What frelling immersion?

Insane Utopian, Philip Linden, said yesterday that he thought SL was immersive. Virus-spewing Lordfly Digerdoo says that having imbedable weblinks would ruin his immersion in SL. What frelling immersion?

I wanted to partner with Kerovia Galatea last night, and I had to exit Second Life, fill out the request form, log into my email, go back to the SL website, and accept her proposal. How the frell is that immersive? Someone explain to me how SL partnering is immersive when I have to go to a website propose, when my partner doesn't even have to be online to propose, when I don't even have to be online to accept! Somone could propose to me, I could accept, and neither of us would need to be online to do any of that.

Someone explain to me how the frell hyperlinks screw with the immersion more than that? Geez, City of Heroes doesn't make me fill out a web page when I want to join a Supergroup. Asheron's Call never made anyone go to a web page when they got married, it was an immersive quest. Why did SL get it so, very wrong?

i dun frellin know, but I do tend ta frellin agree wif ya.

and i frellin agree with the tart about me *hugs*

we also have to link out to change our land tier, post to the forum, read the lsl manual, manage our account or purchase a new account. i think, jarod that people have different definitions of "immersion."

when philip says that he considers second life immersive, he must mean that it occupies most of his time in both second and real life. he is immersed in second life even when he's not inworld. this is true for others as well, they do a lot of planning and communicating with team members outside the interface using websites, chat programs and email.

other people mean that they immerse in second life the way we watch a movie in a theatre. it's a recreational escape from the real world but doesn't cut us off completely. people still answer the phone, let the dog out and make trips to kitchens and water closets.

in both these cases, having the ability to hyperlink out of world to access information, partipate in a poll, or purchase a real life item, etc is an attractive feature and obviously desirable. those that find it jarring can, of course, not use the links.

occasionally, an environment is created for roleplaying or some sort of tour effect and the traditional definition of immersion applies. those builds would, of course, not contain hyperlinks. they're likely to also be no-fly and have many physical components STOP RAMBLING.

the lindens do seem to understand that they need inworld hyperlinks to point people to web interfaces. the idea that second life is a 3d extention of the www is not lost on them. i believe they even envision a day when the www will be a 2d extension of second life. nobody understands why they provide that technology for themselves and not for us. at least i don't know anybody that does.

Who you calling a tart?

And it's 'above' not about. Stoopid.

oooOOOooo. That was a personal attack. I'm gonna get soooo banned.

Hey! I was reading that. Didn't seem like rambling to me. Made a lot of sense in fact. You don't like capital letters much, huh? Apart from the ones above, obviously.

So, to keep this on topic: I agree with the guy above, and the one who started the thread, and the stoopid one who keeps interjecting into all the threads. No not me, the other one.

*cries*

why are you personally attacking me... you AM what im about...

arent you o.O

*runs off crying*

As I realised going to my first town hall yesterday what Philip says and what he means are sometimes totally opposite to each other. Somebody's been spending too much time around marketers, in my opinion.

Maybe his defention of immersive is different than yours?

Yes. Maybe he meant Second Life was dipped in chocolate.

or poo

I think some frelling people enjoyed their recent Farscape fix!

JUNKIES!

-Flip

Give it time Jarod, be patient.

I can get away with "frelling" easier than I can "fucking" here. If I said "fucking" as much as I say "frelling" in the forums, I'd be frelling fucked.

Hehe. I quite like 'fracking' since they started using it in the new Battlestar Galactica.

bah! Fork You!

hehe.. not really, I just wanted to add to the silly sayings.

*blush*

Spork! That sounds like cussing.

Ah, spork it all.

Spork me!

Oh, just spork off.

Ok. Nuff sporking stupidity.

Recent Farscape fix? Wait... Did I MISS the Peacekeeper Wars?! I've been busy coding!

Enjoying your immersion now, Molecular? HAHAHA!

A step toward a genuine "3D web" would be if the partner mechanism were implemented in-world, using scipted objects. However, then the Linden developers would be limited to delayed e-mail and one-way RPC. Although a lot is made of SL consisting of user-made content, I have to wonder how things might change if the Lindens needed to build and code inside SL. Imagine if a Linden developer were told she had to implement the Find function entirely in-world (rather than as a 2D overlay from compiled code in the client). In the meantime, it'd be cool if you could at least use a web browser inside SL (for a number of reasons). In this context, immersion sounds like a synonym for isolation.

(I hope this doesn't sound too critical, I'm just thinking out loud - yay SL)

I can agree that SOME things in SL are not "immersive". But what is immersion? It could be taken as extreme or as lightly as anyone likes to prove their point. I could argue that "No, City of Heroes doesn't require you to do 'this or that', but making me get 'level 20' to qualify for a cape is not immersive!" It's easy to take an example and use it for your own specific situation at the moment.

I also would never compare ANY MMO or MMORPG to Second Life. Ever. To me, that's like saying, "Oh look, my car broke down. I don't have problems like this with apples!!!!"


Maybe we can get things like this "fixed" in the future. I certainly would like to see the Partnering thing revamped totally as it is now. I mean, I'll never Partner with anyone, but it should definitely be an inworld thing as opposed to Email tag.

I love that line, thank you. Yes, eventually we'll be able to render web pages on prims, save data to notecards, and more; in the meantime, don't limit functionality because of some hypocritical "immersion." Thank you.



As long as TerraNova doesn't have a problem with it, neither do I. You're welcome not to compare SL to anything, MMOG or apples; I require context to discuss benefits, detractions, and features.

It occurs to me that if we had external links, it'd be fairly simple to build a web application that used the links THEMSELVES as a communications medium. By passing the object key to the link, clicking the link would open a page on the remote server, which would then be passed the correct information for opening an XML-RPC connection. It's not as elegant as if XML-RPC simply worked correctly to begin with, but it's another way in which hyperlinks would be useful.

Personally, immersion isn't a question at all for me. I run two monitors, SL on the right, and my web browser on the left. Clicking a hyperlink in SL would only open a window on the left side. My SL experience wouldn't be affected at all.

this is true. ll have never decided whether to market second life as a game or an application platform. they've implemented, and not implemented, pieces of each and ended up with something wholly undefined. industry won't use it because it's a "toy" with no practical application; gamers don't take it seriously because of the vast holes in the programming language. successful uses at this point in time are socializing and marketing virtual products such as av clothing and land.

question is, have they created something new that will eventually be useful in both arenas; or are they pulling a microsoft by titling a great big mess a "feature?" only time will tell.

Spork is one of the greatest words in the English language.

Benifer too --- precious.