theinforager

Second Life: My New Vacation Home?

I had just ported back into my First Life and ,glancing down at my watch, realized I had been “away” for three hours. I had been flying, flirting, shopping, buying, building and chatting with friends. I had spent time decorating my new house and acquired some wonderful new threads. I had even been over to see about acquiring a dog to watch the house while I was away and keep me company while I was there. It cost me a few bucks but about half a millionth as much as a place in the mountains or at the beach. I didn’t have to drive or spend two hours dealing with TSA and irritable ticket agents at the airport. No packing. No sunscreen. No bellman to tip, no room service to haggle with, no bored concierge to line up some overpriced tickets to a show or book me a bad table at an over-rated restaurant. I didn’t need a tour book, an interpreter or phrase book. And I had a pretty darn good time. Welcome to Second Life!

http://secondlife.com

Of course many people on the planet who spend way more time on line than I do have long made such cyber excursions and lived in well developed cyber communities for a long long time. I am late to the game but rapidly becoming a totally hooked citizen. What fun!

And I found it by accident. Bumping around on line at work.

Several colleagues and I recently embarked on a quest to develop effective and alternative ways to deliver Face2Face information to our clients’ workforces. While a decidedly more commercial than noble adventure, we were looking for ways to leapfrog past current communication and training practices in industries such as automotive, pharmaceutical and retail. These kinds of businesses rely on large, widely distributed, indirect workforces to deliver their brand messages and sell their products. to a wide variety of customers. These remote sales organizations need a tremendous infusion of communications and training support—information AND instruction on how to make best use of the information.

Over the past two decades companies have spent billions devising creative and engaging ways to garner attention from and build the skills of workers in offices, showrooms, plants, cars and homes. Tactics ranging from simple film strips (ancient times) to video tape, video discs, cd-rom, satellite network downloads and of course internet supported distance learning modules, on line and live classes as well as events.

While all of these methods and media can be effective, even the most interactive lacks the one thing all of those sales people need: practice presenting the product to real, live customers. People with the intelligence, insight and ability to ask questions, challenge claims, correct mistakes and truly test whether knowledge was assimilated or simply memorized for a short time.

Our agency has a robust learning and performance organization that earns a very good living developing and executing these kinds of programs. However, competitive pressure, pricing parity and and purchasing departments have made it difficult to be distinctive, earn a premium and grow the business.

So we set out to look for next generation applications that could be developed and used in the corporate world. And there it was, right under many of our noses—right there on many of our desktops!

The gamers among our staff pointed to World of Warcraft and the millions of hours a week spent on line by kids from Mumbai to Seoul to San Francisco to Des Moines: “MMRPG’s are the future of all communication, all life!, they cried. Others down the hall in the creative department were more interested in sims and building worlds (we creatives love to play God) than peopling them.

The sales geeks correctly point out that there weren’t exactly a whole lot of clients lined up to shackle their sales organizations to video game stations.

We wanted something totally interactive, totally human in its ability to be unpredictable and responsive to participant input; something with a wide variety of domains that simulated both customer environments and customer types; something that allowed a salesperson to see, inspect and learn about products, maybe even demo them for herself or for a client (from cameras to cars to cancer fighting drugs) and above all, the opportunity to practice selling.

Enter Second Life.

Both the actual space and, of course, the ability to use Linden’s open source code to develop a space all your own opened a whole new world for us. Companies and institutions ranging from Harvard, to IBM to Sears were already there and had already discovered what we found: a beautifully rendered, sinfully compelling, infinitely variable, wonderfully and spectacularly REAL place. Truly a place to LIVE a Second Life. For pleasure or work, it doesn’t matter.

It’s all there.

Terra. Buildings. Citizens—both AI and human tended. Places to go. Things to see. Products to buy and sell. Established principles of commerce and wealth accumulation.

I can see a future where work and school are enriched and made ever more effective through this kind of interactivity. The world of developers and just plain computers is so vast and so rapidly assimilating and then pushing new ideas ahead it won’t be long. That’s the real power of the net, isn’t it. Collective intelligence and talent hitched to human curiosity and ambition.

I don’t really want to replace my First Life travels to wonderful and exotic places (although I am tempted to replace a few of my First Life friends!). I like the world outside my front door too much: riding a bike, walking the beach, sailing, playing the drums and just reading a book are all much higher on the gotta do list every day than a mini vacation to Second Life. Work is work whether I am telecommuting to the East Coast or working live at my office there. Ditto school. On line classes are great. So are the classroom based courses I am taking.

But you know, my new puppy is waiting, the house needs a bit more inspired decorating and there’s a party tomorrow night….calling me back to Second Life.