Pretty sad.

Keep trying. Talk to them, Sl should sponsor you if they have any sense.

SL: SaintLEOlions Zimer

Just read your notecard about the impending loss of the 2 sims. I will be honest, I haven’t been an active patron of your groups efforts to bring culture and performance to a wider audience through SL, but that has mainly been because I have been so busy pursuing my own educational efforts in SL that I haven’t had time to be a regular patron. But there are many who have and have benefited immensely from the efforts of everyone involved with Globe, and the SL community as a whole has also definitely benefited.

At times it seems to me that SL is doomed to become the playground of those few large RL institutions that can afford to throw money at it to maintain their presence there (which they will only do of course while they can see some RL return on their investment) or those few individuals who are lucky have the resources and the passion to continue on in the face of what is a heavy financial burden, or the graveyard of those transient users who take up their free plots, fill them with rubbish, get bored and don’t bother to come back to clean up.

What is depressing is that those who try to bring something other than crass commercialism to the world of SL (and we sometimes forget that this was what Linden used to promote SL as and what brought many of us ‘residents’ into SL – the fact that it is a rich world full of variety, people and creative potential) struggle to maintain their presence because like many good things in our RL communities they rely on the goodwill and efforts of a few in a system set up to favour those focused on consumption.

Even in RL the arts cannot rely solely on their own fund raising efforts to survive. They need the support of governments with a commitment to something that is valued for it’s aesthetic qualities rather than it’s commercial viability and that contributes to making us as humans and as communities richer intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, rather than merely being focused on satisfying our base material needs.

Over the last few years we have seen a number of other commercial virtual worlds struggle to survive, eventually collapsing into obscurity. Clearly this happens because they become commercially unviable which is brought about by insufficient numbers of paying users or visitors who spend money within the platform/environment. My personal belief is that this is because the offerings of these worlds were too narrowly focused. Again, I am not knocking the commercial and semi-commercial activities that occur in SL and other virtual worlds, but at the end of the day, you can only buy so many outfits and engage in so many shallow conversations before it all becomes rather boring and pointless. What is lacking is builds and activities that are rich in aesthetical, cultural and educational content, things with a wow-factor that people will come back to and visit time and time again, things that schools will bring students to see and that they can build learning activities around, things that stimulate genuine intellectual, cultural and personal growth. If platforms like SL are going to be able to compete with all the other multi-media and social networking options available online, let alone other RL activities, they need to offer more than just virtual shops, virtual clothes and virtual nightclubs.

So, Linden needs to recognise that for this world that they have created to survive and thrive, they need to more than just innovate technologically (which I believe they have been doing a good job of), they need to do more than just be satisfied with a transient throughput of new users who don’t stay long, they need to do what many RL governments do and invest in the arts and history and culture, invest in people and groups with big visions and a passion for making this world of ours an intellectually, emotionally and spiritually rich and exciting place to explore and spend time in. There are signs that Linden recognises this with their recent machinima competitions and other activities, but I still believe they need to re-invest some of their profits into establishing a fund or funds that will support worthwhile non-commerical activities in SL. They need to make a commitment to the world they created too, and supporting the efforts of a group like yours to bring culture and history to the ‘people’ of SL (and potentially to those who have not yet visited SL) is an investment in their own longevity and survival.

Now: here’s hope, and here’s a possible opportunity.
if you DO have to close in SL, please consider New World grid. It’s non-commercial, run by a French Arts/Educational trust. if they approve a project they give land free. I am reproducing Mount Grace Priory there, a 14th century community centred round a priory, which offers visitors an educational experience. They have kindly given me the use of four prims, FREE. Perhaps your venture might be similarly recognised as valuable, and receive similar support. And if it doesn’t, please note that a full sim on New World grid is US$75 a month, not the scandalous SL L$295 a month.

Will people come to your events there? Well, one only has to create a new avatar once! The grid is growing and has a mutual culture of freebies, support, and help. The more valuable activities take up residence in New World, the more people will come. And so audiences will grow.

Please contact me in SL, or via the hotmail account, if I can give you more details.

Christi Maeterlinck