In my last post I mentioned briefly the “silent half” of Metaverse Development Companies - the sales, management, and producers that bring the projects in for the creative teams to bring to life. Second Life is a fascinating little change of affairs from a traditional development venue in that the artists are the ones that are generally the most visible to the general public. (It can’t be helped - every prim you create in SL has your name all over it.) But what about these silent people behind the scenes, who don’t have their name all over a build? What do they do, what value do they bring?

I’ll be honest - sometimes it does feel a little like Us vs. Them when it comes to the people that pitch and land the jobs, the people that oversee the projects, and the people that develop them and bring them to fruition (and the people that continue to breathe life into them through events and staffing). But make no mistake - the longer I work in this still emerging industry, the more important and vital to a project’s success the business development and project managers prove themselves to be.

When Makaio and I started our own SL development company at the end of 2005, I had no clue what I was doing. I knew I wanted to work in SL and make it my career, but the thought of selling a client on a project, handling the paperwork, tracking expenses, and good lord the taxes, all made me terrified. Because its not what I’m good at. I can think of very few people personally that are not only adept at handling the business end as well as the creative end, but actually enjoy both. (Giff, aka Forseti Svarog, is truly one of the few who can pull off both creative and management with equal amounts of ease.) Even if you can be happy performing both ends of the equation, the sheer lack of time to perform all these tasks yourself makes it virtually impossible once you want to expand your business past a certain point. Even for SL-based businesses inworld, more and more large-scale designers are hiring inworld customer service reps to help handle the numerous questions and requests that their business brings. If you’re doing work for a real life company, they expect someone to be available to answer their questions, do research for them, just like they would get with any other company they do business with.

The people that bring in the projects are the ones that ensure creatives that they have another job lined up and ready to go when the current one ends. Often these people spend long hours on the road, meeting potential clients, flying from one place to another, greasing the wheels of business to make a potential client into one that is ready to sign the contract. They get clients excited about what the company can do for them. They are often the people who create an initial idea around which to base a project. The best ones are the ones that jump into this new field with relish, eager to learn all the ins and outs of the platform and the culture to combine the possibilities of both more successfully. It takes a special talent for people, for communication, and for getting others excited about what you do to be good in this role. Its part marketing, part salesman, part confidant, part inventor, and part visionary.

The people in the middle - the project managers - are no less important. I have a much greater respect for the position now that I’ve spent some time in the role myself. Its a lot of multitasking, a whole lot of communication, running interference, solving problems on the fly, and an innate skill for coordination across a wide variety of job roles and needs, not to mention unflagging enthusiasm. The project manager is the client contact, the creative team contact, and often continues in that role for many months after the project launch, after the creative team has already moved along. If you’re a creator in SL, imagine never being able to log onto an alt or go on busy mode to get your work done - imagine you always have to be available to answer questions and emails from everyone on all aspects of the project, and now multiply that by anywhere from 2-5 projects at a time. It sounds tiring, doesn’t it?

I think the most important thing to keep in mind when looking at all the different roles involved in a MDC is that communication is paramount, and learning from each other is the only way for everyone to get better. Finding Second Life residents with experience in marketing, client relations or project management can be difficult, at least compared to finding SL residents with creative talent. They often have to learn the ins and outs of the platform very quickly in order to pitch and craft a successful project to a client, and communication with the creative team is vastly important towards that goal. Conversely, I know as a creative team member that the last thing I want to worry about is telling a client something isn’t within budget, or pricing a request, or tracking down and packaging additional requests that the client wants - I can hardly balance my own checkbook, much less perform those kinds of tasks for huge corporations. Business development and project managers give me the space and time to concentrate on what I do best.

For an MDC to be successful, each role within the company has to be recognized and understood for the important part of the puzzle it is. For every MDC designer who’s work you see on a project, there’s a large number of people behind the scenes that helped bring the project to the point that it could be built and scripted - and there’s an even larger number of people that work on events and promotion and assistance to continue to breathe life into it once the grand opening is completed.

Secondlifeinsider.com pointed me at longtime SL creative mind Lordfly Digeridoo’s blog post today on MDCs (Metaverse Development Companies) and a bothersome trend that’s been percolating behind the scenes for a while now. I give LF major kudos for having the spine to post it, because frankly it seems like its been the industry’s dirty little secret for a while now.

Go ahead and read his post - he put the situation more succinctly than I could ever reiterate it - and I’ll throw in my two cents in the hopes that getting this message out there will save some creative talent some headaches in the future. I can only hope this message also gets to the ones who really need to hear it.
If you run a MDC, or recruit for an MDC, and especially if you want to work for an MDC as a contractor - the reputation is everything. If you don’t pay your creative talent in a timely, fair fashion, your reputation will suffer, your output will suffer, and your chances of surviving will suffer. I can’t make that clearer. In fact, here’s another onus - the entire industry will suffer because of it.

Creative talent in Second Life love having the chance to work in SL for a living. For any number of reasons, for many of us its a dream come true. But there’s rent or mortgages to pay, sometimes there’s kids to feed. Each creative talent in SL - every single one of them - has abilities and skills that can complement your company in unique and positive ways. Creative talent is not an endless pool of anonymous faces to use and discard without giving them the basic courtesy of paying their fees. Some companies get that. Some companies don’t. Trust me and Lordfly when we say - if you don’t, the community hears about it. I don’t care what kind of snazzy business people you have behind the scenes, polishing your presentation to potential clients, selling them on a project - although those people are heavily important as well and I’ll follow up with a post specifically about those silent workers that make these projects happen in the first place. Your management and promotion and sales people are only one half of a whole.

In most situations, your creative talent are going to be the people that know Second Life the best. Listen to them. Your events people are going to be the ones attracting people to your projects after the initial press release is over. Respect their time and effort. Your auxiliary staff - greeters, helpers, et. al. - are going to be the first face many new residents to SL, attracted by your client’s project, will see. Understand their importance.

And above all, don’t try to get out of paying them. That’s the most solid form of respect you can show. The vast majority of SL creative talent can make just as much money on the open SL market as we can working for a MDC. There’s always RL jobs to pay the bills. But you will never be able to retain the talent that brings your projects to life if you don’t respect them enough to pay their invoice.

Don’t be the company about which people say “Well, I hear they don’t pay their workers”. That’s the death knoll. I still think the MDCs are in this together. The industry is still new enough so that if we’re going to push the entire virtual worlds concept forward, each company has an obligation to do their part to improve the overall reputation of the industry.

I’m very thankful that ESC has always been a company that since day 1 has understood that attracting the best talent means respecting them, paying them a fair wage, and paying them on time. ESC is the ONLY company I’ve ever worked for that I’ve seen take amazing steps to insure that the bills get paid - employees and contractors both. If it sounds like I’m blowing smoke because I work for them, consider this - if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here, certainly for the year and a half I’ve been involved with them.
Thanks again to Lordfly for bringing up a situation I’ve heard about more times than I can count, but has only hit the light of day now. If you run an MDC, listen to what he has to say.

Photos say more than words ever can. This is the reason I love SL - the creativity. You can’t do this in Xbox, kids.

Check out more photos at I Am Legend: Survivor’s Flickr set!

OK. If anyone’s been wondering what I’ve been doing for most of 2007, you can check it out firsthand tomorrow at 10AM SLT…its I Am Legend: Survivor. Four (soon to be five) sims of intense gameplay, set in the abandoned steel and concrete caverns of New York City. Set in the year preceding the events of the movie I Am Legend (which comes out this winter, starring Will Smith), your first task is to decide what side you’re fighting for - the humans that still remain after the New Flu ravages the globe, or the Darkseekers (infected humans) who’s only thought is to kill…and feed. After that, the story is up to you to write. Lay claim to abandoned apartments in the Central Park region as strongholds, haunt the Darkseeker lair of abandoned Coney Island, or search through salvage as Uninfected Humans to gain new weapons, defense tools, medical kits, and eventually the key to the Cure itself using the lab equipment in the abandoned CDC lab.

In between fighting for survival, be on the lookout for easter eggs and exclusive clips from I Am Legend (the movie) coming soon…and join the I Am Legend: Survival group in SL for updates! (Also starting tomorrow scope out http://www.iamlegendsurvival.com)

Screenshots:

If I can step back from the traditional hype language for a second and just say - I think we’ve created something that’s really going to raise the bar for gaming in SL. The whole team couldn’t have been better suited to this project - from NeoBokrug Elytis of The Wastelands as game coder, to Makaio Stygian and Spider Mandala on buildings and props, to Canimal Zephyr on costumes, Wynx Whiplash on dog avatars, Caitlin Benton on animations, Lo Jacobs on orientation island signage, to John Limpert at Warner Brothers (the best client I could ever ask for and that’s no lie), and everyone else that’s chipped in and helped steer this home…without a doubt this is the highlight of my career with ESC. I’m immensely proud of this, proud to have our names on it, and proud to present it to everyone tomorrow to enjoy.
Thanks to all of our beta testers that have helped us test and tweak this as well…you know who you are, too many to mention, but you guys are the best. This is as much your project as it is ours.

What else can I say? Its been a huge undertaking, we were all probably insane, but I think we pulled it off. Stop by with some friends and check it out, and let us know what you think. More than just another project, this was a sincere labor of love for all of us and I think it shows. See you tomorrow!

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IAL%20Orientation%20Island/116/53/33

IGN article: http://movies.ign.com/articles/826/826380p1.html

Check out the game trailer! http://raincloud.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/iamlegend/survivaltrailer/legend_survival_date_300.mov 

I’m a recent convert to Digg. I love nothing more than winding down at the end of the day by diving into more reading material than I can handle. Here’s some handy freebies, tutorials, and tools I found over the last few weeks through Digg or Digg-related links:

Text Effects Roundup on Design Vitality: 51 (!) tutorials on how to create any text effect you can think of. Glass, water, fire, modern, retro, whatever - its all here. Check it out and pick up some new tricks for your non-text work too.

Photoshop’s Secret Shortcuts: Keyboard shortcuts speed you up, and I guarantee there’s at least one trick on this list you didn’t know about. My favorite? Ctrl-Alt-Shift-K will allow you to set your own keyboard shortcuts! I moved “duplicate layer” from Ctrl-J to Ctrl-Q so I can do all my keyboard shortcuts with my left hand.

104 Standard PC Keyboard Icons: these may seem niche, but if you’ve ever had to do any sort of instructional design work these will save you a ton of time. Instead of making the key graphics from scratch, they’re all done for you, and very nicely done to boot.

BioRUST.com Downloads: more free goodies - brushes, gradients, backgrounds, layer styles, actions, even website templates - all you have to do is register.

77 Website Design Resources: like the title says, its geared towards web designers (so a ton of resources on CSS, menus, hosting, etc.) but also some handy links on fonts, button makers, and stock photos.

Two nice tutorials that were heavily Dugg are Advanced Glow Effects and Old World Look, both from www.psdtuts.com. I’m a major supporter of learning Photoshop via free tutorials, and even though neither of these are designed for the 3D texture maker, they both utilize a lot of tricks that you can learn here and apply to your SL design work.

If you’re a Diggaholic and find some cool design-related links, send me a shout on Digg (under “cedo”) and let me know!

Mitch Wagner from Infoweek gets it. Mitch has spent a lot of time in Second Life, and it shows. He’s not a fly-in, fly-out reporter that regurgitates a lot of ten minute impressions and the “common knowledge” bull that gets repeated ad nauseum in what passes for journalism (I’m looking dead at you, Forbes, and you anger me so much I don’t even want to link to your smarmy Comic Book Guy impersonator - I mean, reporter).

While Mr. Wagner has elucidated these points far better than I could by regurgitating them, here’s my personal quick and skinny on his “Five Rules for bringing your Real-Life business into Second Life”:

1. Engage. Don’t talk at people, that’s what your website is for. Get people involved, get them interacting. You can’t be scared of your customers, and you have to put forth the effort to make it a success.
2. Add value to the community. The community is there; take advantage of it. Become part of it. Its too easy to be ignored. Like I said before, there’s a million things in Second Life to do and create already, people don’t HAVE to come to your project unless you give them a good reason to. What unique aspect of your company can you bring to SL?
3. Don’t believe the backlash. Its easy to get excited when something’s hyped as the next big thing, and even easier to get freaked when its torn down because it didn’t live up to the exaggerated expectations. Second Life is a perfect example of that. If you want to ride your career on shameless trendmongering, go for it. Its the people that see past the trashtalk to realistically view both the good and the bad - and the potential - that stick around. And thank you, Mitch, for calling out Wired on their perfect example of “its awesome/it sucks” brand of bandwagon-riding.
4. Be smart about keeping out troublemakers. This is not the sanitized, closed-platform, one-way communication of video games and traditional media. This is interactive. Its not hard to keep your project from becoming infamous for dancing penises. The same way you don’t allow full access to the files on your web server is the same reason you take ten minutes to protect your Second Life project, and the same reason you have people to staff your brick-and-mortar store is the same reason you make sure you keep an active presence on your Second Life island.
5. Think of Second Life as beta technology. Shorthand: yes, there are problems, and its not perfect. The best quote from Mitch’s post for my money is from Campfire’s Mike Monello - “Virtual worlds right now are the worst they’ll ever be”. If this is the worst they’ll ever be, and still there’s an average of 35,000-45,000 users (35-45k tech-savvy, creative users, mind you) on at any given time (remember that’s the size of a legitimate city anywhere in the U.S.), imagine what they’ll be in 3 years, or 5, or 10. That’s not that far down the road. If you’re not exploring virtual worlds for your company now, you will be sooner than you think.

I’ll be the first to admit that color has never come easy for me. I was strictly pen and ink for many years, and even now while I’m getting better at off-the-cuff color decisions, I am still sorely lacking when it comes to inventive colors that work together. Thank goodness for two funky websites that make choosing and designing a color palette simple and fun.

Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com) is a Flash-based site brought to us by our patron saint, Adobe. To get the site’s full functionality you’ll need to sign up for an Adobe ID (and if you don’t have one already, you should, as Adobe has some great downloads courtesy of its community base at Adobe Exchange) - but even if you don’t, good ol’ printscreen will do you just fine.

Kuler’s kick is that any of the user-created color schemes are easily downloadable as a Photoshop Swatch (.ase) file, which means the colors are dropped right into your Swatches palette, ready to go. Plus you can make and save your own swatches based on a starting color and add in mods using a number of different color relationship properties.

COLOURlovers (http://www.colourlovers.com) is more of a broad-based color fan’s source - they offer related articles on color, discussions, even trends and jobs - but again the core idea here is creating and sharing color themes with fellow users. At a glance the site seems to have more available schemes than Kuhler, but that may be because the site also allows you to feature individual colors as opposed to an entire scheme, and the layout allows you to take in more schemes at a glance. Again, full functionality is available only if you register, and when you do you have a number of different options for downloading, including Swatch files, CSS, and HTML codes. Creating your own scheme doesn’t give you the automated helper tools that Kuler does, but it does have a nifty concept wherein you can start off with a URL to a site you want to base your scheme on, and the system will automate choices based on that website’s overall look.

COLOURlovers wins in the search department - it allows you to search based on keyword, hex code, and the ability to disregard colors in your results. Kuher’s search seems to be based on keyword only.

Both of these sites are invaluable if you need inspiration (or more) when it comes to designing layouts, homes, furniture, offices, etc. either from scratch or based on a company logo or color palette. Enjoy!

Thanks to Barnesworth, as always, for hooking me up with these sites

I don’t do a lot of logo work, but chances are you’ll have to do at least one in your career - and these nifty free Photoshop styles are great for icons and other lettering/interface work as well. Check out the tutorial at http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/revealing-methods-of-drawing-web-20-logos/ and download the free styles at the top of the post. Cool beans!

P.S. If you don’t have a jazzy font for your logo, I love http://www.1001fonts.com/

(I’m writing this as an employee of Electric Sheep, and on an ESC-sponsored blog, but these thoughts and opinions are my own as a 3 year resident of SL.)

Everyone’s noticed the media hype pendulum has swung the other way from around this time last year. It was pretty inevitable, considering two things: one, that Second Life still has the same problems with scalability and performance issues as it ever has, and two, that every corporate project was not an unqualified success story in the manner in which they were originally hyped. Both of these are loaded issues, but the overarching problem with the media press - and why longterm residents were rightfully irked both at the positive and negative hype spins - is that virtually none of them take a balanced and more thoughtful look at why Second Life becomes for those that stay such an intriguing place.

I’ll be the first in line to say that some corporate ventures into SL haven’t succeeded. I’ll also be the first to say that SL’s architecture and structure - and in some circumstances, its player base - has never been conducive to drawing and maintaining the types of numbers that would practically force the word “success” into any article written about it. However, what almost every player in the above mentioned scenarios forgets about is why residents stay in Second Life. What is its innate draw, what is keeping these people busy and intrigued to the point that they don’t need to visit Corporate XYZ?

Its imagination. If you’re from a media outlet or advertising agency, I’ll let you take a moment to look that up.

Its somehow fundamentally frightening that with all the press SL has gotten, both good and bad, that so very few possess within themselves the spark of creativity and imagination that unlocks Second Life’s potential. If all you can think to do is fly around and watch people have simulated sex and stare at the freaks, then that’s all you’re going to find. If you wait to be entertained, demanding that your virtual life be catered to, then you will feel disappointment.

But - if like I did, the first night I signed up for SL, you fly around and explore and discover a sex shop with a myriad of poses and positions better suited for Olympic gymnasts, and think not that “this place is a cesspool” but instead think “wow, this really IS a place where you can make anything”, then there’s your first step. If in your rush to be a passive absorber of entertainment, you never even see the flip side of those kinky toys - the side that says “this is a place where anything I imagine, with enough time and effort and practice, I can create from thin air, and its not even allowed but encouraged” - then you miss what Second Life is fundamentally about.

The people that don’t see this possibility are the people that never care to explore that little blue “Build” button. The button that gives you access to a free, streaming, 3D building program that others can instantly see and interact with in real time. They never explore the possibilities and the implications of a free, supported, documented scripting system that interacts with avatars, other scripts, even external databases. They never think about the fact that for the price of nothing, you can have access to what is many people’s first experience with a modeling or scripting setup that truly gives instant gratification to yourself and others. This is big stuff, heady stuff, the kind of intellectual and creative freedom that your Xbox or your WoW or your Playstation doesn’t provide. And its virtually ignored.

That’s another word that causes the passive absorber of entertainment to back away slowly. Freedom. It implies choices and decisions, a free range of options often not illustrated clearly, the direct opposite of a funneling chute designed to hold your hand as you choose from a display rack of company sanctioned activities. It implies a level of freedom more often associated with real life pursuits than gaming diversions. Drive around a town of about 35,000-40,000 people at any given time of the day. Do you look at the empty houses and think “how boring”? Do you drive through a downtown area, stop in a shop with a handful of people browsing and think “what an abject failure”? Welcome to SL, where at any given time 35-40,000 people are online at the same time, doing their thing, creating, conversing, exploring. (And yes, behind the walls of some of those homes in the residential areas you drive by, some people are probably having sex. Get over it.)

The people that discover, enjoy, and stay in Second Life tend to be of the variety that see this pairing of freedom and creativity so often neglected by any other form of entertainment and feel a rush, the joy of a challenge (but a challenge from yourself to yourself), the blank canvas of a painter or the silent instrument of a musician. This is why SL has such a massive entrepreneural base. This is not free money - this is money earned through creativity, effort, honing of skills (often new), and more effort.

But those that lack the ability to even understand why this potential can be so personally fulfilling instead see only the aspect of freedom, not creativity, and that brings problems. Problems in the form of people only willing to exploit the freedom and none of the creativity, and the media who just as shallowly sees only those who exploit and think that’s all there is. That statement applies to a much wider demographic than may at first be apparent.
I’m a designer, sometimes on my very good days I’m an artist. I’ve never had virtual sex. I have met wonderful, intelligent, artistic, imaginative people of the highest caliber that have become some of my very best friends in SL. I have spent countless hours creating, conversing, laughing, and contributing towards a surrealist contribution of art and architecture on a grand scale. I have gone from 4 hours of television a night to 4 hours a month. I do not passively absorb entertainment; I entertain myself, my friends and I entertain each other. What SL truly does, at its most fundamental, is change what you expect out of yourself and others to fill your time. It is a step backwards along the line of constantly more vapid, constantly more passive, constantly more catered to. And even if every press and media and RL company all unanimously declared Second Life to be an utter waste of time and attention, I’d still be here, along with everyone else that has discovered its potential for themselves. We probably wouldn’t tell you to let the door hit you on the way out, but we’ll be happy to show you what we’re up to when you finally come around.

In the history of texture tutorials for Second Life, no one (for my money) has come close to Robin Sojourner. She covers everything, from texturing basics, to full fledged walkthroughs, to UV maps for avatars, to stuff that I don’t even know how to put down in words (like her newly released SL book, “Textures - Inside Hollow Prims”). Stop by Texture Tutorials in Livingtree and browse through the introductory dome notecards, then head to the library for advanced knowledge. Her texture books are free to read in the library and a mere $L25 to take with you - a must-have addition to your inventory. While you’re there donate a little $L her way, as this is all offered free to the community, and its the best one-stop resource for the beginning (or even advanced) texturer I’ve found.