Recently on the Second Life Working Inworld blog, Amanda Van Nuys, aka Amanda Linden, wrote a piece recognizing the "imperative" of work avatars - i.e., a professional-looking avatar - as being a major step in the enterprise adoption of immersive environments and virtual worlds. The response to this entry, which also included an interview with ThinkBalm's Sam Driver, was overwhelming, with 150+ comments posted so far. We here at 3DTLC felt an interview with Amanda would be useful to clarify her points.
"I am very glad that that post was able to catalyze a conversation that was happening in pockets of Second Life," Amanda said from Linden Lab's home base in San Fransisco. "Now we, as a community, are talking about some very core issues about avatar identity and how we use virtual worlds for work, and how these emerging norms are different – or are not different – from how Second Life has worked in the past."
In the post, Van Nuys and Driver outlined how important it was to adopt professional attire as virtual worlds are taken more and more seriously within the enterprise sector. It appeard from Van Nuys' post that Second Life was developing an 'official' policy, of sorts, but it turns out the reality is a bit different.
"Linden Lab will never be in the business of dicatating these type of things," she said. "We love the diversity and richness of the virtual world and how people choose to express themselves. When Sam and I were working on this, Gartner Research was working on their report, which was a huge coincidence. And what was stunning to me about the report was that he said by the end of 2013, 70% of enterprise will have avatar and behavioral guidelines, which means that 70% of enterprise will be using virtual worlds. If that’s true, then there absolutely will be a need for policy. At that point, the codes of conduct and other rules and regulations that apply to a workplace have to apply to Second Life and virtual worlds."
Second Life's policy in this regard as an ahead-of-the-curve industry-leader would be a portent of things to come, as the company makes its way into the enterprise market.
"More than anything, Linden Lab is advocating that organizations should look at having a policy for how their employees choose to behave and dress in a virtual world, knowing that each organization is going to have different policies," she said. "If a work environment in the physical world requires suits and ties – lawyers, or the finance sector – than that would make sense, and that same code would apply potentially in the virtual world. I wear jeans to work – I wear jeans in Second Life, and that’s ok. I’ll wear more casual dress for most meetings, but if I’m presenting, I’m wearing a business suit."
But as a platform renowned for its anything-goes approach, Van Nuys recognized that Second Life could be compared to a certain town in the US with a similar anything-goes approach.
"Sometimes I think about Second Life like Las Vegas," she said. "Las Vegas is where you can go and play, or you can go and work, as it’s one of the largest conference centers in the world – there’s a lot to do there, and all this benefits from each another, the balance between work and play. The comparison, though, is a dangerous thing. I think the bottom line is that Second Life is a place where you can work, and you can play. It’s a place where you can enhance and improve your real life. Whether you come there to attend concerts, play games, meet with a community or attend religious services, or come in to work, I think Second Life is a large enough space to accommodate all of those things. Second Life is about the size of Rhode Island in terms of land size. It’s a big place."
Van Nuys also explained some of the details of the move into enterprise, for which the release of Nebraska is the most visible and most widely publicized.
"We started a dedicated team of 25 people for enterprise at the end of 2008. We’re focused on two things: creating a really compelling work experience on the Second Life platform, and also building a behind-the-firewall solution, Nebraska," she said. "On the first point, we're working on a whole host of things to improve the experience for the enterprise customer – for example, from the Second Life work Web site, we’ll have an enterprise registration and an enterprise work-related orientation place. It will be a ten minute orientation which gives people the time to learn the basic functions, the basic things you need to know to attend a meeting or whatever else in-world."
Clearly, Second Life is making a hard push into the enterprise sector, as Amanda's blog post has suggested and as recent Linden Lab developments have shown. Part of entering a new and emerging market, though, is recognizing the other players, but keeping pace with the competition was not a key factor in Amanda's decision to write about dress code.
"The blog entry wasn’t about the competition at all," she said. "It was about Second Life and about the kinds of things that we as a community need to do to accelerate adoption. It was exclusively focused on us and our community. Competition is healthy and a great thing, and we are in the very early days in terms of virtual worlds penetration in the marketplace. Nobody has sized the market, and nobody has sized the projected growth of the market. Competition is very healthy in new markets, and especially in new markets, because it catayzes innovation and growth."
To that end, Linden Lab is absorbing an earful from its customer base.
"We are very focused on listening to our enterprise customers right now. Almost everything that we're doing right now is based on customer feedback, and collectively our customers are telling us what they need to be able to successfully implement. We’re very focused on lisetning and learning. This is a very new market and we’re all learning together."
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