“So far, we’ve built awareness. Seven years ago we weren’t a very well known brand. Now we are, and now we have to build preference and emotional attachment.” ~ David Steel

A couple days ago I watched the Second Life brand die a particularly ugly death. One I’m not sure they can revive from and one I’m not sure they deserve to be revived from.

The assassin was a young geek with comedic timing coupled with an appearance and shtick based on Nicholas Brendon circa 1998. Chris Pirillo has some deserved geek cred and comes up with watch-able YouTube stuffage. He’s somewhat knowledgeable and entertaining and I imagine he gets the positive and negative attention that comes with that combination in this forward-frenzy age of all things viral.

And every so often, like all of us, he takes the easy route when asked a legitimate question:

Chris Pirillo on “Whatever happened to Second Life” Take One:

This is what Second Life’s brand has become to the current generation of fine young geekibals.

In all fairness to Chris, there was a time when Second Life, socially, was healthy and happy with little more than porn and gambling. And I don’t mean the elite class of Second Life — I mean the casual user. The “addicted” part is a might unfair. Games of luck have existed at least as long as history has been worth recording, and so have depictions of sexuality. Most people have a guilty pleasure be it gambling, porn, techno-gadget lust, virtual paper dolls, good sippin’ whiskey, or bad 80′s music. But our peccadilloes are not what define us and they shouldn’t be the details that define our societies.

We spend a lot of time declaring “RL” and “SL” in our speech — and I appreciate the movement to stop that practice, even if I don’t abide by it. Because SL is, in many ways RL. It’s sort of like the Dagobah Dark Side Cave:
“What’s in there?”
“Only what you take with you.”

Put another way: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” is ever true in both virtual and real worlds (Oscar knew everything but a good lawyer).

But, let’s look at it from Pirillo’s point of view. There are a lot of people in Second Life doing wondrous things, but they aren’t the average user and those wondrous things aren’t necessarily what will woo a mainstream audience into the format (or even what will woo the current generation of geek). So if you just have a specific elite class working to impress that same elite class and a bunch of other people running around trying to indulge their peccadilloes — what is someone like Chris supposed to come away with?

What Chris got right was his very valid opinion — that Second Life is a crummy product that has failed to capture the imagination of someone like himself. What he got wrong was why — mostly because he simply took the easy out. (Also, he was uninformed about our gambling having been taken away from us — more’s the pity).

To his credit, however, the kid is a trooper and he didn’t just continue to mock and roll his eyes. When attacked by the community in ways I can’t even begin to imagine and don’t want to read, he engaged a few calm voices and re-evaluated his point of view:

The ungodly second take:

This is what Second Life’s brand is, even for those fine young geekibals willing to take a second chance.

I also tried to listen to the Phaylen Fairchild interview, but I couldn’t get beyond the introduction. If you can and must, the link is here.

I can’t fathom what the poor kid could possibly have to say beyond this point, but the thing that’s clear to me is that he’s done his due diligence. He’s done better by SL than SL has done by him. And that is a harsh, cold reality if you’re trying to evaluate the outreach SL has made toward inviting new users to the table — or even in trying to lure indifferent users back.

Second Life and Linden Lab have murdered a brand that had every chance to be the top of its game for a very long time. It happened through incompetence. It happened through indifference. It happened through arrogance. But, the more I reflect on it, I really think it largely happened because Linden Lab did the same thing Chris did in his initial video — they scorned their user base instead of evaluating the product honestly. For me, this started when they took the coward’s way out instead of defending their user base against the shock-and-awe wave of news stories that revealed *gasp* people were doing naughty things on teh interwebs.

There is a lot of hostility that wafts from Linden Lab toward its users — that sense of eye-rolling that we are all crazy cat ladies and griefer vandals (when we’re not busy being porn addicts that have to be led by the wrist between “Adult” and “Non-Adult” and “Whatever Mature Means” sections of a needlessly over-segregated grid). For the last several years the old Microsoft mantra of “you’ll get what we give you” has been their MO (hint to LL: even Microsoft had to dial that back to keep up, guys). And when pushed up against silly reporting they didn’t take the high road and say “if our users want adult experiences in our platform, that’s their option and we defend their privacy. Second Life is no different from the real world in that adults will spend their time pursuing different social options — be it a night at the opera or a stripper jumping out of a make-believe cake. Now, if I could draw your attention to the money our community has raised for cancer research and the work some of our users are doing to help handicapped individuals explore mobility options…”

Boo-yeah. Dismissed. Moving on.

Instead we got the Robin “deer in headlights” moment which has come to define the “not ready for prime time” reality of the Linden Lab program. LL doesn’t appear to have moved beyond that point. It’s as though they dismissed their user base for embarrassing them instead of bridging the gaps that led them to realize they were out of touch with what was happening on the grid.

Ivory towers kill brands.

What people fail to realize about Facebook games and Twitter social networking is the simplest aspect. Sure, there’s ease of use and the accessibility on the deck, but underneath there is the sense that those tools and entertainments are living languages. Second Life is becoming the Latin of virtual worlds. Sure, you have to study it, but no one really *uses* it anymore except those freaks up in their elite clubhouses.

Can we turn it around? As a user base that has been dismissed from the table? I don’t see how. Not until Linden Lab invites us back. The more frightening question — does Linden Lab want to turn it around? Or is this now the final product that will be stripped down into chatroom / facebook friendliness with point-and-click virtual shopping options to turn profits and no longer push the boundaries of “whatif?”

I’m waiting, hopefully, to see that is not the case. The firing of Qarl and Philip’s inability to talk straight about real goals, however, leave me edgy and disheartened. And yet, still here, unwilling to let go of the possibilities of “whatif.”

To steal an abbreviated moment from James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter:
Eleanor of Aquitaine: “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this…?”
Henry II: “Step by step.”