3. second life
• launched 2003
• carefully managed real-money economy
• about 50,000 concurrent users
• community-driven “sandbox”
• global user base
• terrible UI and social tools
4. eve online
• launched 2003
• carefully managed real-money economy
• about 30,000 concurrent users
• community-driven “sandbox”
• global user base
• terrible UI and social tools
5. a roadmap
1. programmer culture:
san francisco bay area and iceland
2. eve online’s emergent user culture
3. second life’s emergent user culture
4. y so difrunt?
7. iceland = san francisco?
• “the californian ideology”
• “viking programmers”
8. “the californian ideology”
• (wikipedia)
• Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
• Barbrook & Cameron essay
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-
californian-ideology-2/
9. recipe
• “a mix of cybernetics, free market economics,
and counter-culture libertarianism”
- barbrook & cameron
http://www.arpnet.it/chaos/barbrook.htm
10. in california
• Ayn Rand + hippie culture
+ engineering culture +
1980s-1990s cyberpunk
• generally idealistic
11. in iceland
• the californian ideology
+ the sagas +
globalization
• more nihilistic
13. david friedman – silicon valley
scholar of icelandic law
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html
33. demographics
• sl as the last expression of the techno-hippie
demographic (california 1998)
• eve as the first expression of young bitter
anarcho-capitalists (iceland 2008)
34. • sl – how 50-somethings wish the world was
• eve – how 20-somethings believe the world is
35. • sl – “your world, your imagination”
• eve – “space makes you bitter”
“yummy tears”
36. “A year in EVE will teach you more about human
nature than a decade in any other MMO, but
what you learn may scar you.”
http://tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/65