Portugese President Delivers Speech Via Second Life

[Earnest Cavalli]

Portugese President Delivers Speech Via Second Life


Holy antiquated technological gimmickry Batman! On June 9th, Portugese head of state Aníbal Cavaco Silva became the first president in world history to deliver an official speech from within Second Life.

The speech was purposely punctuated by its choice of virtual venue (and my respective real-time repetition) in an effort to celebrate both the "Dia De Portugal" national holiday and the June 10th opening of the "Portuguese Republic Presidency's Island" in Second Life.

Omnipresent Second Life chronicler Wagner James Au has an excellent write up on the speech [http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/06/portuguese-presidency-debuts-in-sl-with-the-first-ever-head-of-states-speach-in-the-metaverse.html] (complete with the above video record of the event) and the Portugese government's efforts to leave a sizable bootprint within the sandbox, though Au is one of the few writers who still applies wide-eyed wonder and childish glee to the subject of Linden Labs' virtual world.

Whether this is a positive trait or a negative is certainly up to the reader, but after so many years of hearing about how Second Life would revolutionize everything, I think hearing the story of yet another politico jump into the virtual fray isn't as impressive as it may once have been.

Then again, given that I can barely locate Portugal on a map (it's in the Wundagore Mountains, right?) I could be totally wrong. After witnessing that event, do any of you find yourselves standing, slackjawed at the nigh-Rumsfeldian levels of shock and awe the Portugese government has cobbled together here?

Permalink

 

[Flunk]

Second Life is still running? I thought everyone was sick of the world's most boring MMO by now.

 

[HobbesMkii]

A little late. Wasn't there that Wired article like 3 years ago about how Second Life was a barren wasteland?

 

[Divinegon]

It's spelled "Portuguese". Not Portugese.

And we're the country to the left side of Spain (We're historically older and ruled half the world with Spain having the other half before. Now that's all crap because people screwed up things).

But yeah, the whole politicians getting into technology is silly even in here. Specially because nobody really cares about Second Life in Portugal.

 

[Therumancer]

Not sure if it was 3 years ago, but basically what happened as I understand thing was that they started paying attention to both the political/porn content and the potential for people to use linden currency as a replacement for the real thing to perform money laundering and such (ie buy lindens, then exchange for cash). This lead to the linden being at least monitored and people using it for exactly that backing away, and more importantly all of the "ageplay" perversion and such where people would get online to hook up with cartoon lolitas for hot-chat sex with animations was apparently regulared and caused a lot of people to leave. I mean something like 99% of the people doing Second Life were probably perverts looking for a fix, or catering to the online sex trade there.

With dated tech, and no real appeal for the people who built it, people abandoned it by the droves. Or at leas such is what I've been able to piece together.

That said, I have never heard anything about it going under. Besides the technology is interesting in concept, even if the business model where people were paying small fortunes for virtual space, has always been ridiculous.

Also it lead to some genuine innovation, that whole "Destroy TV" thing was actually pretty neat and I could see that going places if people were to pick up on the idea.

I never did Second Life (little interest in it other than as a concept, I'm perverted but not so hard up I'd go to pay to hot chat someone... ever) but every once in a while something like the Destroy TV avatar-jacking thing would get my attention.

>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[Iampringles]

Wow, that would be cool if it was any country besides Portugal. I have too many enemies there.

I wish I had Portuguese enemies... *sigh*

 

[Crimson King]

wtf?

 

[oliveira8]

Too bad that he completly destroyed the country when he was Prime Minister, by putting all the EU funds in his pocket. Way the go you!

But of course everyone already forgot that...old people are the major of voters and old people forget what happened 20 years ago....

-.-'''


Old People need to die. All.Of.Them.

 

[Zulu-Echo14]

To the Writer: Fuck you.

 

[Iampringles]

Wow, that would be cool if it was any country besides Portugal. I have too many enemies there.

I wish I had Portuguese enemies... *sigh*

Trust me, their not that good. I swear to non-existent god that they shoot like they come from the <url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy>Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.

At least your enemies can shoot.

Mine just swing flails in my general direction, whilst shouting angry folk music quotes at me.

 

[Tesahli]

That was a really nice building they did there for this event, though I thought it'd be a recording of the speech. People from Portugal may never play SL (I don't think I've seen any), but Brazilians seem to love it.

Second Life is still running? I thought everyone was sick of the world's most boring MMO by now.

Still pretty popular and starting to do better, regularly getting 75,000 + users logged in at once and rising, and 15,000,000 accounts created (though that's about as meaningless as WoW's claim to having 13,000,000 players or whatever) and about 40 million dollars (USD) a month in virtual transactions (a 65% increase from last year).

I notice that most of the public naysayers of Second Life in gaming forums make snap judgments on SL from either the grand experience of maybe at best 3-4 hours of logging in and then logging off forever, and from parroting other people with about as much experience. I've found most of these kinds of post to give information that is either woefully inaccurate, highly exaggerated, and/or extremely biased against SL even lacking any real knowledge about it.

This lead to the linden being at least monitored and people using it for exactly that backing away, and more importantly all of the "ageplay" perversion and such where people would get online to hook up with cartoon lolitas for hot-chat sex with animations was apparently regulared and caused a lot of people to leave. I mean something like 99% of the people doing Second Life were probably perverts looking for a fix, or catering to the online sex trade there.

With dated tech, and no real appeal for the people who built it, people abandoned it by the droves. Or at leas such is what I've been able to piece together.

They banned sexual ageplay, but I think you greatly over-estimate the number of sexual-ageplayers there were in Second Life. Most of them are probably still around as well, just doing it more covertly. The real ban that did any damage was banning Gambling, they had no choice there, since it was pretty illegal.

Linden Lab themselves said that they found that only 2% of content in SL was adult in nature, I kinda doubt that claim, but I think it's much much lower than the 99% you threw out there.

 

[Caliostro]

Ok... Can't tell whether this is awesome or just retarded...

Also, our "president" is just a figure head, evidenced by the fact that he spends his time giving speeches in MMOS... It's the prime minister that has the real power.

Then again, given that I can barely locate Portugal on a map

Side effect of being American I'm afraid.

PS: *Portuguese. A quick check on Google would have done wonders...

 

[GothmogII]

Meh. At least the video was pretty well done, well, it was museum lobby quality at that.