Explaining SL to the unwashed masses

OK was talking to my mum today........told her that I was teaching a class, making jewelry and planting flowers.....

Twas all fine and dandy 'till I had to explain to her exactly WHERE I was teaching a class....who I was making jewelry for......and what virtual land I was planting flowers on.

She was bemused that I was paying real $ for fake land...hehe, who can blame her.

OK so this all happened like 10 months ago, but I still remember it well.............and when she calls and I say....gee can I call you back I have a class, I still think she's stumped.

My mom is hardly a fool, but newfangled things confuse her, and SL and me makes her go hmmm.

I have to admit when I first stepped into SL and saw that people paid real $ for NOTreal land me and hubby both said....ha how dumb....we would never.

Well we both ate crow, and still do..............

So with that said I bet most, if not all of you have a story of how you tried to explain SL to a family member or friend.....and how foolish it probably sounded comming out of your mouth.

I would love to hear the tales you told. And how you tried to explain it.

And how people reacted to you.

Yeah, I've gotten to where I try to avoid explaining it. I usually end up trying several different analogies before they finally get a vague understanding, but are still dubious. I get 'So how're you doing on that...that...online thing...these days?' from extended family members a lot.

Oh, recently I think I scared someone away from Second Life, too. My brother was showing it to some good friends of ours who are like super orthodox religious types, and he did right by showing them all the cool stuff in SL first. Create, meet, have fun! However, he neglected to mention the other parts of SL that exist outside my property. I called them up and tried to explain what their 18 year old daughter was going to find if she wandered around SL on her own. They said they'd 'get back to me' if they decided to try it. Not heard from them about it.

in my experience, i've found most people to become quickly intrigued. the main person who makes fun of me is one of the people who live at my place.. and that's only because i spend more time in the forums than i do in-world. lol..

but back on topic..

what i usually say as a quick summary statement to draw them in while fleshing out the concept quickly is, "it's like a parallel world that exists on a digital plane."

from tehre i go on to touch on avatar/"character" creation and the myriad of choices available. then i mention how there's a 3D building tool and a scripting language. if i haven't lost them by that point (hehe..) i continue on about how there's an ever-growing map of land available and how (with a Premium accuont) you can own a piece of that land. i've even been able to go and explain prim allocation in relation to plot size as it relates to what a server can handle as it's really just digital information.

*whew*

..and that you can fly.

That would be a biggie for me................

my problem with SL is that while i think sl is a medium i use to interact with real people, my gf sees it as just another meaningless game.

it creates a lot of problems when i'm in the middle of a conversation and she wants me to step away from the comptuer immediately. i'm caught between being rude to my sl friend or my rl partner.

i guess it doesn't help that i'm a pixel slapping addict.

I just like watching their eyes glaze over as I explain it.

Heh! Sometimes I try NOT to explain Second Life. I came to realize my enthusiasm in explaining "Second Life" then trying to explain it almost makes it sound like I'm some sort of weird Cyber-Born-Again-Christian.

Plus some of these people are quite... whats the word?.... Clueless?

I say it's sort of like World of Warcraft. Usually I get a reply of "Whats that?" Then I know to stop.

Or others respond with either "I dont have a computer" or "My computer is old". "How Old?" I ask. And it usually turns out to be still running Windows 95. Barely.

I mention everything being created by the users. And the answers I get are "I'm not an artist" or "I dont have Photoshop". I tell them "Most of the people on it aren't artists either!". The Photoshop one is tough to explain- most of these people never heard of stuff like "Opensource software" like GIMP. To them, everything about computers costs big money.

I tried showing it to my parents once. Once. My mother sort-of gets it. My dad is.... not even remotely impressed. Heh, he's the "it aint work if you arent covered in sweat, suffering from work-related injuries, punching a time-clock" mindset. He still thinks computers & the internet is a fad.

Oh! I try to leave out the "you can make money" part. If thats their only reason for trying it, they'll be sorely disappointed.

The first line I always use, because I want people to realize the Second Life is much more than a game, is "every character that you interact with in Second Life is a real person, from countries all over the world, sitting at a computer... and everything you see in the world, buildings, vehicles, clothing, furniture, weapons, is created by them."

I go on to say, "in Second Life I have met friends from many different countries. I have created lots of items using the 3D modeling tools and programming language that is built right into Second Life. In fact, many players, including myself make real money selling these items we make."

If those descriptions don't get them interested I tell them about all the sex, and well, that seems to work

Sinatra

I gave up attempting to explain SL to anyone I know in RL long ago. After a year of being met by incomprehending blank stares, ridicule and/or attempts to put me into therapy for 'internet addiction' I realised that I was wasting my time attempting to communicate with people I know in RL. My address book is alot leaner these days.

Back in the day, when a group called VERTU (which raised money for nonprofits via SL) was still around (I have no idea, is it dead?) -- I helped them manage a fundraising campaign, the money going to the non-profit I worked for full-time then.

Anyway, just before the big party/fundraiser, the non-profit marketing bosses called me down and said "You can't DO this! It's like, what, another website?" They couldn't figure it out. I had to explain to them that it was like telling any other community group they couldn't donate money -- not a nice way to keep getting further donations! Anyway, it took some serious explaining (there was no 3D card usable pc on which I could *show* them SL), I finally managed to convince them to take VERTU's money and I only had to change a couple of small things about the build I put togehter for the project (they didn't like the pig. It was of "poor graphic quality," lol).

A few months later I ran into the new media director for that nonprofit at an inter-office conference and said, "Wow, that fundraising thing you did? That's just so cutting edge. Seriously, it's like, out there. How did you come across such a thing?"

I sighed, and explained it all again .

I find the explaining SL goes really well, right up to the point when you mention money......

Me trying to explain SL:

"Well... its this world where you can do anything you want."

*glazed eyes*

"No, its really cool, you can build anything you want to build and meet people and oh mom you know how you like vegas so much, there's a sim of vegas there!"

mom: well why dont I just go to vegas then? and whats a sim?

/me gives up

I get questions once in a while.

I show my account page, and the Caledon sims from the "show larger version" home page map.

I make sure to use the words 'video game' and 'play' but rarely say more than four or five sentences.

And let them sit there stunned and poking at the website on their own.

I find that the very best way to explain Second Life to non players is using this: http://secondlife.com/community/video/trailer_contest_2005/JavierPuff.mov

Javier's trailer is a superb 2 minutes overview of what SL is.

I also sometimes use the videos I created to show how our community of friends interact.

I met my wife in Second Life. Luckily, her family is big and has seen it all. They weren't even particularly phased when she told them she had met me in an online world. We kinda skipped on the other details.

Wendel

This is my favorite summary and explanation of SL:

http://futuretag.net/index.php/Slgp1

My mother thinks SL is Dungeons and Dragons.

"I don't want you to get messed up like you did when you played THAT GAME."

Which, she is convinced, caused me great psychological trauma during my childhood in the 80s. Yes, but for TSR role playing games, this ruined Ph.D. you see before you could have made something of himself: been a lawyer or a banker or a CPA. Fortunately, my mom thinks she and Dad saved me by taking the game away. (shudders...I could have ended up a department head in neurophysics somewhere, thank you mom for saving me from that fate).


I'll never convince here that this isn't Dungeons and Dragons. And I'll never convince her that any D&D induced psychosis only occurred in a crappy made-for-TV movie she watched one night.

I like to start by explaining that everybody regularly spends real money on intagible/virtual things. When you buy a CD, you arent buying a shiny pice of plastic, you are buying the string of numbers written onto that shiny piece of plastic, how is that any different from paying for a string of numbers that represent a virtual widget? Along that same line nobody thinks twice about paying for an itunes download, or an MMORPG bill, or even their operating system, but all those things are just as much "virtual" as land and prims. I find that people think I'm much less of a weirdo when I point out how much of they spend on "useless virtual objects".

Although I do wish there were more possibilites, it isn't qute as limitless as the metaverse I imagined, there needs to be outer space, more caves, the overwhelming majority of this world is green plains that you just walk around on. I just wish the environment was more diverse without requiring one to build it out of prims. That and there needs to be better ways to animate objects, more ways to interact with them too, there are alot of things in the real world that prim behavior can't quite represent, so I wouldnt go so far as to say "we can do anything", but it is a leap ahead of the 3d worlds a few years back.

Rather than "do anything" I say you walk around, socialize, buy/sell, play games, create stuff. I call it a playground except with alot more people and the abilit to make yer own toys.

"It's sort of like a game, but there's no actual point."

"So, what does that make you, for marrying one of those 'sad' people?"

If you want to be snarky, anyway. Even as a confirmed bachelor, I know this isn't actually a smart thing to say to your SO.

After playing in so many of these virtual worlds I've learned to get over it. I guess the first one I got into that wasn't really a game was the palace, then activeworlds, then vrml sites like cybertown from the blaxxun servers, then off to things like there, which eventually led me here, and its the same story every time with all the outsiders thinking its pathetic. The really old ones like lambdamoo and that one lucas arts thing that hosted the first case of avatar rape were before my time though.


They should really take a look at themselves, I don't see SL as any more pathetic than livejournal/myspace/facebook and alot of those kids spend more time on those sites than I do in SL. Or these web forums, lots of yer critics live on these message boards and it isn't any different. At this point in RL many people we meet spend a huge amount of their time in front of a computer screen in some form, to call other ppl pathetic for it is being hypocritical.

I work in IT for a health system, so any system changes I need to make that require downtime always have to be done after hours. Actually, any system changes at all have to be done after hours because of the risk of affecting patient care.

Its a running joke around my office not to schedule "Change Controls" that involve me between 9pm-10pm, because "Travis) has to run his game show."

Everyone thinks I'm crazy, but that's okay.

Most of you guys have me laughing my butt off.




OMGawd UnWorldly I remember lambdamoo, that was the first place I was Nyx...and have been ever since. Shit that was before my 10 yr old was born.....holy cow where did that time go. And compare Lambda to SL, Lambda was definately a user created world but all in text and emotes......it's so kewl to see this stuff evolve and grow.

I wasn't actually IN lambdamoo when it was anything new. I am only 22 years old but I got online when I was really young. My online adventures started around 1994, windows 3.1, compuserve before the AOL merger, software rendering on the 486(I didn't get a sound or gfx card until later). In those days the new things were stuff like the palace, and activeworlds was just around the corner.

So it was before my time, but I was aware of it and so much of the other fun commandline stuff from back in the day. It's weird to think about, I was born in 1984, GUI's have been common my entire life thanks to the mac. Still in such a short time things have changed so much, even from the days when I played on my parent's IBM in the early 90's things look completely different, it makes me feel alot older than I really am. I was always big on vitrual worlds and the internet and stuff, made my first web page when I was 12, saw the rise and fall of the .coms as it happened, when I look back on it I realize I had a really fun childhood.

Point being, the whole time I was picked on and most everyone thought my computer activities were pathetic, but here I am one year away from a computer engineering degree and a sweet job doing what I love, I wonder what they would think of me and my lame computer life now.