In any case, I was urgently realerted to the reality of interface hell yesterday, when I reentered SL after a several week break. I had come to the conclusion I wanted a crawl on all fours animation to use on beds, sofas and soft surfaces where appropriate at large.
Took me about five hours to track one down, and when I got it, it was some sort of AO application and I didn't know how to use it until a friendly person edited it for me. Then, sadly, it proved to look like crap. Oh, why must it be this way!
Why is it that we have "crouched walk" as a default animation, but not a crawl which is the most natural thing in the world? Why are there no horses that can trot or cars that are actually controllable and can stay on the road? Why can't anything ever be made that fits seamlessly into the framework and not collide with everything else? Just such a simple matter that an animation returns to your default stance instead of another anim you might have activated previously? SL must be the only game in town where your gestures, movements and actions are all part of the (hopelessly jumbled) inventory!
I don't have any real concrete solutions, but I have to conclude that the impracticality of all sorts of interaction in SL makes this game entirely an execise in "look but don't touch". And that's without mentioning that nothing you ever interact with, be it cake or other people, actually results in any sort of reaction or sensation on your avatar's part.
It's all intertextual roleplay and make believe, there is a huge disconnect between avatar and world, and I'm sort of growing tired of it. I want to feel hungry goddamit, I want to stuff myself with applepie and smear it by mistake over my new blouse so I have to bring it to the cleaners!
"It's your world, your imagination". You're free to do absolutely anything, yes, but how?
