6 lessons Second Life can teach the Facebook metaverse

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta and its metaversea kind of virtual world where our 3D avatars can interact as they do in the real world. The idea reminded many of Second Life, the virtual and social environment that pioneered this business model in the first decade of the 2000s.

In an interview with the American magazine Time, the creator of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, and Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist who spent two years in the virtual world and wrote the book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Humanexplained the six lessons that Facebook can learn from Second Life.

1. People will frequent the virtual world, even without an explicit purpose.

While Silicon Valley is constantly searching for the "killer app", that is, the next "killer app" that could change the world like Google and Facebook did, Second Life is a virtual environment with very peculiar characteristics. There are no defined objectives or usefulness, no score like in video games, no winners or losers.

This lack of apparent "meaning" may seem strange to many, but Boellstorff and Rosedale agree that this is in fact the essential reason why many people "live" in Second Life.

"A lot of people take a look at these things because they've heard of them, but then they discover something they like to do or a community they like to interact with that they've never heard of before," explains the anthropologist.

According to Rosedale, the unlimited potential for creation is one of the main reasons for the success of metaverses. In fact, in Second Life, users can build their own world however they want.

2. People will spend money on digital goods, but few creators will make a living from it.

One of the common misconceptions about metaverses is that people don't buy things that only exist in the virtual world. But according to the creator of Second Life, this is a fallacy, since in the first ten years, users spent 3.2 billion dollars, in real money, on transactions on the platform.

According to the anthropologist, the next metaverse is destined to become a platform like YouTube, where a small percentage of users earn income by producing videos, while the majority are just consumers of content and another part makes videos informally without any economic purpose.

3. Difficulty of use and technological challenges are obstacles to mass adoption.

In 2017, the American magazine Atlantic estimated that between 20% and 30% of Second Life users never accessed the platform again after their first use. The biggest difficulty is understanding how the virtual world works.

Avatars that look like cartoons don't help either, as does the need for powerful computers to run the program and the need to use augmented reality equipment. Second Life also struggled to develop a good mobile application.

These are all challenges for Facebook, which has announced that it is investing in technology to create increasingly realistic avatars.

4. Virtual worlds can have difficulties reaching certain audiences.

According to the founder of Second Life, interest in metaverses grew during the pandemic, while we were stuck in our homes. But in normal times, it's hard to convince someone to stay in the virtual world.

Digital escapism can be an interesting resource for people living in rural areas with no or little social contact, or in authoritarian countries where the need and freedom to communicate can turn the avatar into the user's primary identity.

5. Establishing rules is complicated.

The founder of Second Life considers it difficult to establish moderation rules in the metaverse, and an identity control system that allows management of what happens on the platform.

According to Boelstorff, creating a paid model like Second Life - where users pay to buy land - helps ward off the negative tendencies of companies like Facebook, which recently showed that it prioritizes profit over disinformation. And it helps to keep a malicious public at bay.

6. The metaverse must not be omnipresent 

Silicon Valley's capitalist model is so suffocating that investment funds are constantly on the lookout for the next Facebook or the new Apple, i.e. companies capable of transforming the world through mass-market programs and products.

But the metaverse, which has been presented as if it were a kind of Matrix, may not actually have as wide a reach as these other platforms, but it could still be useful for certain audiences, such as disabled people who can't leave the house.

Or for other purposes, such as encouraging teleworking and thus reducing car use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at a time when we are talking about the ecological transition. 

Despite the major problems and unknowns that still hang over the Metaverse that Zuckerberg is designing, the founder of Second Life guarantees that there is still a huge appetite for exploring virtual space, especially as technology continues to advance and improve.