SL must move beyond the Techi Wiki culture

ROFLOL!

I prefer to believe that it just isn't finished yet.

LL is smart enough to come up with a "rearrange furniture" button, once they realize that this is important. Content creators need more sophistication than we have now. Resident consumers need less.

Goodness, please don't anybody accuse me of asking Linden to dumb it down. Nothing of the sort. Just put a snap-off cover over all the gears and loose wires. Having a multi-tab multi-button multi-checkbox multi-edit control cornacopia of prim adjustments is nifty. For designing apartment buildings or hoochie hair. But geez, what if I just want to plant a dogwood next to the sidewalk and make it look purdy?

Somebody mentioned AOL. Well, the internet is a MUCH better place now that nincompoops can use it too. Some of the people I correspond with regularly are nincompoops (i.e. "relatives" and the internet is a much richer tool when it includes everybody. I can now use ONLY the internet, I don't have to use the internet to talk to smarties and pony express to talk to bafoons. That makes it more useful.

SL needs to be more idiot-friendly.

We need more idiots.

(Maybe we can find ways to keep them out of the forums...)

Buster

I guess I missed where it said in the EULA that SL was limited to a certain demographic.

As a matter of fact, on the public front web page https://secondlife.com/ the title bar says "Create", "Personalize", "Play", "Own". It talks about Kermitt's jump to RL business with tringo - what should be every business person's grail. It shows people partaking in the entertainment. On the lower left it talks about developers and builders. Seems pretty diversified. It has room for developers, builders, artists, content creators, shoppers, club goers, land resellers, and on and on. It doesn't seem to indicate that you have to be a tekkie to play, although if you are a tekkie it might catch your eye more than it may most MMOG players who are used to the game owners providing pavlovian chores for them. That's just not SL.

awww I was hoping to slap that one on 'alt - not an alt' thread!

Take away all my fun!

Cocoanut,

Since you have essentially been asking for a TSO like structure where those without skills can still find a way to earn money by doing some arbitrary task, say for example, the creation of gnomes, I would ask this question: when you essentially insert the concept of endless free money into the economy, how do you stop inflation, and more importantly, what is the incentive for developers to make content for sale if all you have to do is click on a machine and make endless gnomes?

Yes, some people do create for the love of creating, but a big incentive to the massive amounts of unbelievably high quality content in SL of late is the potential to actually make money off of it and be financially rewarded for your hard work. If someone is being financially rewarded without doing any work (other than spending time clicking on something repeatedly, a la TSO), how does that not kill off the incentive for others?

I think a far more responsible approach is for the community to find ways to provide compelling, though menial jobs that do produce income for the casual player that do not involve prositution. Linden Lab would need to provide some additional tools to make it easier to define wages, hours, etc (something There had some level of), and then they need to get out of the way and stop tampering with things (like events, still an exceedingly dumb alteration they have recently made).

You can't have a world built by its users and then have some artificial crutch put in for the masses. You also cannot compare SL to TSO - SL is not TSO, and all the attempts to make it so won't change that.

I've always thought of Chip as the "Panty Baron". Trolls are best kept on a diet of pure bullshit, I've always heard...

The problem with all of your analogies is none of them have anything to do with Second Life. AOL, and all examples that you have provided, are either content services or tools. AOL does not provide content creation tools - they provide the content - your TV is a vehicle for delivering content. Your car is a tool essentially, but similar in concept, same with the washing machine. Yet you have to learn how to drive, and even doing the wash takes some skill to not destroy your clothing.

I think what you ultimately are asking for is that Linden Lab provides content, because Maxis did, because your TV does, because Everquest and World of Warcraft and DVDs and whatever other interactive entertainment you use provides it. You lack a fundamental understanding of SL. The entire world is user created - all the content, with the exception of some Linden infrastructure stuff (telehubs, roads, etc..) is player created. The players have to create the games for those who want to play games. Linden Lab wants no part in doing that, nor should they. They have more in common with the world wide web than AOL.Nothing exists on the web unless people create it - all of the games you play, all of the pages you view, all the chat rooms and porn and greeting cards and games of Bejeweled are there because people created content.

Linden Lab has not approached this as a game - if they had, there would be canned content and levelling, a la Ultima Online. We have the power to make SL whatever we want - and the more features that are added to streamline the software (ie make it easier to use for all of us, tech and non tech alike) and increase the possibilitites (animations, vehicles, interactive games, streaming porn), the more opportunity there is to do exactly what you are clamoring for - create more stuff to "do" for the average person.

Just a gentle reminder that you folks are trying to reason with the people who stand on street corners yelling their conspiracy theories, if not just random obscenities, to inanimate objects and passing cars.


Carry on.

UI improvements and user experience is a priority of SL, they have. If you look at the original versions of SL from early beta, you basically had a 3d Studio Max-lite clunky, horrible UI. Some elements of it remain - the horribly fucked inventory and the way you work with it (dragging items one at a time out of a box?) is the bane of SL, even if it has gotten better. However, the client itself has had some dramatic transformations over time. Any UI can continue to get friendlier - I hope LL spends a lot of time looking at World of Warcraft, and even the Sims as examples of friendly UIs that don't dumb things down. The difficulty with SL is we are flying an airplane while building it - these changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary.

The stability is not there yet for this to be the next killer app online. The paltry prim counts and subpar physics and the vehicles that perform poorly at best create a world experience that is not optimal. Combined with a UI that is still more Maya than My First Computer, it is going to take time. However, even incremental changes help. Many people blasted some of the curving of edges, translucency effects, fades, etc.. that have been added in recent versions- but it all adds to a smoother look and feel.

It will happen in time,and I think it will definitely happen in a way that keeps the complexity under wraps without dumbing it down. Being able to do that is an art form. I really think once LL opens up the interface to outside development, you will see things flourish as well - there are some brilliant add ons to World of Warcraft that make an elegant interface even more useful. The possibilities are exciting. I think in some ways LL has to throw out the baby with the bathwater on this current interface and rearchitecht it from scratch - it is showing its age and legacy, and sometimes it is impossible to fix something. Time will tell what the right approach will be.

hahaha, I'm not sure what that means, but it has a nice ring to it

That's it, Chip's a racist!

Let me tell you a story that I think illustrates perfectly the tekkie wiki problem. And it's not about crazy hysterical nutter conspiracy ideas, or being useless on the job and being the reason for "unproductivity" and jobs being sucked overseas (yeesh, heluva lot of venting and prejudices coming out on that rant, including xenophobia).

I agree somewhat with Coco's post, that I don't have to learn the theory of internal combustion in order to drive a car. But in fact I know enough about the rote sequences I need to type to work the control panel and other features of my computer and fix my game or fix my other applications. Any educated person can do it, and that's why I'm unimpressed with tekkies, because as I've said elsewhere, they just learn sequencing well, and have a knack for it, but so what? People are good at different things, but you don't let literature professors rule your world, you don't let used car salesmen rule your world, you don't let presidents of countries rule your world, so why let tekkies rule your world? And yet, they arrogate themselves to that position, and stand squarely in the way of you getting about the normal business of your world.

Example:

I noticed a hateful anti-Anshe campaign going on in the New Continent. There were signs all over the place BOYCOTT ANSHE accusing her of inflated prices. In fact, her pricest were the lowest given the many wannabee barons and opportunists out there as it was opened. I asked the Lindens to take the signs off Anshe's land because it was at a time when she wasn't online but asleep. One Linden arrived and understood perfectly the need to remove them, saying "this is bullshit," and removed them. I said it created a climate of hatred to have those big signs everywhere, it scared off customers, people even felt intimidated from buying, I imagine, because they weren't. I imagine they'd feel they were buying into some unpopular evil if they bought that land.

I fly a little further and find another sim filled with the hateful signs. The entire New Continent filling up. I called the Lindens again. I was bucked from one to another. The next one to come out was annoyed at me, and said "We are not garbagemen" and noted that Anshe should put on autoreturn. The annoyance was palpable. I tried to explain why it was important to remove the signs, but got a lecture. But the signs were indeed removed. I told the story to a friend, who teleported me to another sim. I arrived to find a Romper Room full of my all my favorite forum "Friends". We debated the Anshe issue strenuously. I made some points about the incitement of hatred against a class. Nobody could grasp the principles.

Next thing I know, a tekkie is sarcastically and nastily telling me this sort of line:
"}}}}}}}}>>>>>>>>RIGHT-CLICK ON YOUR LAND, OBJECTS TAB< SET AUTORETURN."
etc.

This person condescendingly hectored me with instructions for how to remove prims, as if I was retarded, and needed remedial help in getting prims off my land. It was very important for this person to humiliate me, to feel superior, to condescend, to dispense with tekkie advice, and all the rest.

But, duh, guess what, that person knew I'd been in the game for months. Surely they knew I owned a fair amount of land and must have returned many a prim in my day. Even if they didn't know that, well, why the snotty tone? That's always the puzzlement I feel -- ok, you're superior? But why the snotty tone? We get it, already.

And in fact, the person completely missed the context and the point! How could I press autoreturn on *somebody else's* land?! How could I do that? It was Anshe's land, not mine, and I have nothing to do with Anshe at all. I was merely picking up the cause in a generic sort of way on principle.

Well, the rest of this story is history...but let me say more.

I next endeavored to talk to a Linden about this and other issues for probably something like an hour. I talked until I was blue in the face. I could not, for the life of me, for an hour, get this tekkie Linden, to understand a basic thing about autoreturn and land barons.

Linden after Linden told me "let Anshe put on autoreturn." Not a single one of them would look beyond their play book or their tekkie backgrounds to get the larger context.

Land barons don't put on autoreturn for good reason.

1. So Governor Linden trees don't return! If you put on autoreturn, the trees fly off instantly! Gone is your ground cover! And then the forums fill up with mean and nasty post after mean and nasty post about how you, rapacious land baron, are stripping away lovely Linden trees and scarring the land, and squeezing it for every last drop. The horror! So if you press autoreturn, they will kill you in the forums. *You cannot take the time to replant all those trees...so you simply MUST leave on autoreturn* while the land is selling. Otherwise is looks awful, and actually has less chance of selling.

2. They want people to rez their houses first before they buy. A lot of cs time is spent coming out to a site to watch if a person can set the house down. Leave it on autoreturn, they can't do that. To be sure, you can put it on 180 minutes. That should be plenty! But people are stupid. They leave the house there, and they want it to be there when they come back. Or they want a picnic and they want the picnic cloth to be there for hours. Indeed, when I asked Anshe why her autoreturn was on, she said "so people can picnic" -- meaning the way that a common past time especially of newbs is to go out to new lands and just hang out and rez stuff, the land isn't sold yet, it's not on autoreturn....

3. They can't take the time. Parceling blocks of land is sometimes exhausting and picky work and going through and also setting times on each parcel just adds to the chore.

Neither the person contemptuously telling me to right-click -- on land that wasn't mine to start with? nor the Linden I talked to until I was blue -- could see ANYTHING in the story BUT their own TEKKIE fixation. No larger context existed for them. Tools, functions, mechanisms -- but not of the "soft stuff" of public opinion about trees...the desire of people to picnic...the time-consuming labour in parceling.

And THAT is what I mean about what is wrong with our world. I'm supposed to listen forever to hectoring and condescending tekki "knowledge" and withering comments about client side this and that. But they are never supposed to listen about picnics, about trees, about hard work?

THAT is what I mean about their unwillingness to accept any data coming in from any other field but the hard sciences. You'd think they'd acknowledge that other fields of human endeavor, literature, philosophy, religion, poetry, economics -- would be relevant even to their work. But no, they have to wither on the vine and actually tell you some useless piece of crap just to prove themselves superior.

Imagine you found a beautiful land, just over the horizon. You gratefully rushed forward. You raced to see the beautiful land. And somebody witheringly tells you to rightclick on the objects tab to set autoreturn for the simulator -- terms you may not even yet absorbed when you are new...but all you wanted to do was have a picnic. And why can't you? Without having to set autoreturn? Because there ought not to be such hateful signs in our world...because the business of real estate ought to be as welcome as any other business and accepted as an equal partner with the content and technical features of the world's scaffolding.

yawn

Toy, you taught my first building class back in July, and I was wondering when those were coming back. It's time to replace tringo events with yours

*El Kabonggg!!*

Im waiting for Schwanson to get his newbie island set up then I will be teaching there both basic and advanced building

I agree, the possibility of endless free money, and inflation, is the potential pitfall.

I don't think, though, that having something productive for the non-creators would stop the incentive for developers to make content for sale. After all, it wouldn't suddenly turn everyone into terrific content creators; it would simply provide money for them to buy content from the other creators, and to do imaginative things that benefit everyone but don't provide physical content (if I did the Game Show Channel, for instance). I don't think the addition of an easier way to make a living would quash the creators of content in any respect.

I think it's more of a matter of balance, rather than either/or. I am not suggesting something which would turn people rich overnight. I'm asking for something that would provide a way for players to earn a modicum amount of funds, even if it is something as simple as the money trees for newbies. I am talking about small amounts.

Interestingly, I originally thought those money trees were created by the Lindens, for the express purpose of making sure new members fly around a lot and see a lot of the world. The fact that it was created by players makes me know players should be able to create other modest money-making adventures for any and all players. Some of this exists now - the Treasure Hunt at Samauri island/gardens/or whatever its called is one example. But it isn't available all the time, whenever players are on the game - and it is limited to the number of players allowed in the Sim for the event.



Agreed. And I would add, incentives are built into the game for doing other things (education events, for example), so incentives could be given to players providing paying "jobs" or fun tasks for the "masses."

I don't care how it gets in the game, I just know the game needs it.

coco

I didn't read that, nor do I care, but I realized that quoting people's half a page long entry is not only a good way to waste space, but also to up my post count! Yay!

Looks like you're missing the grip on a few yourself, buster.

Suddenly the words 'pot', 'kettle', and 'black' occur....

Oh, and nice try on the attack, but I'm afraid you don't have a spoon big enough to stir this pot. -snicker-

Prok wrote: "I've never heard of a game company that has to 'throttle' new accounts?"

That's because you're ignorant. I'm familiar with other online community sites, similar to this one, that limited new member signups in various ways in order to keep their systems from being overwhelmed and crashed by a large influx of new users.

Your ignorance regarding this industry is made apparent by many of your posts. For example, I was amused by your contention that the average non-techy person would be unable to figure out something like sliders to control whether or not they can be "pushed." There (you might have heard of it) has a setting on the user interface that controls whether or not a member can be "pushed" by guns and vehicles, and everyone figures it out just fine. Of course, There throttles new accounts by only offering signups to members of MENSA . . .

Anyway, nevermind me and my unclean FICI-WIKKI knowledge, Prokoleh. Get back to "fighting" with Andrew Linden about his company's business plan. I'm sure you'll win!

LOL