Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Longtime SL blogger Prisqua Newall of SLex in the City has a must-read blog post about how rampant virtual world shopping events are choking the creativity and originality from Second Life culture. It was inspired by her own personal moment of clarity as a rampant shopper:

This journey through Second Life’s marketplace has led me to a significant personal insight regarding digital consumerism. A moment of clarity emerged when I realised my inventory contained at least L$20,000 worth of items I had never unpacked and, as a result, never used. The excitement of events and continuous sales often leads to a pile of unused digital items that remain untouched, forgotten, and, over time, obsolete. This was especially true for me when I switched from the Lara body to Petite and then to PetiteX. Each change made many of my old items useless, likely mirrored in the experiences of others as they navigate the vast array of body options within Second Life.

Part of the problem, she argues, is that SL sim owners have a strong profit motive to continuously push shopping events hosted on their land:

With the event hosting 75 stores, this pricing strategy could rake in approximately 675,000L$ (around US$2,700) per event for the organisers. When contrasted with the monthly expense of running a 30k region on Second Life, which is around US$259, the financial allure of organising such events becomes starkly apparent. This juxtaposition suggests that event organising can emerge as a lucrative venture, potentially offering a more appealing profit margin with arguably less effort compared to maintaining an estate or developing products.

Read the whole thing here, and watch the accompanying video she created for this (below).

This is a topic I want to delve into more, but my immediate sense is she's roughly right. My social media feeds related to Second Life are almost entirely around shopping events or shopping deals, and the very existence of her blog post about SL culture highlights another trend: The vast vast majority of Second Life-themed blogs are actually (and completely) shopping/fashion blogs. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but there was much more diversity of topics 10-12 years ago or so.

My own perspective is this rampant consumerism largely became inevitable as Second Life shifted to a mesh-based economy beginning around 2010-2012, creating the ability (and therefore the market, and the promotional push), to create and customize ultra-realistic human avatars. As I wrote in Making a Metaverse That Matters:

“Once users are presented with a believably human template,” as virtual world researcher Nick Yee explains, "You want chairs and furniture and cars where your bodies can sit in and drive around, and you need large virtual closets to put all your virtual clothing and people are building these beautiful cantilevered houses by the beach side because that's what people do in the real world.”

While Linden Lab may have hoped Second Life users would define reality according to their wildest imagination, the realistic human avatars shaped how much of the world would evolve:

And with them came all the social problems typically associated with wealthy beach enclaves in the real world. 

“[That's] where the racism and the sexism comes from," as Yee puts it. “Because when the avatars are sufficiently human to make human assessments upon, our inherent human biases come clawing into the digital world… It's almost unavoidable, because once you have bodies that are anywhere near realistic, people feel the need to dress up their bodies, and to look cooler than the next person. And suddenly you have this whole economy based around selling bodies and hair and body parts.”

Emphasis mine!

None of this is to say Second Life is only about human avatar fashion and shopping, because many other thriving subcultures and creative communities exist. It's just that they're very noticeably less the overall focus.

Neither is it inevitable. As noted, much of this is driven by the economic incentive of sim owners. But Linden Lab can change those incentives by changing the world's price structures — and perhaps more important, taking an even more active role in creating an in-world experience that's an alternative or a respite from the endless shopping grind.