Does a virtual world need to have evolved?

That's something you can only say for yourself.

So you agree that your original comment about SL being more competitive in 2005 because LL was pushing a "game model" with things like the leader board was in error.

It only takes one person to disprove universality.

Plus, I do not believe I am so unique as to be the only one. The Search Users list is crammed with dead profiles, after all - what of their worlds?

The leaderboard implied competition and sent a signal to those who had not had opposed signals provided by social groups, so no.

You can say that whether it had an effect or not. You need to SHOW it, demonstrate it had that effect. You've now argued that your SL sucked because SL was a game, and because it was a platform, and because it should have been a game, and because it shouldn't have been a game. Make up your mind.

No. I'm saying that in 2005, SL was a platform misrepresenting itself as a game. This misrepresentation wasn't malicious or even deliberate; nobody was really sure how virtual worlds were going to turn out at the time. This appeared in both things like the leaderboards (emphasises competition) and the standard where newbies asking for L$ were told to "make something and sell it" (implies universality/balance).

My belief, though, is that that period was necessary in order for SL to develop into what it is today. BM and other systems that try to be an absolute and known-unbalanced platform from the start will have greater trouble without that phase; but another VW that tried to do the same as SL would also have trouble, because we now know how the story ends, and those claims of balance and universality would be being made deliberately and known false (unlike for SL where they were accidental and of unknown truth).

It's not really to do with anything about "my SL sucking". IF you want to know the answer to that, just imagine the replies I get were directed at you.

"Your World, Your Imagination" is not the slogan of a game. SL was and is a game, a platform, a floor wax, a dessert topping, a snowmobile racing over the tundra, a flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel, a little bird eating the moon, a metaphor about an analogy, an illusion, an umbrella made of fire, a world, and dozens of other things. Your world, your imagination, no matter what LL advertises it as.

Do you ever ask yourself why you get those replies? Honestly?

"Your World, Your Imagination" _is_ the slogan of a game, because of the promise of universality. Universality cannot exist without balance and balance is a game design concept. If that slogan is seen as valid when used for a "platform" then it could just as well be applied to RL.



Any reasons I come up with are only domino effect.

Yumi, what is "universality"?

The concept of all being included:

Bollocks.

You yourself said, above, that the key to SL was that the "your" in the slogan was addressed to "all of us" - requiring universality. So what is wrong with my statement?

It will apply to real life when I can sprout wings with a few keyboard and mouse clicks. It is pretty clear the slogan meant to the average person something like "you can build what you want and own stuff".

While SL was not the first 3D online thing (it was preceded by a number of games), it was the first mass exposure to creating 3D items. I had seen 3D software before, but then I worked as an engineer, and remembered when CAD workstations were $50,000 items. Even in the mid-2000s, decent 3D design software was in the hundreds of dollars and required a high end PC to run. Second Life brought this down to free for the software (though you still needed a fairly good PC of the time to run well).

The idea of owning virtual items and virtual land dates back to Dungeons and Dragons at least (mid-1970s), to at least Monopoly if you are talking just land without items. That it could be bought and sold for real money I think is the break from playing a game with tokens to becoming something new and different. When your items and land have a real life value associated with them, you think about them in a different way then when they are just game tokens.

To the extent that Linden Lab can arbitrarily cancel your account and assets, it is still not a full transition from game token to "something real". The evolution to a virtual world where hosting is an actual contract, so that you are guaranteed services, and can at least get a refund for failure to perform, has not happened yet.

Leaving aside all the other issues with Blue Mars, on asset creation they have moved a small step from SL's "your stuff was created on our asset database, and if it gets lost, well too bad" to "your stuff was created on your PC, so you naturally have the original if you take care to keep backups". I know that backup solutions now exist for SL, but that is not through any Linden Lab efforts.

Your statement is two completely unrelated comments with "because" slapped into the middle. You might as well have written 'Microsoft's Slogan "Where do you want to go today?" was a farce because Microsoft has never produced a popular automobile in its entire existence'. Or 'AT&T was a failure because many people failed to "Reach out and touch someone" no matter how passionate their plea'.

The whole idea that a slogan is a guarantee is bollocks. I certainly never claimed anything even vaguely like that.

You said that what made SL grow like it did was the fact that "your world, your imagination" applied to "all of us". Well, "all" kind of requires a guarantee; otherwise it becomes "some".

The idea that SL is about building and/or making money is very limiting.

The First Amendment in the US, and similar clauses in other modern democracies, applies to "all of us" whether you choose to exercise your freedom of speech or not.

That's why the umbrella is made of FIRE!

I think Yumi has a point though; a lot of people were lured in by that promise (promise in the other definition i.e. potential) and left frustrated when they couldn't master the prim.

What, in your definition, is involved in "choosing to" do something?