In case you missed it before the long holiday weekend, Linden Lab recently rolled out a new look to the Second Life logo:
Second Life has seen a surge of interest from people new to SL, longstanding residents, and groups and businesses seeking a uniquely interactive place for gatherings and special events. With this renewed attention we decided it was time to update a key part of how we tell the world what SL is all about… The new logo uses clearer, bolder type to communicate our optimism and confidence in what the future holds for SL. We retired the soft green color in favor of bright blue to reflect the boundless energy of our residents, who create amazing content and experiences. When it comes to what you can do with SL, the (blue) sky’s the limit!
It looks good, and the company's logic for the change makes sense — but also seems far too conservative to me.
If you really want to update the logo, why not also update the name itself, too? As a brand, "Second Life" has always been problematic, and is probably key to the reason SL failed to grow the active user base despite tens of millions trying it out at least once. (At minimum, calling it Second Life certainly doesn't help with retention.)
Why? Short answer is the one any SL user is painfully familiar with: Calling a virtual world Second Life makes it too easy for a skeptic/cynic/troll to say, "Oh it's just for people who want to have virtual sex/parties/style/etc. because they can't get it in real life." An utterly dick-ish remark, to be sure, but an unavoidable one when that very implication is baked into the name.
Longer answer: The name "Second Life" was based on an understandable but ultimately flawed assumption about how the Internet would trend made back in 2002. Here's how early Linden Lab team member Hunter Walk, who started the brainstorming of the name (which the leadership team subsequently iterated on) explains it in my book:
“I came back the next day with ‘Life Two’, thinking about the Milton Bradley game, Game of Life,” he says. “That evolved into Second Life.” That provoked immediate pushback from other staffers: “That’s really easy for people to say, ‘Ha ha, you need a second life because you don’t have a first life,’” Walk recalls them arguing.
Still, Hunter held his ground. “I said, ‘You know what, let’s take those slings and arrows. It’s such a strong notion, it’s such an idea, everybody wants a second life.’” He pointed to the growing ubiquity of alternate identities and little personalized icons, in e-mail and instant messaging software, on blogs, growing seemingly everywhere on the Net. “You see more and more people with avatars and screen names,” he told them. “I think if we hit our stride we can sell this. It won’t be geeky. It’ll be ‘Of course, why wouldn’t you want one?’ Because it doesn’t have to be better or worse, it doesn’t mean your first one is lame or great, it just means it’s different, and you can be somebody different, and do something different.”
But just a few years later, Facebook established real life identities as the main interaction model for most people on the Internet. Trailing far behind it in terms of active users, Twitter does allow anonymous accounts, but only 6% of Twitter users are completely anonymous.
Meanwhile, the largest virtual worlds are not about having a second life, but having fun online with others (often or mainly real life friends). Minecrafting! Building and fighting around a Fort[nite!] Playing with [Ro]blox! Roughly half a billion people play in these worlds every month.
But what to call Second Life, instead of Second Life?
There's a number of directions that could be taken, but a quick solution is to just drop any mention of "Second Life" and replace them entirely with "SL". (Already the community's main way of referring to the world anyway.) Linden Lab could then launch a group of sub-brands which link core SL activities to the larger SL brand.
Imagine these as sub-headings on the official website and on its social media channels, categorizing the variety of activity possible in-world. For example:
- SL:Gaming
- SL:Socialize
- SL:Create
- SL:Uncensored
To explain the last one, “SL:Uncensored” would better convey a walled-off, red-lettered, sub-brand for all the pornographic and other extreme content a significant minority of kinky SL users have created. That would also address the continued branding problem encapsulated by the dumbass bon mot, "SL is just for virtual sex" with an immediate "No, that's just in SL:Uncensored" rejoinder.
Make a radical change like this, and I believe we'd start to see substantial growth of SL. When new users no longer feel the need to apologize for or defend their choice to play in SL, they're much more likely to stay beyond the pandemic-driven growth we're seeing now.
Or maybe they'll just stay because the logo is blue?
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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