2011: a Humble year

Second Life’s New Leader: Rod Humble Becomes CEO of Linden Lab

MMO and Gaming Industry Visionary to Bring New Life to Second Life

SAN FRANCISCO — December 23, 2010 — Linden Lab®, creator of 3D virtual world Second Life®, today announced that Rod Humble has become the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Humble joins Linden Lab from Electronic Arts, where he was Executive Vice President for its EA Play label.

Humble’s 20-year career in the game development industry has included work on more than 200 games. In his most recent position at Electronic Arts, Humble headed the EA Play label, which includes the best-selling PC game franchise of all time, The Sims. In 2009, he was ranked #2 on the annual list of the Hot 100 Game Developers from gaming publication Edge. Prior to his work at Electronic Arts, Humble served as Vice President of Product Development at Sony Online Entertainment for the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), EverQuest.

Thus broke the news, on December 23rd 2010, that Linden Lab had a new CEO. Now, I’ll admit, and with all due respect to Mr. Humble – Rodvik, as we all now know him – but I’m not a games player (or wasn’t, until my retired father got himself a Wii, which has become the centrepiece of get-togethers at his place…but I digress). No, I had no more familiarity with The Sims than I had with George Clooney; sure, both were / are big names in their respective worlds, but the closest I’d been to either was passing a DVD box on a store shelf…

So the name “Rod Humble”, to me, meant little when the announcement was made, and I really had no idea how to respond to the news, so decided to wait. Some were a tad impatient for him to say something (although he wasn’t actually due to officially start at LL until mid-January), and some even commented that his silence didn’t bode well. I didn’t share this view and saw a number of reasons why Rod Humble was taking the right course in keeping quiet – as did Tateru Nino, in a thought-provoking piece.

When he did finally blog (just under a week after starting), his first post was a combination of the uplifting and the cautious – which again, I personally felt was the right way to go, and boded well for the future.

Since then, we’ve seen highs and we’ve seen lows – but I’ll nail my colours to the mast and say I believe the former outweigh the latter. On the whole, a lot of confidence has been restored in the user community – one only has to look at the overall favourable reaction to Rodvik’s appointment the more people heard him talk about SL, and to the reaction of SLCC attendees and those who watched the streams from the convention. Yes, there is still a long way to go, and cock-ups do happen, as we saw both with the code breakages around the middle of the year and the Marketplace mess-ups. But – the Viewer has been improved, mesh has arrived after years of waiting and hoping for many; we have Linden staff spending time in-world, re-discovering the complexities of the platform and developing new tool sets that will be released to the community, and so on.

It would be easy to nit-pick over the issues and downsides that remain, but I’m not going to that. One year ago today, it was announced that Rod Humble was appointed as CEO on Linden Lab, and since then, it’s been an interesting ride – and was we can see from his very appropriate post today, we’re in for more interesting times in 2012, which are bound to bring their own share of rewards and grumbles.

All I am going to say at this point – while aware that he didn’t officially occupy the hot seat at Battery Street until mid-January 2011 – is this: happy anniversary, Rodvik, and here’s to the next 12 months. Looking forward to further engagement between Lab and users, and experiencing the tools and pathfinding elements on which you blog…

…Just one question for you, if you please: at SLCC 2012. You said your goal for your first year at LL as being to be able to give every family member within Linden Lab a Second Life account, for them to be able to send the account to any “intelligent or above average intelligence computer user” for them to be able to use it to get into Second Life, use it and be grateful.

How has that worked out? Goal met? Very curious to know! :).