SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Was I worried the iVillage tour last night wouldn’t be well received? Well you always wonder when you throw an event in SL if people will show up…but man, I had no idea that they would show up in the numbers they did last night. A LOT of tour attendees arrived for the kickoff tour, and while I’m so thankful for that (thank you all for coming!), it brought up the other side of the coin - what do you do when you’re overloaded with guests?

In real life, people end up wandering out to the porch or the patio, going on a Denny’s run, or the cops show up because your neighbors complained. Physical space tends to balance itself out. In SL, however, there’s a few little factors called lag and sim limits - two invisible presences that will shut down your event for you, which you have little to no control over, and can quickly complicate an otherwise groovy time. In RL, people make their own choice on when to leave a crowded party - “C’mon guys, we’re packed like sardines in here, let’s go”. You make a choice based on your physical comfort level. In SL, your physical comfort is a non-factor - you’re at home in your computer chair with your fuzzy slippers on. The reasons you can’t get into a sim or your computer slows to a crawl are outside influences dictating to you what will happen, not vice versa. They’re also technical reasons as opposed to physical sensations - its hard to be told by your computer what will and won’t fly, its not so hard to obey what your body tells you is your personal limit.

Having got that mental noodle out of the way, I did learn a lot from last night’s iVillage tour. A lot of those lessons I want to help incorporate into the next tour, coming in the new year. Some are organizational, some are instructive, some are suggestions I’ll make for the residents that pick up the tour torch after my stint is over. (Such as, if you’re going to the mainland for a tour, try to put your meeting on a sim border, or barring that, organize two tour groups to attend in waves.) But the biggest thing I learned again was that the generosity and patience of SL residents is undeniable. Someone had a question, people jump in to help. The people we approached to speak at the tour, Steller Sunshine and Neph Protagonist, were incredibly gracious and generous, willing to improvise, and went above and beyond the call of duty. Celebrity Trollop was fantastic spearheading goodie bags from wonderful designers, and the designers themselves were so giving in their selections, picking wonderful items from their inventory that made the gifts extra special.

You can analyze and pontificate on the software that runs SL, the concepts of the metaverse and virtual reality, but its always going to be about the people that make SL such a wonderful place. Its the first, last, and only reason SL exists, and really the only one that matters. For your perusal, I give you the lone picture I managed to save last night - the talented Cylindrian Rutabaga performing live at the loft, accompanied by a random guest dressed as a cockroach on keyboards. The mystery guest sat in for a song or two, then wandered off to explore the rest of the sims, giving us a truly surreal and (for my money) amazing moment that can only happen in Second Life.

OK, the hour is drawing near for the first tour sponsored by Ivillage.com, and I’m nervous and terribly excited at the same time.

The theme for the kickoff tour is going to be “A brief history of SL” - the first stop will be visiting the Beanstalk, one of the oldest builds still standing in SL, and speaking with its creator, Steller Sunshine! Stellar was one of the very first residents of SL - her born date is 3/13/2002, that’s right, she’s older than most Lindens you’ll see! She’ll be meeting with us to talk about the good old days of SL - I’m so excited to ask her some questions myself

After we visit with Steller, we’ll be headed over to Pixeldolls to speak with Nephilaine Protagonist, another long term resident and one of SL’s most outstanding examples of a successful SL businesswoman. Bring your questions and your extra spending cash for this part!

Finally we’ll head back to the Ivillage loft, where we’ll enjoy live music performed by Cylindrian Rutabaga, chat about the tour, and check out the free goodies donated by the wonderful folks at Second Style magazine and a host of talented and generous designers waiting under the christmas tree! Woo its a full night

Again, this starts at 6PM SLT, just head over to Sheep Island (SLurl) or look up “Ivillage” in Search. Grab a tour HUD from the pink champagne glasses and tag along - I’ll see you there!

Its the season for making icy frozen builds (especially with the Winter Festival coming up), so I thought I’d share a tutorial on how to create an ice texture for your builds. This is heavily based on a glass tutorial in the 3D Game Textures book I can’t stop talking about, but with some extra steps.

You can start this texture from scratch by filling a plain color layer with 7% noise, but using a photo of a metal base works well and adds a little extra variance in the end result. I grabbed a scratched metal from Mayang texture, brought it into photoshop, and resized it to 512×512.

• Duplicate this metal layer and go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise: 7%.
• Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush: brush size: 9, brush detail: 1, texture: 1
• Filter > Distort> Glass: distortion: 6, smoothness: 3, scaling : 166%
• hit D to set default colors to black and white
• Filter > Render > Clouds
• Hit Ctrl+Shift+F to fade the clouds filter to 25%
• Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur: 1.5
• Filter > Artistic > Fresco: all settings to max
• Ctrl+Shift+F to fade the fresco filter to 15%, set the blend mode to Multiply

OK! Now you’ve got your base ice, it should look something like what’s below.

Its pretty dirty looking, but we can do some things to pretty it up.

Duplicate the layer (I’m big on duplicating layers so you can go back if you mess up a step) and go to Edit > Hue/Saturation: check the Colorize box, then Hue: 194, Saturation: 29, Lightness: +19. Those are just the settings I used, but go nuts, play with the settings until you find what you like.

I like making my ice look lit up from the back, so if you want to add that effect, duplicate your layer again and go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects, and use the settings below:

Finally, a last optional step is to make the sides look like they’re slightly denser and refracting the light differently from the center. To do this, add a layer style to your lit layer and use the settings below for Inner Glow:

There you go! A quick and flexible way to make ice textures for your SL builds. Try tweaking the steps to make your ice clearer, dirtier, rougher or smoother. You can also make a great base for an ice wall this way.

A few weeks ago I got a call from Marc Schiller of Electric Artists about brainstorming on a project for the website ivillage.com. I know Marc from the aloft project which EA was also involved in, and he’s an awfully righteous dude - he groks what SL is about and is genuinely enthused about the potential of the platform beyond making a build for a client, so I’m always interested in what he has in the pipeline.

The project is one that immediately interested me for a few reasons - ivillage wanted to do something women-centric in SL, addressing the fact that SL has more than its share of female residents compared to other online MMOs. The end result is best put by the official release statement on the project:

“Beginning December 14^th, every two weeks the iVillage Girls Night Out events in Second Life will celebrate and showcase great locations, personalities, and content already existing inside of Second Life. Each Girls Night Out evening will be curated by a different Second Life resident and who will lead a tour of interesting local and indigenous locations already established inside Second Life. Tours will range from things like music events, discussions, tutorials, and more. The first curator will be Cory Edo.

To participate in the Girls Night Out events, beginning on Monday residents of Second Life will be able obtain an iVillage branded tour application (called a “HUD”) which will be automatically updated after each tour to provide residents with the latest information on the next event and set of locations. Residents can obtain the iVillage HUD for free at the new iVillage Loft which will launch on Monday inside Second Life on Sheep Island.

For iVillage, the goal of the project is to showcase and highlight the amazing community of women who are doing amazing things each and every day inside various sub communities in Second Life. It is also to extend their commitment to communities of women beyond the iVillage website into new immersive environments.

The goal of the project is to showcase and highlight the amazing community of women who are doing amazing things each and every day inside various sub communities in Second Life

It is interesting to note that almost half of the residents of Second Life are women. In addition to this, women spend more time inside Second Life then men. The iVillage project is to celebrate and showcase this incredibly vibrant community. Rather than to create a branded island and bring in new content into Second Life, iVillage is doing something unique and innovative by not developing a branded space, but rather by assisting new residents in discovering the amazing things that are already being done inside Second Life but are hard to find.

You can follow the progress of the iVillage Girls Night Out project on the official blog for the project at: www.ivillage.com/gno.”

So that’s the boilerplate. Here’s what my input was, and what I really like about this project:

• Anyone that’s been in Second Life knows gender appearance is as fickle as clicking a checkbox. So how do you market an event for women, when you have no idea if the people showing up are women or not? My advice was don’t push the issue - there will be men attending, either in male av form or female, and there’s no way to stop it. Embrace it. Don’t make gender a prerequisite to attend and certainly don’t try to enforce a female-only policy. Personally, I’m a feminist (thanks Mom for marching with NOW in the 70’s), in the sense that its ridiculous to hold one gender up over another. We all have ideas to bring to the table for discussion, and our opinions are colored by far more than our gender. You can’t have discussions with only one side. Besides that, there are many men in SL that have female avatars because they identify as women, and SL gives them a way to do that that RL doesn’t allow for. So, if you’re a guy and want to be involved with the ivillage project, you’re invited! We will try, however, to make the tours and events as non-threatening and positive to women as possible, and we’re encouraging tour guides to consider gender in all its forms when brainstorming on where to go and what to do.
• What I like about this project is that its open for anyone to jump in and participate. Do you want to make a tour showcasing the best of vampire culture? Host a scripting class? Explore sex and gender in the escort industry? Talk to women that run their own SL business from their homes because it allows them to be full-time moms for their kids? Have a makeover session? Run a gender experiment where we all run around the grid in male avs (or female, if you use a male av normally) and talk about our experiences? Lets do it! We’ll have a sign-up box at the Ivillage loft where you can drop a notecard with your name and what kind of tour you’d like to host, and we’ll get you scheduled and help you with what you need to make it a success. Take this in whatever direction you’d like - keep it fun, interesting, and smart, and the sky’s the limit.
• The other really cool thing about this is: Ivillage foots the bill for the things you’d normally need to invest in to organize a great discussion/tour group. They take care of the land, the loft, the tour HUD, and the promotion - you just come up with some great ideas and organize a tour. You’re free to concentrate on the stuff that really matters - the tour you organize, and being host to a wide variety of people from across the globe.

That’s about it for right now - I’m really excited about the kickoff event! Our loft is your loft - if you’ve ever wanted to get a great discussion going, or just tour some awesome spots in SL, Ivillage is here to help. See you there!

P.S. here’s another writeup about the project on 3pointd.com.