Short clip: Linden Lab providing users with an open-ended platform

Introduction

>> What are some of the challenges to building a service like Second Life, compared to a more traditional website?

>> So there are many, and we have spent 5 years learning about them. That is I say, we're now at a point where we are hosting tens of thousands, close to 100,000 people simultaneously in the world. That in itself is a significant challenge. This is not like most traditional multiplayer games where the worlds are sharded into smaller groups, smaller clusters of game players. This is 1 world that everyone can contribute and participate in collaboratively. The challenge really is in handling user generated content in a way that doesn't degrade the experience for others. We provide a very rich building tools, set of tools that can be used to build objects of all kinds. In fact everything that you see in Second Life was ultimately created by the users, not by us, but by the users of Second Life. Those objects can further be scripted. We have a full, rich scripting language that allows you to imbue those objects with characteristics, interactivity, and so forth. We put very few constraints on how those scripts are constructed, how they objects are built, and to be able to host the range. It's now close to 250 terrabytes of content that our users create, is on ongoing daily challenge. Our users are far more creative with the applications for Second Life than we frankly ever imagined we could offer them. We really have provided them with an open ended platform for their imagination, for their creativity, and they've done things with the platform that we frankly couldn't have imagined.

>> How do you keep it from going off the rails then?

>> Well we do... we do go off the rails, quite frankly. And when we do we study those vectors, we study those behavioral conditions, and we look at both technical and non technical solutions to the problem.

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