A World Created Entirely By Its Residents

Imagine a restaurant that advertised meals cooked exclusively by its customers. Would you go there to experience fine dining? Probably not. In fact, we have a name for this sort of dining experience. We call it a pot luck dinner. Pot luck dinners are not without merit. They provide a social experience. There is usually plenty of food. And the food is generally tasty and filling (meaning high in salt and fat). And people enjoy pot luck dinners, as long as they don't go very often. The problem with pot luck dinners is that ordinary people create relatively ordinary food. If you are going to go to the trouble of getting dressed up and go out, you really would like to experience something extraordinary. You would like food created, not by your neighbor who clips coupons, but by a chef.

Consider another, parallel, example. What if a Hollywood movie studio boasted that its line of movies was entirely made up of home movies. Last year's big success was Sally's Surprise Party and this year they are betting on The Travails of the Bar Mitzvah Band. Would you expect this studio to produce classics of the caliber of The Godfather, Jaws, The Terminator, or Fargo? Probably not. There are television shows that rely entirely on home movies and they are fun to watch. They are the pot luck dinner of the movie industry. But, their cultural contributions are nil. And their enduring value is nonexistent. If you want to see a movie of enduring value, you have to see one that is produced by professionals.

Now imagine a virtual world created entirely by its residents. Oh, wait, we don't have to imagine that. It is Second Life. And while the residents of Second Life do come up with some interesting things, they are the virtual world equivalent of Aunt Betty's creamed tuna over noodles. No matter how good that creamed tuna may be, you get to a point where you can't stand it any more.

I suspect this is the reason why the retention rate is so poor. And yet LL continues to redesign the orientation islands and reorganize the volunteer groups. What is that old line about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?