Kaneva bergerons building? But will it work?

The other day I was looking at the site for Kaneva (it seems I see huge numbers of banner/tower ads for Kaneva and IMVU these days but very few for SL.. ), and I noticed something unusual.

Previously the strategy for all of the SL competitors was to not support user building at all but allow users just to coordinate prefabs. The logic behind this is reasonable - it makes it much easier for them to host the world and reduces lag and similar, and gives an identical experience to SL for the majority of users (most users do not create their own content from scratch anyway).

However I was surprised to see that on Kaneva you can now buy "building blocks" to design the interior of buildings (the exterior is still alway a prefab because there is no "outside". Compared to SL the building is laughable though - the only prims available are boxes (and boxes with archways in) and all you can do with them is to position, scale, rotate, and texture them - no cutting or anything like that (although you can scale them into cuboids).

In spite of this some people are still trying to build neat areas by just using these textured cubes.

Now here's my question. Is this just a rather bad attempt at fudging free building into the Kaneva engine or is it a deliberate Harrison Bergeron? In other words, is it an attempt to ensure that there isn't enough flexibility or scope in building for the best artists to shine, thus ensuring that the majority of people who are NOT the best artists do not feel themselves sidelined? (There is no way to give an interior layout to someone else on Kaneva that I can see.) Did SL ever attract or appeal to the group of people, who this kind of strategy would appeal to? Is it a threat to the lower-level building users on SL?

Dunno the answer to your question but have a comment on this bit...

It's not identical at all!

Even though most SL residents don't really create stuff, having some that do gives all the non-builders a _lot_ more choices. We're not limited to a set of prefabs - we can get just about anything, as long as _somebody_ has taken the time to build it and make it available..

When I was doing the beta for TSO pre SL beta.
The building tools for TSO are very simple easy to use for everyone infact easier then here yet you can't really do much of your own textures, there is limitations too there.
Some people buildings really were awful and uncreative in my humble opinion just like here.
Then there were people like myself who were very creative who did pretty good jobs with it.
Here though I find sometimes using prims to build things a whole lot more challenging.
It not that I don't have talents or creativity its just harder to do things in SL.
I figure in that game enviroment if you are really talented and creative you could probably come up with something even within the limits that would make your design shine more then someone who is as talented or creative in that way.
I bet they want creative people to join to improve their world.
I could easily get jobs to build with easier building tool, simpler enviroments but here I wouldn't be able to compete in same ways.

That applies to the other worlds as well, though. IMVU, for example, does allow user created content - it's just that the tools needed for doing it aren't provided as part of IMVU and it isn't a selling point of their service. I don't know about Kaneva - maybe their development team takes requests..

you broke my google.

What does bergeron mean?

Im finding a type of appricot, and some therory of how rain drops work.

Isn't Kaneva sort of like a 3D Myspace? That's the impression I got when I read about it.

Takes off her thought scrambler cap....

It's a story where everyone is handicapped to the lowest common denominator. If you're smart you are made to wear something that makes it hard to think. If you're athletic you're weighted down and restrained so you cannot move well.

It's a character from a story by Kurt Vonnegut. The thrust of the story is a dystopia in which radical egalitarianist policies have resulted in the government handing out appropriate "handicaps" to counterbalance any born "advantages" people may have, so that everyone is equally burdened.

And to the topic, I don't think Kaneva would pull a stunt like that. I think it's easier on their network.Maybe they're trying to gauge how creative their userbase is. If a lot of peole start using those blocks they might start introducing more. If not, then they know to just concentrate on prebuilt items.

That was also the impression when I tried it out...wouldn't run on one of my comps (which, btw, can run SL just fine! ) and besides hogging space on my hd was as exciting as...dunno. It just wasn't exciting at all. I think even the SIMS have more creativity going.

Ice Nine?

Was that the book? Beautiful people had to wear ugly masks too.