So can you walk us through that argument?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Well, first of all, let’s just start with a couple of practical foundational

concepts before we get to the Constitutional stuff. First of all, I don’t think people like to

regulate industries in the United States, unless there is a real demonstrated danger. We like

to kind of get on with making money. So that’s one thing that I think really sort of pulls

people up sort when they think about regulation. Generally speaking, regulation isn’t the

answer to absolutely everything. On the other hand, as we’ve seen this week, right, calls for

regulation come when we see a serious public downside. That’s why we’re hearing calls for

regulation of Wall Street right now. So that’s one pushback.

The other pushback is that industries have always known that, if they try to take care of the

problem themselves, then that prior inclination to not regulate unless we need to is going to

have greater sway. So all industries try to self-regulate first. And that’s not a Constitutional

argument; that’s just simply a smart way to handle yourself when you’re considering the

prospect of regulation.

But then there is this further issue, and that is that, just like movies, just like plays, video

games are speech. They are expression. They tell stories. They are the modern electronic

narratives. And, because of that, Congress is limited with respect to what it can do in terms

of targeting the speech itself. Now it can obviously limit how and when we can access the

material, but it can’t just simply turn it off, eliminate it entirely, say, “Thou shalt not put

X thing into a video game,” any more than they can say, “Thou shalt not put X thing into a

play or into a movie.”

So the critical question then is: What’s the legal standard restricting Congress when it turns

to regulating video games? I’m not going to bore the audience, but let me just say this. If

there were three strikes for Congress in trying to regulate video games, they’d have been

out a long time ago. They have tried again and again and again, with all of these different

statutes, to regulate speech online, and all the different ones have been held

unconstitutional because they’re overbroad and because they restrict too much speech. We

finally got one this past year that passed Constitutional muster, but very narrow exception.

Generally speaking, Congress’s track record in regulating speech online has been pretty

miserable.

So given that background, what’s the constraint? What are the courts getting bent out of

shape about? The basic one is that Congress can’t regulate speech heavily if there’s a less

restrictive alternative available, if there’s some way for them to get the result they want

without regulating quite so much speech. And, in a lot of the porn cases, the argument was

that filtering, voluntary use of filtering, would be more effective--and a Congressional

Commission found this--would be more effective in blocking minors’ access to porn than a

quite scary law that said anytime anyone communicates off-color material to a child, they

could go to jail. As we’ll see, by the way, that threat remains right now. Cybersex is not a

safe activity under our current legal regime.

So the current fight then is whether or not private solutions, like filtering or like filtering for

Virtual Worlds, ignore lists, that sort of thing that let us filter other people out of our

existence, whether those kinds of private self-help solutions must be promoted by Congress

first, whether they have to try that first before they say, “You know what? You just can’t say

certain kinds of things because of the risk that a child might overhear.”

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I am looking at the backchat while you’re talking about this and

seeing a lot of very interesting comments. Not surprisingly, it looks like a pretty pro-game,

pro-free speech audience, given that most of them are actually in Second Life at the

moment. Not too surprising.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Sure. Right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: One person is saying, “You should have made the whole show

about this topic,” and I agree. There’s clearly so much to talk about, and I think we’re going

to run out of time. Actually, let’s just see. I guess the one thing that I did want to ask you

about as a last question is: I guess the distinction between video games and Virtual Worlds

is that, in Virtual Worlds, some of the content is coming from other residents. When we talk

about kids seeing violent activity, it’s not necessarily something intended by the maker of

the Virtual World; it’s something that someone else is doing. Similarly with sex. Do you see

a big change in both the practicality and the philosophy of legal policies protecting kids in

Virtual Worlds compared to games?

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Yeah. I think that the big fighting question is, for video games, right,

you can say, “Gee, you can’t put violence in the video game. You can’t put sex in the video

game because a kid might look at it.” And, if that’s Constitutional, well, then that’s

Constitutional. I doubt that it is as a blanket prohibition. But, for Virtual Worlds, the real

problem is that targeting gaming companies and telling them to keep certain things,

especially sex, out of Virtual Worlds just doesn’t work. Right? Because people can just

come into the Virtual World, and the problem: a lot of the content is other people. And this is

true of even Virtual Worlds that are incredibly restrained in terms of what you can say and

do. Right? One slide by one of the presenters showed people lining up to say swear words

in a very chat-restricted server in Club Penguin. So if that content’s going to seep in as a

result of the actions of other users, then targeting the game companies and saying, “Listen,

you can’t have that in your game,” is just not going to be a viable alternative.

And I think that there’s a real tension between the law and between practice right now. For

example, you mentioned that, gee, the chance that a predator might get into a Virtual World

and might then dirty-chat to a child, well, that’s true. And just like getting on the phone and

sending a dirty phone message to a child will get you in trouble with the law, I think right

now it’s a very nebulous area as to whether or not sending dirty text to someone who might

or might not be a child would get you in trouble under the strict letter of the law. But,

policemen on the ground seem to be following a quite different regime. Right? They’re

following the usual “to catch a predator” model where they’re going to set up a Real World

meet and bust the person when they show up, trying to make a Real World connection with

someone that the predator thinks is a Real World child. So there’s a huge disconnect

between the law as written and then our Constitutional standards and then the law is

enforced. None of those three things seem to match up right now.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, it sounds like it’s going to be an interesting decade ahead of

us, and I’m not just talking about the fact that the Dow is down 700 or so today, but looking

at how policymakers are going to protect children in the Metaverse. So I’m sure we’ll have

you back on to talk about this. So there are topics we didn’t get to. I think, over the coming

year, we will have various people, who I met at your conference, come on to Metanomics

and give their perspectives. So thanks a lot for joining us again here today.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD: Thanks very much for having me, Robert.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I look forward to talking with you again. So thanks to

Josh Fairfield of Washington and Lee University’s School of Law.

Okay. Let’s go on and meet our guests for the main event. Andy Mallon is the director of

Social Research Foundation, which has conducted a pretty comprehensive survey of

Second Life residents. This survey has important implications for enterprises in Second Life.

And Erica Driver, of ThinkBalm, is here to give us an enterprise perspective. So thank you,

Andy and Erica, for joining me on Metanomics today.

ANDY MALLON: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting us.

ERICA DRIVER: Nice to be here.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let me start with you, Andy, to just talk about your organization.

What is the mission of Social Research Foundation, and how did you get into this?

ANDY MALLON: Well, to make a long story short, first, thank you for inviting me here

today. I think it’s a fascinating forum. My background really is about 30 years in business

magazine publishing. I helped mainly trade associations, like in the credit union field, the

owners of the Practical Account Magazine, National Association of Credit Management. I

helped them with their magazines, with business development. Then when I retired in 2003,

to make a long story short again, Business Week hired me totally out of the blue as a

consultant on an education technology project. I was fascinated on what was being done in

that area. I could tell you a lot about banking software and accounting software, but not

educational. And that eventually led me to discovering Second Life. I felt like immediately I

got what the potential was here. But what I did not see was how companies could properly

do the research necessary in advance before doing something in this medium, such as

knowing who you’re interacting with, putting together a panel of demographic attributes that

match what you’re looking for. And so I got my board at the Foundation to agree to fund

putting together this First Opinions Panel, and that’s how it all came to be.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. And so for this particular study that you did, you went out

and you asked a bunch of people to provide questions. I guess I added a few in and so did

Erica, and I’m sure you had a number of others. These things are not easy to do, from your

end, and I didn’t have to pay a penny. So I’m wondering if you can talk a little about your

motivation for conducting this survey.

ANDY MALLON: Well, I don’t run the panel for profit. It’s a nonprofit organization. We do

work, for example, for graduate students. We don’t even charge them or maybe just enough

to cover at least some of the cost. A Fortune 500? Okay, they can help to pay the freight for

the rest. What we felt was that, in the past year, Second Life has gotten kind of a bad rap,

which is, I think, in a lot of the industry, there’s the boom and the bust cycle, where it was

first considered the darling of the media. And I wanted to take a good hard look at really

what should companies really know about Second Life that is outside the typical hype. Who

is in there, in terms of the people that have stayed in Second Life, the residents? What are

they doing there? Which is the question I always get from corporate clients and prospects.

And what are they doing personally? And what are they doing professionally? And finally,

what are their plans for 2009? How does that compare to their involvement with Second Life

in 2008? And so we decided to self-fund this study and really start digging for those

answers. We’re happy to go further if some company wants to go further with us and fund

something deeper. But at least take a serious look at who’s in there now and clear up a lot

of this misconception that it’s just a game or just for sex or just for things that would be of

little use to companies and also for them to get the idea that Fortune 500 larger companies

can use Second Life for more than just the collaboration of their own staff. They certainly

can interact with the Second Life population. If they need a select group of targeted

demographics, we can probably provide them with that and rather quickly because they’re

members of our panel now. We’ve got about 11,000 members and hundreds and hundreds

of them easily could come together in a panel for most any job requirement they need.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So I see a question that just came in from Austen Scanlan: How

statistically verifiable are your stats? And I guess this is one of the things that I get

concerned about with panel studies. You have 11,000 people, but, of course, these are

11,000 people who have agreed not simply to respond to a particular survey, but that they’re

saying, “Yeah, I’m here to respond to a number of surveys. Let me know.” It’s more of a

self-selected sample we usually see--

ANDY MALLON: It’s a fair question. It’s a fair question.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: How do you approach that?

ANDY MALLON: Well, our first thought when we started this was to try to create a

representative sample, but we ran into two interesting situations. The first is: Representative

of what? Representative of people who have joined Second Life? We know that many don’t

stay after the first hour or two. So then the question is: Is it people that stayed at least for a

week or two or people that come and stay in Second Life, let’s say, an average of an hour a

day or an hour a week? So what you make it representative to? How would you want to

define that? And I found that that could lead us down a very long rabbit hole, not that it’s not

significant from the standpoint of statistical analysis, but this gets to the other part of my

point, which is that not a single corporate client was asking us that question. They would

come with specific demographics and say, “Can you get me people that match the following

demographics? And we need this by a certain deadline.” And that’s what we began to focus

on after that.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. Before we get into the meaty parts of the results, I

did spend some time looking at who responded. I mean I guess this is a self-selected

sample within a self-selected sample and that it was the first thousand, 1,200 or so people

who responded out of the 11,000.

ANDY MALLON: Right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But these people actually look a fair bit like what Linden Lab has

published overall. And so just to summarize real quickly some of these things, the sample is

pretty much 50-50 male and female. The average age is in the mid-30s. Income looks like

it’s roughly above the median for the U.S. somewhere. Median looks like it’s slightly above

50,000. And that’s not surprising since they all have computers that can run Second Life.

The sample is maybe a little younger, I should say, relative to the Linden Lab sample, but

not by much. So it looks to me like, while it may be a self-selected sample, it’s not a really

strange one. So let me just talk about what I did with the data, and I think Bjorlyn Loon will,

hopefully, paste in the link. Our discussion today is going to follow the post that I put on

metanomics.net this morning, and we’ll more or less walk through that.

And the very first thing that we’re going to look at is a graphic on why people are using

Second Life, what the reasons are that they’re there. So one of the things we see is, people

rated things as one, two and three; one being the most important reason that they’re in

Second Life. And fun and creativity, the desire to socialize, those got lots of ones. And then

there were smaller numbers usually in the 300 or so for running a Second Life business. A

couple hundred for networking. A couple hundred for research. And more like, I guess lower

than that, in the high one hundreds for bringing a Real Life business into Second Life. So it

does seem like it’s a pretty big cross-section of why people are here.

The first result running with that, that I wanted to talk about was how interested Second Life

residents are and the residents of your panel in interacting with Real Life brands in Second

Life. And what I thought, I’m just going to give my own opinion on this one because I’ve

been on the record a couple times saying one reason that branding plays don’t seem to

work all that well in Second Life and often result in bad press, my view has been Second

Life, the experience that people are looking for in Second Life is often antithetical to

engaging with Real Life brand. People are coming into a Virtual World to create their own

reality and to do things that are disconnected. Immersionists, in particular, they get very

upset when someone breaks their sense of immersion into another World. So I was

surprised to see relatively high percentages of your sample willing to express an interest in

engaging with the brand.

Now the natural critique here, well, these are people who have specifically said that they

want to--of these 11,000, right--

ANDY MALLON: Right. Right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: --they all say, “I want to engage with brands.” And so we could

just be seeing bias there. But I went a little further with the data because often when we

have a self-selection bias or really any other type of experimental design flaw, which

self-selection basically is, we can address that, in part, by looking for cross-sectional

variation. Everyone in your sample is self-selected into it, but we can make a distinction

between what I’m calling personal and professional users. So I took that last slide that we

looked at, that indicated the reasons people are in Second Life, and I said anyone who gave

top ranking to running a Second Life business or networking with professionals or

conducting research or bringing a Real Life business into Second Life, if they put any one of

those as a one, I called them a professional user. And we had 458 of those in the sample.

So more than a third. And the rest, 800 personal users.

And so, if you look at that, actually the professionals are more likely to say they’re very

interested in connecting with the brand than somewhat interested. About 210 are very

interested. Two hundred are somewhat. About 50 are not interested. And then if you look at

the ones--there’s a lot less interest among the personal users, where, out of a much larger

number, only a little over 200 are very interested, 450 are somewhat interested, and 130 are

just not interested. So I guess I feel like there’s a little vindication, from my view, that the

people who are coming into Second Life really as end users, as opposed to professionals,

don’t seem that interested in engaging with brands.

ANDY MALLON: I would just make one comment there. The question is: Interact with the

brand how? If the brand has come in and not done anything or simply the resident has not

had an experience with a brand in Second Life, then they might say, “I’m somewhat or

maybe not that interested.” That’s the whole point I’m trying to make with this survey, which

is, the brands should first do research with their target attributes in Second Life, to figure out

how to promote that brand or use that brand within the virtual environment. If they can figure

out the right way to do that, then that should begin to generate a lot more interest. But the

residents haven’t seen that yet where the brands in the past built what we call ghost towns,

and so the residents, while they express interest, then naturally those on our panel would be

the most likely to be interested in brands. The fact is the brands themselves have not held

up their end of the bargain mainly because the people from the brands, who came into

Second Life, were usually not mainstream marketing departments, but were sort of at the

forefront of the avant-garde groups that are sort of testing digital worlds or testing different

media, but don’t necessarily understand that media yet. So I think this question is a good

starting point for the discussion, but by no means is it the final picture of the role of brands

and those [who have little?/AUDIO GLITCH] interest in brands.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. Okay. And you do have some data which I did not put on

the website. I sort of ran out of time, but there was some information on how people wanted

to interact with the brands. It seems like people are really quite interested in participating,

well, as they were promised, I guess, when they joined the panel, interested in focus groups

and things like that. I was interested that they also would like to engage in product

development with companies, which I think is good news for the enterprise users in Second

Life because there is a lot of prototyping and things like that going on.

ANDY MALLON: Yes. Yes.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So let’s see. Let’s move on a little and talk about projections of

the future. So you asked a question of how people anticipate their Second Life use, well,

how it did change over the last year and how they anticipate it changing. So over the last

year, the personal users, there were a number, well over a third saying that they used

Second Life less as the year went on, with many fewer personal users saying that they’re

going to use it more. And we saw the flip on the professionals. The professional users,

many more of them are saying that they did use Second Life in increasing time over the

course of the year.

And we have a graphic also that I’m hoping now SLCN can put up on what it is that they are

doing more and what it is that they are doing less. I would just like to point out that none of

the numbers here have to add up in particular to anything because a lot of people they’re

not planning on doing something more or less because they didn’t do it, and they don’t plan

on doing it in the future. So you can see that the numbers of more and less vary a lot.

Erica, as an enterprise user, I think you have some thoughts on how to interpret this data on

what professionals are doing more and less. You care to weigh in on this?

ERICA DRIVER: Sure. So let me introduce myself briefly, to give people some perspective

on my comments. My name is Erica Driver, and I’m a principal with ThinkBalm. I’m an

independent IT industry analyst, and I focus exclusively on the area of enterprise use of

immersive technologies. And so I actually contributed some of the questions about

enterprise or professional usage of Second Life to this survey. I’m very interested in this

data. So if you look at the survey question about what people are doing more this year

versus last year, one of the line items--one of the answer options was professional activities,

which includes training. And so interestingly, about 16 percent of the survey respondents

said that this year they’re doing more professional activities in Second Life this year

compared to last year, but then again there’s another 19 percent that said they’re doing less

of this. So I’m not sure about the statistical relevance there, given the possible margin of

error. But it evens out a little bit there. I’ll pause and take a breath and turn it back to you,

Rob, if you want to comment on other elements of that survey question before we go into

the enterprise stuff in more detail.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, no. Let’s actually jump into that. I guess one thing that I

would like to say is that when we look forward when we ask users what they’re thinking

they’re going to do over the coming year, the results are actually stronger than they were

before in the sense--well, first of all, I should say everyone, both personal and professional

users, are expecting to use Second Life more over the coming year than over the past year.

And there are some, of course, who are doing it less, but the mores outrank the less by

something like around three to one overall. But it’s 4.4 to one among the professionals and

2.6 to one under the personals. So it does seem like the professional users are pretty bullish

in here. I guess, first of all, before we get into specifics, what’s your thought on why that

might be, that the professionals are particularly enthusiastic about what they’re going to be

doing over the coming year?

ERICA DRIVER: Well, that one’s hard for me to answer the way you put it because I didn’t

cut the data in the way that you did, which is professional users versus personal users. So if

it would be okay with you, maybe I’ll answer a slightly sort of different question?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Oh, sure. Sure.

ERICA DRIVER: So when we look at this data and we ask how people plan to spend their

time in the coming year, there were about 16 percent of the survey respondents, 198

people, said they currently do use Second Life for business purposes related to their

primary job. So then once you look at those and start picking that apart a little bit, to your

point, more than half of them, almost more than a third of them, about 37 percent said that

next year--oops I’m looking at the data a little bit strangely here. So about more than half of

the time they spend in Second Life is currently related to their work. There’s still another

huge portion, 41 percent said that they’re spending up to a quarter of the time on work

activities. Another 22 percent are spending up to a half. So a significant portion of people’s

time. Would this be maybe a good time to dig into what they’re doing, what kinds of

work-related activities they’re--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, let’s go to that. SLCN can pop up the primary job activities.

I don’t actually remember the title of the slide they have, but go ahead and talk about that,

and I’m sure they’ll get that up.

ERICA DRIVER: I think this is one of the most interesting findings in the study. We asked

the question, or I should say “we.” How erroneous of me. The survey asked the question

about what kinds of work-related activities are you doing in Second Life, and some of the

responses were not terribly surprising. Teaching and learning was the top of the line.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they’re doing that in Second Life. Another 43 percent

said that they’re collaborating with others to get work done. Forty-one percent are holding or

attending scheduled meetings. So those are sort of the core of common kinds of activities

that you see people doing in immersive environments like this. I’m surprised looking at this

data is that 35 percent of those 198 people who use Second Life for work, they’re using it to

visualize information in 3D, 35 percent. And I find this fascinating because now we’re really

starting to get at what is special about immersive 3D. It’s the ability to use this technology to

do things you just can’t do either in the physical world or in 2D.

So if we’re trying to communicate some complex concepts or some complex data sets and

look for implications there, it’s very hard for us to talk about that and to look at pages of

numbers and flat graphics. But, if we can create a visualization, we can walk around it

together, look at it. You might see that there’s a chip taken out of a pie chart or a bar graph

on the back side that I can’t see from the front. So I can wander around the back and look at

it with you. This is a fantastic use of what’s new about 3D. So it was encouraging to see that

more than a third of the respondents are using it for that.

And another point I want to make quickly is that a small sample, but 12 percent are actually

using Second Life to manage Real World systems. Much higher than I would have thought.

I’m aware of a couple of fantastic examples: IBM’s been doing stuff like this. Implenia in

Switzerland. Some fantastic experiments to--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: If we can just explore those for a minute. Now on the IBM one,

are you talking about where they’re looking at their servers?

ERICA DRIVER: Yeah. The 3D virtual data center. Exactly. They’ve built a middle-ware

layer to actually be able to manage and operate the physical data centers from within an

immersive environment. And it’s demonstrated within Second Life. I believe their production

environment uses OpenSim, but that’s IBM’s story. And then Implenia, what they’ve done is

they’ve integrated in a similar way the facilities, the building management systems. Implenia

builds sky-rises and football stadiums and large, large structures. So they’ve integrated an

immersive environment, in particular Second Life and also OpenSim, with those facilities

management systems. And so, for me to read that 12 percent of the respondents here are

doing something like that tells me there’s a lot of fantastic examples out there I haven’t yet

heard of and would be delighted to learn more about. While the numbers are small, they’re

very encouraging about people beginning to use 3D and immersive technology to do the

things we can’t do otherwise.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So one of the things that I’m wondering when I look through this

list is, I don’t see the word “prototyping.” Do you think that some of the 3D visualization

respondents what they’re really doing is making things in 3D so they can see what they’re

like, more cheaply before they start making them in the Real World?

ERICA DRIVER: That’s a good question. And it’s kind of a fine line. If I think about concept

visualization versus product prototyping or prototyping anything, it’s kind of a fine line. I just

wrote an article on the ThinkBalm website about what some of the faculty have done out in

Ohio at universities there. They’ve built not really a prototype, but more a conceptual

experience in 3D, to allow the decision makers to experience what a motion tracking studio

would look and feel like, to help determine if they wanted to make an investment in that. So

it’s not really prototyping; it’s more like concept visualization, which someone could interpret

into this question visualizing information in 3D or collaborating with others, so it could have

gotten “munged” up in here, to your point.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let me ask--this is I guess going outside the data because it’s a

question about Worlds other than Second Life. Everything you’re saying would also apply to

other Worlds, and I’m wondering what your take is on how bullish and active we can expect

enterprises to be over the coming year, outside Second Life, but in Virtual Worlds.

ERICA DRIVER: When I think about where enterprise as a general category is with

adoption of immersive technologies, I think of us as being in the seedling stage, very, very

early on and with just experimentation, and that’s it. We’re not seeing any companies with

enterprise rollouts across tens of thousands of people, but we will. You look at leaders like

IBM and Sun Microsystems and BP and others that have been experimenting and are

committed to this technology, they’re going to lead the way in, hold up the light for others.

And when I think about what’s happening here, I give it a five-year timeframe before this is

mainstream. And that probably sounds very aggressive when you think about other

evolutions like the web. I have three reasons for why it is aggressive. The convergence of

technology, whether it’s bandwidth, software, graphics cards, make it possible for anyone,

well, not everyone, but many people to have access to this technology, who couldn’t have

before. So this is technology convergence.

The next biggest reason is because of social networking. Because, unlike five years ago,

people who have expertise and knowledge and passion about immersive technology can

find each other and put their heads together, can solve problems together, can answer

questions and point each other in directions. So I’m talking about Twitter and blogs and

social networks. There’s just the possibility for people to push this forward that we just didn’t

have before. So five years, mainstream.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Well, from your mouth to God’s ears, as my mother would

say.

ANDY MALLON: Let me just add also, Robert.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Oh, sure. Yeah.

ANDY MALLON: This survey that we did included a Virtual Worlds market share study.

There wasn’t room for that in your presentation today. Hopefully, by the end of this week, we

will have all the charts done for about 50 questions that the survey contained, and those will

be available at our website, socialresearchfoundation.org, at no charge. Again, we making

all these results freely available.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Great! I guess I want to say thanks to you personally and to

Social Research Foundation for doing this pro bono, doing the work for free, letting people

ask questions for free and then publishing the answers also for free because I think it’s a

huge benefit to the community of those professional users and people who are using this for

their primary occupation.

ANDY MALLON: Thank you.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I know we’ve already gotten a bunch of hits on our website, as

people are looking into this.

I’d like to end by focusing on a couple questions, or I guess one question in particular that I

contributed to the survey, which is the state of the employment market. Well, I guess there

are two questions. I think we’ll have time to do them quickly. The first is: Who’s getting paid,

and how are they getting paid? What is the form of their wages? And so what I did, this

question basically asks: Are you getting paid by your employer in Lindens for work you’re

doing in Second Life? Are you getting paid in tips, which, of course, are going to be in

Lindens? Are you getting paid in Real World currency? Or are you getting nothing at all?

And so I think the first thing to talk about is, among the personal users, 96 percent of them

aren’t getting paid for anything. Among the professional users, still you only have 21 percent

of the people getting any sort of payment for what they’re doing. And how are they getting

paid? Well, it tends to be Lindens most commonly, and that’s about double the number that

are getting tips. But eight percent of the professional users so this is over a third of the 21

are getting paid in real currency.

And I guess I see Perplexity Peccable is asking: What if you’re just told to do Second Life

stuff as part of a regular salaried job? That’s a good question, and I’m guessing that’s

primarily the people who are getting currency. I think a lot of them are probably saying, “Oh,

I get paid in dollars.” And some of them maybe are saying they don’t get paid anything. But

I’ve talked about this before. I think that there are a lot of people who are doing it in the

interests of the enterprise that they’re working for, but it’s not something they’re actually

being asked to do. They are seeing an opportunity and being intrapreneurs. So I think a lot

of those people are also saying they’re not getting any.

The last question on the survey is on the state of the employment market and what we find

here, you know, I asked Andy to ask the panel whether it’s getting harder to find good

workers or easier and whether it’s harder to find good paid work or easier in Second life.

We’ve heard a lot about the employment markets within Second Life, and a lot of

hand-wringing about the health of the in-world economy. It’s interesting that the most

common response after “I don’t know” was for people to say “both,” that it’s harder to find

good workers and that it’s harder to find good paid work. So my take on this is that it’s not

simply a supply and demand issue. If everyone were out there looking for work and there

weren’t enough jobs, then we’d have the employers saying, “Well, it’s easy to hire people,”

and the workers saying, “I can’t find anything.” Or you could have it go the other way where

the employees are in the easy seat. The fact that workers can’t find good work and

employers can’t find good workers both simultaneously suggests to me, as an accountant,

that really what we’ve got here is a bit of an auditing problem.

I think that the difficulty for employers is finding people who are really qualified and

dedicated and to distinguish them from the people who are really just in Second Life for a

lark and maybe think picking up some kind of job would make their time in-world a little more

entertaining, help them meet people and so on. And I think these are all true, but it makes it

difficult for the employers to distinguish the serious job applicants from the ones who maybe

aren’t going to be as qualified and, more importantly, as reliable and dedicated as they need

for Real World enterprise, even though the business and the work is taking place in Second

Life. So my take, just to give a plug to one of our sponsors, Kelly Services, if you think about

what companies like Kelly do, they basically provide an auditing service, not just doing a

little of the searching, but also providing that determination of credentials, abilities,

dedication, reliability and so on. And so I actually think there’s quite an opportunity for

employment firms, like Kelly, in Second Life, as soon as the economy gets bigger.

So let’s see. I see we are basically out of time so what I’m going to do right now is just thank

everyone for being on the panel. Thank you, Andy, not only for providing the data and all,

but for coming to join us and talk about Social Research Foundation.

ANDY MALLON: Thank you very much for inviting me.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And, Erica, thanks to you for providing your insights onto the

enterprise segment of the survey.

ERICA DRIVER: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Thanks also to Josh Fairfield for talking with us about some policy

issues. And check our website. I’ll have a post on there this afternoon talking about the

issue of child sexual abuse in Virtual Worlds that we did not get a chance to discuss during

the show. And let’s see. The last thing I want to say is, we have a very interesting show next

week. We are going to have a representative of SL Exchange, which is changing its name to

Xstreet, and we are going to talk about their name change as a result of Linden Lab’s policy

regarding trademarks. But we’re also going to talk about monetization, buying and selling

and supporting buying and selling in Virtual Worlds. Along with a representative of

SL Exchange, we are going to have a representative of fatfoogoo, which is a company

founded by people who have done a lot of monetization and micro-transaction support for

mobile carriers. This is a company devoted to doing something similar in games. A

representative from fatfoogoo will be Stevie Case, who some of you gamers may know as a

championship gamer from years back, then a designer of computer games and now vice

president of sales and business affairs for fatfoogoo. So I hope to see you all here next

week. Bye bye.

Document: cor1035.doc

Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com Seocond Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer