Do the Lindens believe this...?

From the SL6B blog entry:



No mention of also needing skill or talent!

Now, before you say this is just Yumi whining again, this seems important for other reasons. It suggests that the Lindens still think that building is a much more universal activity on SL than it actually is, which could suggest other interpretations of their policies or attracting corporates and education, and potentially on the adult policy as well.

So, is this how LL see SL (ie, in a way that doesn't match the reality)?

But it's nice for everyone to be included, whether or not they have supreme command of the SL building tools.

If the idea going in is to fill a bunch of sims with some sort of builds, it seems reasonable to assume that the audience for doing that will be folks for whom building isn't a big turn-off. And for those with other inclinations, the pre-built kiosks must be intended to broaden the field beyond hardcore builders.

I suppose some skill is still required even to populate the kiosks, but I don't know how much further that can be taken. I'm not sure how one would go about getting involvement from determined couch potatoes, nor contributions from those intent on consuming.

(Actually, though... remember "Message in a Bottle" from last year's birthday? That enabled visitor participation with about the lowest threshold of initiative imaginable. Seen in the context of this question, I'm thinking it was an even more ingenious installation than I appreciated.)

When I did Burning Life; I made a mad-dash for a plot of land, grabbed it, won it, and wondered to myself..... "What am I actually going to build?" (O.o)

I had zero planning, no textures, and I'm not sure if I was even seriously building yet. In the end, I made a giant toy box with a research encampment around it. It was a blast to do and got quite a bit of attention. I recieved a lot of IM compliments for my scaffolding. (^_^)



Really, I LOVE to see the creativity of 'unskilled' builders. They don't know what the rules are yet. And, that's a good thing. It's the most pure form of unfettered imagination. (^_^)

I say... Bring it on! XD

Show and Tell

Sure, sure, I'm not arguing against providing the booths - it's just that there's reasons why you might not be able to build your idea others than "time and will", which they left out.

And "command of the building tools"? In my experience the problems of building are 10% knowing how to cut a prim, and 40% knowing what to cut it to, and 50% knowing what the heck you're going to use it for in the first place

(Also, Qie - "determined couch potatoes"? That might be one thing, but "talent" implies that some people can't do it no matter how hard they try, because they lack the talent.)

That's not really unskilled though, that's pretty good.

Thank you. But, you'd be surprized how much of that build involved "I wonder what will happen when I... Aw CRUD! Not that! *delete delete delete*" (^_^)

Actually, shorten that down to 10% knowing how to cut a prim, 10% knowing what to cut it to, 30% knowing what you're going to build with it and 50% getting SL to let you rez the prim and keep the settings of the prim!

In a way I like the idea of the small kiosks. They might be for the smaller groups who want to have pictures and note card information about the projects they are doing. Or for content creators who are caught up in the 50% of cursing SL to keep the farking prim changes.... >.<

That sums up my building technique quite nicely .

Yumi, I've analyzed your post in fine detail and I've come to the conclusion that you're over ANALyzing Dusty's blog entry.

Go drink lots of beer.

*ponders*

I now better appreciate that your point was about the words (not) used in the original quote, rather than the plan for the event itself. The kiosk thingies should appeal both to those who don't want to build and to those who lack the skills, and Dusty didn't mention that latter group, almost as if no such group could exist.

In my response, I made pretty much the same unwarranted assumption: that everyone could build if they wanted to, and therefore the kiosks are for those who want to participate but don't want to build--not that they lack the skill--when in fact the kiosks are also perfect for exactly those who would build if only they had the skill.

So it's not just Lindens who make that mistake. Maybe a builder-rich group of forum posters is more than likely to do so, too.

But I also wonder... do residents themselves deny or downplay their own membership in that group of skill-lacking would-be builders? Excluding newbies who are still learning the Editor, people seem to say that they're just not interested in building--just can't be bothered with it--not that they "just could never get the hang of it" or anything like that. (Or do they? Maybe I just don't hear from those.)

If it's true that people avoid citing lack of skill as the reason they don't build, it could be that it's the "dirty little secret" of Second Life--something nobody talks about.

I'll freely admit I'm in the group that can't build for the life of me. I just don't "get" it and frankly I see no shame in that. The ability to look at a basic prim and envision the potential shapes within it is just something that I lack. I look at a cube and I see...a cube. How people can look at the basic prims and imagine how they'll be turned into complex creations continually amazes me. I'm just not visually oriented at all, my mind works better with text which is probably why I've been writing code since I was a kid and continue as a scripter in SL.

Building might not be a universal activity but a short trip through a few mainland sims shows that a lot of very 'amateur' building goes on in SL!

...There might lie the answer to your difficulty!! When I build things I work the other way round - I imagine what I'm going to build first and then I work out how I'd make it. Also, big builds usually involve a lot of repetition, where you simpy duplicate a section of your build as many times as you need to. Also, when you've done a bit of building, you end up with a useful kit of parts that you can use or modify, mix and match, which saves time compared to starting from scratch each time.

<---- agrees with this above post.