"Your only limit is your imagination."

This is now Seth's thread. Answer his questions, damn it.

One wonders what type of experiences lend themselves to abject cynicism.

SL is not the best fit for cynics.

I'd wager that SL enjoys a optimist to pessimist (including those who are simply playing at being pessimists because of a fervent desire to appear as "counter status-quo" ratio well above that of RL.

Apparently, that sticks in some folk's craws.

(nod)

That's the sort of thing I've had. When I've commented to someone, for instance, that I'm not completely happy with my avatar's appearance, the usual response has been "why don't you change it then?" or similar. Nobody seems to acknowledge that not everyone has the design skills required.

Improvements? I'll start with an obvious one. In-game avatar posability, with proper IK. At the moment, any feeling of freedom in SL is devastated - devastated, I tell you - by the inability to have your avatar do anything unless you have an animation for it. Everyone knows how awkward Poser is, and 90% of its features aren't useful for SL animations, so an in-game editor or a free-pose option for spontaneous actions would make things infinately more accessible.

I'm not going to get into can-do versus can't-do attitudes, or the equality or inequality of innate talent versus effort invested... we just spin circles...

I certainly understand the frustration, but only to a point. The LSL wiki makes me want to tear my hair out, but I'm also not willing to take the time to really fight with it.... at least not yet. Too much other stuff for me to learn and improve at.


Seth, I hear what you are saying above but I don't see how Second Life could become a fantasy-land of "everyone's a winner" without completely revamping their goals and business model. You seem to be talking about a middle ground, but I'm left searching for what that middle ground could look like and yet be sustainable.

Seth Kanahoe: Thread Imperialist.

Sure, SL is for optimists. And I imagine the LL crew likes it that way. So - how to make SL a good fit for those who waver between optimism and pessimism? - in other words, those who are uncertain.

Big crowd, big market.

Nobody? Sounds like more generalizing.


I don't find this to be true at all. What types of "anything" are you trying to do? I've been in SL over 2.5 years, and I am not "devasted". I do not use animations unless they are triggered by an object I choose to interact with. How is that a problem?

Everyone? Again, sounds like more generalizing. Also, I find this suggestion a bit out of place following on the heels of your expressing above that some folks can't master sliders in appearance mode, how do you think folks will fare with an animation editor?

Furthermore, if you think people howled about GOM and LL "co-opting", just add an in game animation suite, and then listen for the resultant cacophony from the folks who sell animations and poses.

Imagination is a funny thing. It's what happens to you while you're busy working. It's often what happens when you thought you were on your way to something else.

Let's say you want to build a house. Much of what that house ultimately becomes is imagined DURING the building of it, not prior to it. Start to build, and imagination will not only come, it will take over and tell you what to do. Or - start to write, and the imagination will come, and the characters will start telling you what to write.

Because the builds - or the writing - take on characters of their own. What seems like "wonderful imagination" to an onlooker is actually just the natural progression of making one small decision after another, as they occur to you, or as the creation demands it. Now I know there ARE people who have huge flashes of brilliant inspiration, ideas, insight and imagination; I'm just not one of them. My flashes are much smaller, and I generally put in just a whole lot of dull, regular work work work for every little bit of flash of inspiration I may enjoy.

But - without doing the work work work part, you will never GET those little flashes of inspiration and imagination. (Unless you are a rare genius.) You often don't even start to get the best of those flashes and ideas until you are well into the work. Just look how many sketches Leonardo da Vinci made. He was WORKING.

How to prime your imaginative pump: Little things can often be your jumping off point. Take something you like, and see what all you can do with it.

For instance, in real life, you find some adorable brown teddy bear buttons in the sewing store. You picture them with red cordoroy. You go search that out. You picture a jumper. This goes on and on till you have, in your hands and finished, two matching, adorable Christmas outfits for your little girls, unlike anything else available on earth, with details even you could never have possibly anticipated in advance through imagination alone.

"What imagination!" people say. "It was the buttons," you say.

Thus, a song lyric becomes a whole house in SL. As the house is created, it gains ever more detail, and gives you new ideas. Those new ideas didn't come from an entity called "imagination" that one either has or doesn't have. They were born from a song lyric, and built on that, detail by detail. Or from a texture, or the call of gulls on a beach, or the waddle of a squirrel Tiny. Things that already existed.

Creative blocks: In the process of creating, the creation itself develops its own identity and needs, whether it's a book, a movie, or a build or event in SL. And that may be different from what you originally thought you were building. In fact, I find my creative blocks in rl and SL generally come from my refusal to let the creation have its way.

At various points in the process, the creation wants to go in a direction you didn't previously imagine for it. What you thought would work isn't really working like you thought it would. The creation is balking, rejecting it.

That makes you mad. You don't want to think you could have been wrong in your original conception, or worse still, WASTED ALL THAT TIME! But eventually you go ahead and try what the creation is demanding, and lo and behold, it works! Even though it pisses you off and you feel like you wasted all that time going in the other direction. (You didn't.)

Or - it doesn't work; nothing works; and you decide that even though you're somewhat disappointed with the actual creation, as opposed to how you were imagining it, it's probably the best that it can be. So you just go ahead and finish it, the way it was, and that turns out to be just fine, too.

Anyone can develop their imagination muscles. Imagination, for the most part, is what happens during the process, and as such is a skill that can be honed through practice like any other skill. That's why writers, fashion designers, and other creators can come up with it on demand.

But they don't expect just to imagine the whole final thing, or even necessarily expect that the whole final thing will actually match what they first imagined. Nor do they expect that each creation achieved through this process will be equally as good as all the others they've done. But they know that gradually, through practice, the overall quality rises.

This doesn't mean, of course, we can all become an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright or a writer like Dean Koontz if we just work hard enough at it. (There is only one Dean Koontz, and he is a special gift from God to the rest of us). It does mean, though that those who are motivated to can become good journeyman/craftsmanlike designers, and over time, open our own minds to all the imaginative possibilites we are each actually capable of.

My advice: Start with some teddybear buttons (to use a metaphor), and go from there to where those teddybears lead you. And FINISH THE PROJECT! No matter how sucky you think it is, before heeding the siren call of the next fresh, clean slate.

coco

Hmm. You know, I've never for one moment equated what Cory and Enabran just did as having squat to do with a particular "sort" of SLer. SL is supposed to be fun, easy and fairly quick - balanced, nessesarily, with capability. After all, as it does need to be powerful in order to fulfil the goals of its users, it also must to be fast and easy to make it accessable. Drop either and SL is useless.

Now that you've pointed out relevance to the "casual" user, I've given it some thought. Unfortuneately I still don't get it. SL is hobbyspace - all but a very few SLers are anything other than casual users.

I ran into the usability thing in my last RL job.

We were a small software company that made a program for a very specialized business niche. Unfortunately that niche is populated by some of the least tech-savvy people in the world. I got used to explaining things in a very simple non-tech way to people.

Well, part of our software let them attach photos to cases they entered. If they wanted to make the photos look better than a straight scan, they had to obviously use some kind of graphics editor, which we didn't provide - but we got SO many people asking if we could incorporate something like that into the program that would specifically do the 4 or 5 things they wanted to do. As opposed to purchasing Photoshop Elements and learning how to mess with that.

Now the reason we didn't add it in is because we lacked the resources and manpower to do it, plus it didn't make financial sense overall. However, LL's end goals are different, and at least a few concessions to usability (like a built-in pose editor - I agree that is desperately needed just because the alternative is so awful) would probably go a long way. Especially since they already have the brains behind the scenes to do it, or at least have access to people who can.

Your first paragraph said exactly what I was trying to say with my functionality mess of words. There's a delicate balance in providing power and flexibility, and making it intuitive and easy to learn.

As to the second paragraph - SL the grid is hobbyspace to most. SL the software platform has the capability to be much, much more.

Then you need to reprioritize your view of the product - no offense - because a vast chunk of the potential market out there doesn't have your outlook or your skills profile. Hobbyists or not, they're very much better than you are in some valuable things, and very much worse that you in others. Your skill and interest set may correlate with present SL realities, but whether you represent the market is another question.

And I doubt very much that Second Life is "balanced" in the way that you claim. LSL, for example, is not fun for the casual user - and I'll go out on a limb and state that as a fact.

Can't add much to this post. My experience has shown me exactly the same thing. Every step in the creative process lends itself to new refinements that you would not have thought of until you'd reached the appropriate crossroads. Some of my most crucial additions and features were things I didn't think of until I was well into the thick of things.

Finishing is important too. Once you've finished something, you've learned a lot about the process and its pitfalls. If you start over again once you've finished the first iteration, the second iteration comes out even more clean and polished, since you knew exactly when and how to sidestep the pitfalls from version 1. You can do this... many times, if you'd like. But eventually you hit something that's just about right.

i don't mean any offense to the original poster, but in response to seth discussing how these threads keep on popping up...

I know that SL *is* hard... I've watched my wife try to get used to the tools and interface

however

I bet on every single game's forum boards... Wow... TSO... whatever... -- games that try their best to make it easy to "level up" -- there are always some posters who are writing "this is too hard"

so you can't necessarily draw conclusions from a recurring message

I think you're preaching to the choir. Please re-read what I said without tinting it with what you think I am on about here.

I didn't say it was, I said it needs to be. As for LSL, Mono (if we ever get it) holds the promise of several available languages - well, more than several. One would be very simple, very modular and extremely easy to learn, at the expense of power. then there would be others with more difficult learning curves that have more power, probably specialising to some degree according to certain sorts of tasks. (/me dreams)

Thanks ^.^

Yesh. Just, not at the moment
One of the things that keeps me in SL no matter how borken it gets is the potential it has to be the grand wildcard. All things to all people. (Well, or as close as it can be had.)

I agree. One thing I draw from it is that sometimes, "this is too hard", can easily be replaced with, "I am not very patient".

That's my feeling exactly.

SL is hard, for the average person - that's just all there is to it.

Then again, Anarachy Online was complex and hard to figure out, too. When I went back to try it a second time, I realized I'd forgotten a lot of what I had learned in the first 60 levels, and just didn't want to bothere learning it all again.

coco

Doing shit well is hard in general. One could say writing, dancing and, yes, even scrapbooking are hard for the average person. I think that's just the way it is. No solution beyond expecting the average person to apply themselves and learn if they expect to be successful.

Not bothering is related to what I said about patience.

If you don't have the time and or patience to invest, you (figurative you) really can't complain about those who do, or have a valid point in stating that it's "not fair" for whatever raison du jour. Yes, SL was hard for me. I have not seen it stated that it's easy. I quit WoW and other MMORPGS, because I find level grinding to be too "hard" (I don't have that type of patience, nor do I possess the hand eye coordination for real-time melee) for me. UO was the one exception.

I didn't know Photoshop, or have any 3d building skills beyond The Sims when I came to SL.

I am now adept at PS, and building in a 3d simulator.

It didn't just happen. I am horribly unartistic in RL. It took a lot of time. A lot of mistake uploads. A LOT of trial and error, patience and MOTIVATION.

For me, it was related more to motivation than lack of patience. I didn't have the motivation to learn it all over again.

coco

I went on to talk about motivation. It's in caps.

I think the two are intertwined anyway.

For example - since I do not have the patience to level grind, I lack the motivation to do so.

What about the poor people with no talent and with no motivation...and no HBO?

Hey, there's always "Mo'dwell 6".

Let me rephrase this because apparently I wasn't clear.


Your limits in general are defined by your dedication, your imagination, and the skill you glean from said dedication. That's absolutely fine.

Your limits in Second Life are a completely different story. Second Life is limited by what the Lindens allow us to do, the platform it exists upon, and the limits of the client connection. You cannot, say, have a (decent) quadrupedal avatar, run your own simulator, or run Second Life on an Xbox without hacking the client, a practice Linden Lab explicitly prohibits in their TOS.


So, for those only limited by their imagination in Second Life, small worlds for small minds.

I really hate to come off as "up on high" and blunt here, but that's really how it works. The more imaginative someone is with regards to virtual worlds, the less they are drawn to the limitations of Second Life.


Anyone that tells you otherwise is either blissfully ignorant or has a knack for marketing.

One small note: Cocoanut's post was brilliant. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do in response to it, but it isn't to post any sort of response, because I don't have one, other than that it was brilliant. Um, which I just posted as a response... oh, you get the picture.



Shake hands?



People know how to make certain motions because they do them with their own bodies. They know how to move their hand forward or similar. Yes, using Poser can be difficult, but only because it allows the armature to be put into blatantly impossible positions (which almost no animations that I've seen actually use). Ever play Rag Doll Kung Fu? Try that for a "free pose" mode.

On the other hand, the appearance editor is entirely artificial. You don't think of the shape of your face in numeric terms normally. And I've had problems with the fact that you can sometimes achieve the same appearance in two different ways, but find that one of those ways seems to confuse things so that the av's shading or skin looks completely bizarre. Of course, you don't usually know the other way exists at the time you find that one..



I don't see why it'd hurt them any more than having in-game building tools hurts people who sell builds. Just because everyone has the tools to do it doesn't mean everyone has the skills and time.