Issue Rehash: Second Life MUST be an enjoyable place for the Average Person

"Coco, the reason is because LL aren't the people to look to for that... the whole idea behind SL is that it's an entirely user created world. Those ways to make money need to be provided by other users. It's a development platform, not a game, and currently it's not economically viable for content developers to provide ways for other people to make money... yet. Hopefully we'll get to a point where the economy is large enough and the toolset robust enough that we can start to provide that kind of opportunity for people who don't want to create content, but in the meantime people need to get used to the idea of paying for things, not being provided artificial mechanisms to earn them."

Sounds good, means nothing. I don't care about the way things were. If the premise is to get more players and make a profit, then the game needs a way for players to make money to purchase the goods other players are creating. THAT would be an economy.

The way it's set up now, there is never going to be an economy, toolset whateverthatis or not. What we have is the have players and the have-not players, with the have-nots buying their Lindens from the haves with rl money, and the haves perhaps hoping it will stay that way forever.

coco

There is... it's called paying for it.

See other thread for my response to this.

coco

SL is not a game.
It is:
a platform
a virtual world
a tool
a collection of experiences
the next generation web browser

It must be useful to the average person, not necessarily enjoyable.

Hiro, your use of the term is noted.

A link that seems appropriate to this issue:
http://forums.totalgaming.net/Index.aspx?ForumID=5&AID=72208

I couldn't disagree with that more Hiro. SL is an entertainment platform, not a utility. SL will never be an efficient tool for utilitarian tasks. Let's take a simple example... I buy a lot of stuff online like books and music. The reason I do that is because it saves me time. I don't have to drive to a store and look around through the shelves to find what I want. What would take me half an hour takes me five minutes instead. Why on earth would I want to do that in SL and go right back to the real world inconveniences that I was trying to avoid in the first place... flying to the store and searching the shelves? People come to SL because they want to be provided with social entertainment. That's not to say that SL can't be used for some useful things, but to suggest that SL's purpose is more to be utilitarian than entertaining is a bit crazy (in my personal opinion).

Nice point Chipper.... I think thats why the web based SL buisnesses took off - they solve the same problems that Amazon and Ebay do in RL.

Siggy.

I'll probebly get flamed for this, but here's my 2L$.

First, what I think SL actually is:

- Its the "Metaverse", because it is capable of storing and retrieving data, and presenting it in various ways. If you think this sounds like anything else done on the net, its because you're right. Sorry folks, there's nothing special about "The Metaverse" really.

- Its a community oriented shared online development platform. In this sense, its definetly not a game, same as IRC isnt. If you look at what people have done on IRC since it was first presented in the early 80's, you could definetly agree that IRC is a vast community oriented shared online development platform as well. I've seen groups, disputes, communities, attacks, games, file sharing, almost anything imaginable that could be done with nothing but text.

SecondLife has four differences from its ancient counterpart:
- It has a built in 'Economy' factor.
- Its centric rather then distributed. Not only servers, but also its data.
- Its completly company owned - meaning, someone's expecting a profit.
- It got fancy pixels.

Is SecondLife here for entertainment or practicle uses? I am tempted to say both. However, SecondLife was developed first and furmost as the G word we all hate to say: A game. As much as I hate to admit it, SecondLife is being viewed and developed as such. The moderation system used on SecondLife is the same as you may find on City of Heroes. The company seems to say that "This is not a game" but still develops it as such.

SecondLife is chiefly here for entertainment: Because entertainment brings profit. And SecondLife is here to bring money to its developers.

Now. This technology, as we are being told, may get released one day for the public. Once it does, we will be able to use this technology for useful, practical causes. But until then, SecondLife is here to generate profit by providing entertainment - be it social, creative, or economic entertainment - with us only being able to use it for practical causes the same way as you might use EverQuest for business meetings: No one said its impossible and that you shouldnt, but no one is really expecting you to do it, either. (and yes, I -am- aware that SL has better social tools then EQ. I've only been here for a year and a half, yada yada.)

Back to the original question: I'll answer both if/why and how.

Do I believe that SecondLife MUST be a place for the average person?...

... no, not really.

SHOULD it TRY to generaly appeal? Yup, it definetly should. Because it only makes sense from a business perspective of bringing more users. But here's the thing: I think the world as it is right now is good enough. "Average people" have all the tools they need to get social. If they want to get creative, they got the most easily accessible tools in the known multiverse to do just that. Take me for example. I'm a coder, not an artist. I cant use Photoshop for the life of me, and sometimes I manage to doodle something in Paintbrush.

But I still went ahead and built a pretty spiffy japanese house for myself (IMHO anyway). If I were to do the same in Maya or 3DMax, i'd probebly have ended up bashing the monitor with some randomly chosen heavy blunt object.

Content dev takes skill, and its not instant push-button easy. The tools we have right now are very good as they are, though they could definetly use some minor usability improvements in certain areas.

What I do think LL needs to do to appeal to the average person... is simply improve the user interface. Lets face it: The average person is dumb. The current mess of buttons on the lower bar, the parcel status icons on the top, the huge load of menu items in the pull-downs, we all take this for granted because we've been on this system for a long time now. But for the average person, most of this, as simple as it may be, looks rather scary at first. And even after getting used to that interface, they still have to work hard to get anywhere. And Average People hate "working hard" on a "game". This is why most people have never really seen more then 4% of the features the UI has to offer.

Hell, most of them even end up never noticing the parcel permission icons for months. (I'm serious).

So, for conclusion:
I think SL's social/content/dev ballance is as good as it is. I do not think that it should shift anywhere. But if SL wants to attract more membership from the average user crowd, then they really need to work on that UI. Other then that... na.

Yus.

*mew*

Are you feeling alright today, kitty? That's more words than I've seen you use collectively in months

Must be something I ate.

Surely I will.

Inflation.

K?

No? Then what else do you think will happen to the economy when mindless pizzamatics are handing out money to anyone who can click buttons for a while?

Oh, you mean USEFUL jobs.

Create content.

*shrug*

What else do you expect to get payed for? Being charming? Isn't gonna happen.

Not from LL at any rate. Have you considered trying to make money without LL just handing it to you?

I don't even mean content creation. There are players and content creators who pay for services, too.

Of course, you might have to work hard, or maybe do things you would rather not do...

But, ya know... That's kinda what a job is all about.

Hum, you seem to leave out a few things.

What is there to do in Second Life.

1. Go to clubs, and dance the night away.

2. Explore.

3. Play games. Bingo Tringo Slingo, Trivia etc.

4. Build homes and hold a back yard barbacue.

5. Go shoot up jessie and throw a party afterwards.

Seems there is plenty to do in Second Life, and if only the Lindens would stop messing with the calandar and return it to the way it was, I bet there would be even more people coming into our world. Infact there are several things that the Lindens have canged or made more expensive, maybe ending all these and returning them to the way they were before the changes would help too.

Summed up: "I fear change."

The old system (This includes not just the event calandar, but several of the other changes made as of late) was broken. It basicly was way too condusive to a system of formulaic "winning" the game. It didn't foster true innovation; under the old system, one person would innovate and then 50,000,000 other events would be exact copies of the last "winning" innovation. Occasionaly you would get something new, like Tringo, but then a million copies of it would spring up overnight as people latched on to the next "winning" formula.

This is not condusive to the long-term health of SL. It's a form of limited stagnation, and stagnation means death for an MMORPG, unless your name is Ultima Online.

In the proccess, boats might be rocked, waves might be made, and houses of cards may collapse. Such is life. The only sure things in life are death and taxes, after all, and this pretty much is true for SL as well. In a healthy environment, change is a constant. Those who can change with the environment prosper. Those who cannot, stagger and fall, forgotten and trampled by the ever-moving engine of progress. It's cruel, but it's life. SL should be no different.

Going out on a limb here, would it help if an account had to be premium in order to do perform some "advanced" functions such as creating scripts, possibly adding scripts to objects, uploading textures, feel free to add to the list.

I've never thought along the lines of limiting features other than land ownership because LL does that for the money, not to simplify the experience. Smaller menus, fewer preferences and a limited set of abilities might actually make the experience more enjoyable for basic newbies.

The basic midbies and oldbies would complain, but LL weathers complaints like real starship troopers. Feel free rip my head off if this is a bad idea.

*rips off Khamon's head*

Crippleware, IMO, is a bad marketing tool. As you say, land is a different story... There is a tangible reason why it's not given to basic account holders. The rest, there isn't.

I don't think so... Cubey's question was "What is there to do in SL but create content or use content?" and unless I'm very much missing the point, you reinforced it for him very nicely with every example you gave!



Yup. Go to a club built by a content creator full of scripted gadgets built by scripters and builders. People hadda create that content for you to use it, ya know.



Yup. Explore all the content that people built. Exploring empty, flat land wouldn't keep that many people entertained for all that long (besides which they'd have for sale signs over it in no time)



Yes, all those scripted games everyone so loves!



Yup! Create your own content and use it!



Yup. Go shoot up Jessie with scripted weapon content!



Yes. There is plenty to do which involves creating or using content. As Cubey said in the first place



And as you've adequately demonstrated yourself, no matter how much the Lindens have 'messed' with things to some people's dislike, there is plenty to do in Second Life anyway, and it certainly doesn't seem to be affecting people's enjoyment of the world - in fact it seems to be diversifying it as people find new things to do to pass their time.

I agree. That's why something like anti-push-script sliders is too cruel to impose on them.
Currently, in fact, newbies DO turn off complexity by just screening everything out and not bothering to do what everyone tells them to do which is "go to a class" or "go to a university of prims".

I can't tell you how many times I deal with people in the game who not only ask "what is a prim" weeks after their start date, even months after their start date they ask "what is tier" and -- I kid you not! -- "what is a telehub". This happens because some people join and teleport into their close friends on a sim and never do much except hang with that group and goof around and not even explore too much.

And that's ok. The key to bringing people up to speed on the game tools is not only "wizards" but capitalizing on the way in which they actually learn, which is piecemeal, in dribs and drabs, on a need-to-know basis, through interaction either with friends or other one-on-one interactions not in a class or live help format.

I'm going to take myself as an example because I'm a perpetual clueless newbie on things like building tools. WHEN I need to learn how to rez a prim or snap into place by typing the numbers, I find someone to give me that one-on-one tutorial. Why? Because instructions in notecards, classes, wikis, etc. just don't penetrate, I'm too busy doing the other aspects of the game (that's why those who continue to narrowly slam me as "being the one member of SimArts who couldn't adapt to the game" are silly, because I just played another part of the game and made my own game LOL).

Right now, for example, I'm utterly dismayed when I find out that "select individual" is no longer an option on the build tools after I finally mastered how to unlink, edit, and link prims using that function. Now it is "edit linked prims" and I can't get it to work. However much a tekkie can snort and guffaw over that, I know that I am no different than 10 million other people who find these changes dismaying and confusing and annoying to have to learn anew. I'll take aside somebody like Buster soon and ask them to explain why this thing appears fucked now and I'll "get it" after a five-minute tutorial.

SO the way is to create more socialization opportunities on large open spaces as well as more intimate closed spaces where people can transfer knowledge, not just dance half naked on a laggy sim. Facilitating the transfer of knowledge through informal group events that aren't a classic classroom with one person pontificating up in the front of the classroom are the wave of the future.



Taking contents out of a box and dragging them into inventory is one of the biggest stumbling blocks. I remember like all newbies going around with a big BAZ box on my head for days, unable to understand how to open it LOL. So store owners and merchants ought to do more to help newbs clear these hurdles and in fact many do by simply answering their IMs.

I think once LL and some older players get over the aversion to commerce, there will be more opportunities for commercial events that have product display and educational informercial type things will be tolerated by either an in-game classified listing or by routine bulletin boards or ads boards in the welcome area, which rotate regularly, that have announcements of various businesses or non-profits run by players that newbies can click on and get the advantage of an experience to transfer knowledge that isn't necessarily a class.


Amen.



This sounds too complicated and ambitious. Currently, the basics we need FIND to do is to be taggable better with key words, and to be saveable as a ready-made clipped yellow pages of services/businesses/etc.

THose are some of mine, for starters.

I placed all activities into two categories: creating content and using content.



This falls into the category of "using content": the club, the club services (dancers, owner, etc), dance scripts, and other in-club attractions. The club owners, of course, are creating content.



What is there to explore without content? All builds and even the land itself is content. Exploring definitely falls into the "using content" category.



Scripted games? That's more user-created content.



Aha, these fall into the category of "creating content".



Scripted guns? Buildings in Jessie? Sounds like they're using content. Party? Well if they use anything at the party beyond chat, they're bound to be using content of some kind or other.

There *is* plenty to do, and it all falls into "creating content" or "using content". Crippling the content creators would mean lead to less content to use -- less to do.

Cocoanut,

In this post here, and in your convo the other night, you expressed the desire to have more organized activities in communities. I think you were looking for the kinds of things that used to exist in SimArts or PlayTime or whatever the TSO communities were we enjoyed -- and that means jobs that create money, opportunities for investment, and also entertainment options.

And in SL, which is more like RL, you have even greater expectations that someone will organize somethign that is kind of like a Club Med vacation, where there will be an interesting array of activities like expeditions to ruins and bunny hop dance lessons, or just drinking and chilling, or sports, or whatever. AND you have an expectation that SL, which is more like RL, will have some kind of jobs or money-making opporunities that are more easily accessed than what you see now.

I'm not sure what you envision when you wish to see a community bulletin board, where you walk up to it and can read the notices on it (if such technology could develop, which currently is absent in the game, though the new "Notecard Taker" scripted by CrystalShard is a revolutionary step in this direction.

Do you expect there to be games, contests, classes, shows? Well, why not!

The answer people are giving though is...but players have to make that. Your reply then is....it's too hard for players to do that unless they spend scads of RL money. To which I can only say, well, come and do your contest game on my land! Or...go up the steep ladder created by the existing came which is to work the very closed network of favor banking and apprenticing and suck-ups. When Khamon says this works the same was as his office, church, or club, I can only say, sure, human nature is human nature, but the SL version of this human reality is a much, much more exaggerated and much more controlling one without the RL checks and balances of accountability and transparency.

People who buy and sell these rental/buy island communities are probably not going to be able to go beyond the administration of that side of the business to also provide micro-entertainment for the masses. I think they can absorb some of it, like Anshe did with her Wild West salloon, but not all.

Then there's the question of jobs!

I think if we fix the group tools to increase investor confidence by removing the flaws like malicious officer recall and the problem of the treacherous officer who can sell land out from under you, we will see more and more layers of jobs appearing with more complexity. For example "landscaper" and "groundskeeper" and "mall manager" and "property sales rep" and numerous other jobs will be able to be encouraged if the tools are changed to allow all kinds of levels of participation.

They're not likely to be changed any time soon, however. Even so, some of these jobs are possible to create if people can find the sufficient level of trust they need.

How can we create more jobs beyond sex escort and Tringo player? There are only two directions to go in now, content creation and land purchase, sale or management. To make these work their best, we have to push the changes in the events calendar to filter better, have more opportunities for classified ads, etc. I'm thinking that changing the events calendar functions and filters and titles is easier work for Lindens to do than changing group functions.

This thread is great. Thank you for all the ideas and discussion about this topic. I'm pointing other Lindens to it. We're listening and learning.

Occam's Razor...

There is a lot to SL that makes it beyond the simplest solution for the internet at this time.

Thank you I had actually had everything in its different catagory and now thanks to you, I do see they fit into Creating and using.

I take back my statement Cubey.

i would guess that most of the posters to these threads about the shape of sl are fairly technical in some way, though i'm not sure that's true, but i get that feeling. correct me if i'm wrong.

that brings up question, are the people posting to the forums average users? if not, how would one get their opinions? the forums are a small sampling of the sl population, and it's unclear how representative it is. the view numbers on the sticky thread at the top of the hotline forum is only 107. a nice round number for thread views is 20 views / post. both those numbers would indicate that relatively few people (compared to the over all sl population) read the forums.

ll did a survey once where they posted the url in the forums. which is a non-random sample, and may not capture the "average" user. i think (hope?) that ll has done surveys since then, and they know who the average user is, and i think it would be interesting to know who the average user is. while i know that kind of information is usually proprietary, it might give the sl content providers something to work with and provide the sl community with what it wants.

who is the average user? and what are they doing? and what do they want?

maybe the average user is technical? i mean most of the users i know are fairly technical, but that might be a function of the things i do.

the other question might be: does ll want the average sl user to be like the average webuser (yet)?

i do tend to agree that the non-technical users (be they the average users or not) need something to do in sl if ll wants them to stay. but i feel rather unqualified to speak for the non-technical user, as i am techincal (i.e. i like torturing prims and scripting). but on the other hand there are a few things every user could use:
- grid stability (e.g. no more login problems)
- better group tools (i.e. pooling of group resources, and group communication)

beyond a few technical issues, i don't see that ll needs to do much. ll's policy on some things has been, "if you see a need, it's an opportunity for you to fill that need." which works for many things (e.g. bingo, tringo, sex, clubs, etc.), but doesn't seem to work well for those things that don't reward well (e.g. helping newbies for free).

</ramble>

where does hanging out and chatting fall?

Unless they're standing on an open field, naked, without skins, that would be using content.