trees are people too

As we draw to the end of our experience in second life, I was bemused to come across an article discussing how Second Life is losing its currency as a marketing tool.

As I discussed in this earlier post, companies had been embracing second life as an environment where they could further market and promote their products to virtual consumers. While it wasn’t necessarily a way to generate revenue, it did offer a huge opportunity to create brand awareness and brand recognition, and to engage the realm of Second Lifers who were engaging with the virtual world. In a world no longer limited by time, boundaries, language or cost, it provided the perfect opportunity to reach a whole new demographic of consumers. But it seems Australians are not interested.

Unbeknownst to me, Tourism Victoria had built their own environment, a replica of the popular lanes district in Melbourne, as an attempt to attract visitors to explore the city of Melbourne. After witnessing a decline in popularity in the use of Second Life in the last 9 months, however, they have decided to pull the plug. While the investment wasn’t costly, it was no longer worth the investment of time and effort, considering there were only ‘a few hundred’ Australians using Second Life at any one time. It looked fantastic, check it out.

Perhaps not necessarily the fact that Australian’s are ‘over’ second life, but maybe more that the uptake of applications like Facebook have distracted the target audience from engaging with it?? I know that the general consensus from participants in this subject seemed to be that Second Life seemed a little ‘passe’, a little dating and even a bit cringe-worthy. There was talk of ‘nothing happening’ in Second Life. In experiencing it, it quickly becomes clear that it is not actually a game, but a virtual world, one in which you have to drive the narrative yourself, by exploring, building, engaging and actually working at it. This is something that not only alienates traditional gamers, but also might have grown tiresome for the digital natives of Gen Y, who are fickle and of short attention span.

There is talk of life being injected into the game again if it affiliated with another online marketing tool, say ebay, but for the moment it will be interesting to see whether Second Life retains its momentum and its appeal to younger up-and coming generations. Perhaps it is just Australia that is experiencing this apathy towards it…

It still provides an excellent platform to explore Machinima, however, and a cost-effective way to produce beautiful media, should you be so inclined. While I don’t doubt machinima will continue to grow in popularity as an efficient and effective cinematic production tool, perhaps more sophisticated engines than Second Life will take precedence. Watch this space.