SL & Circuit City & 1st Impressions

With Circuit City (a US chain selling computers, electronics and home entertainment) filing for bankruptcy, I thought I'd drop over at their island for a bit of n00bstalgia.

When I joined SL, the first thing my friends did (aside from helping me shop and fix up my av) was to drag me to Circuit City Island for a contest they had. They hid 10 iPod icons, randomly, one at a time on the sim, for a month or so. The av who found and clicked on one received a real iPod Nano from Circuit City.

Hunting that iPod taught me a LOT about navigation and camera controls... how to stand in one place and cam inside of buildings, boxes, around corners and such... how to fly without flying into things, and navigate forests, stairs and multi-level structures/mazes/tunnels (okay, I still fall down stairs, but it's my AO I swear!) For a newbie like myself, this was an incredible learning experience.
I also met a CC employee there who was extremely helpful when it came to fixing my sound card, tweaking my SL settings, and recommending a new, SL-compatible machine when I was ready to buy one... all at no charge. He also showed me a bit about basic building and texturing, often taking the time to construct a set of binoculars or whatnot and explain as he went along.

The island had some really neat builds. Maybe none so spectacular as others I've seen since, but the walk-through SLR camera, an interactive, moving display, was my favorite thing there. I dropped in and navigated the ban lines a couple days ago but couldn't get to the camera. My friends and I, most of us new, spent so much of our first month there that I can't help but be a bit nostalgic. I'd like to thank the Circuit City folks who put it together and made SL intriguing for me instead of disappointing and frustrating. My friends and I have our iPods to remember you by.

Since this is RA... what was your first experience like in SL, and did you have a place like I did to learn and explore before venturing into the rest of the grid?

(photo taken 2 days ago)

I started my SL journey on the CSI NY sim way back when. (has now been turned into a vamp island last i knew) Had a wonderful person I met on that sim walk me thru the sl bugs and so forth. great experience. Had it not been for him I probably would have given SL up after the first day or two.

I was trapped at some freebie place for days. I was too afraid to ask for help. People looked weird! Then ... I spent a day stuck in the ceiling and decided to click things and stumbled on the Search menu. It didn't find me anything I wanted, but at least it got me out of the ceiling.

@ Klunitz...
One friend's first experience was riding a scooter and getting stuck in a tree, unable to move. She thought she'd still be stuck every time she logged in, but fortunately she wasn't, or I doubt she'd have come back.

@ Cigi...
I would have done the same, without helpful people and friends showing me the ropes. It was overwhelming to me, a non-gamer who had never seen anything like this before!

So true, I now help any new ppl that i come across. I even have folders in my inventory for female and male newbs.

first take I landed and I remember having to do all this stuff but then I had to drive and run over rats I called my friend frantic.

Yup it was call a friend and she got me out.

B

I spent two days stuck in OI - couldn't find my way off the Island. A friend rescued me but I somehow landed under water and we both spent hours it seemed sitting next to a lifeless person in a compromising position. From there discovered drinking in SL when someone handed me a beer and i couldn't figure out how to let go of it- I kept falling over drunk for days... I remembered I wanted a tattoo they were expensive! Finally broke down and put money into the game. Then one day - about two- three months later.. I bought my first 512. Ah those were the days... holes in the ground I could not smooth, hair rezzing two feet awa from my head cause I borked it and had no idea it could be fixed... shoes and hair up the butt.. no SL Wednesdays- oh yeah.. those were the days...

strangely enough, it is not a place, but sounds that have a touch of nostalgia for me...

I normally now turn off the ui and environmental sounds....

when I do turn them on, it makes me feel like those first few days in SL

first day in, squeak through the tutorials really fast (anyone remember the old grab the beach ball one?) and get whisked away to where my GF at the time hung out...Weirdorkistan and club 69 (one of the early clubs to have their own station and DJ's) met some interesting people back there, several I still talk to, even a few now famous inworld personas... ah the good old days... I was scripting and building by day 3

I landed in SL as a TSO refugee (we are talking the wave that was fleeing the All new and horribly laggy friendship web).

I was immediately sent to the OLD orientation island. Where you had to maneuver a ball onto a table and drop it. Kiss a parrot. Read the BACK of an eye chart. Fly across a huge deep canyon to a Greek looking temple to take your journey directly to the Ahern welcome area. I did great until that canyon. It took me a solid 45 minutes to get across and I learned that the Lindens had put signs in the water at the bottom of it with instructions on how to fly. I got REALLY tired of those signs. I didnt do this all in one shot however. I was terrified my sim would whiz himself because I couldnt find a bathroom anywhere, or worse die from lack of food. SO I logged out for a couple hours every 20 minutes or so to let him green up.

By the time I landed on the star trek looking telepad at Ahern I couldnt remember how to walk. So I stood there trying to click on the ground to move. A nice lady asked if I needed help and after I said yes she started walking away telling me to follow her. One small problem by the time I had figured out how to walk she was nowhere in sight. To this day I wonder what she thought of me.

So I wandered around Ahern for awhile clicking on everything. Shot some targets in the old shooting gallery. grabbed a free hoverboard kit and promptly wrecked it. The discovered the sandbox. Having done some 3d modelling outside of SL I proceeded to make a very rough table with stacked tori for the base and a flat cylinder top. I tried for a good long time to find a merge command. No Luck. Then I found link. One problem I missed with the mouse and picked hinge instead. Then in the process of trying to pick up my item I moved it up into the sky and it unwound like some sort of freaky slinky. (meanwhile I was still logging out every 20 minutes for fear of death or embarassment).

I stumbled onto the stage area near Ahern during a Newbie Q & A session. Towards the end of the class I finally screwed up my courage and sheepishly asked "Where is the bathroom?" When they stopped laughing.....it was explained to me you didnt have to green up in SL.

Went premium, got assigned a really crappy piece of mountainside as first land in Europa. Got swindled out of it. Bough a nice water plot in Ebisu. GOt bit by the building bug. And as they say the rest is history. Over the years more than 70 members of my extended family have joined me in SL. Until the day they closed the old orientation island, Not one of us warned the incoming family member about that cliff with the river at the bottom.

My first 7 days were spent in Cordova. It was nice then, just a bunch of creative landless residents learning to build and watching the more experienced residents who would occasionally give us some tips. Not a griefer in sight during my time there. I think this was a good introduction to SL as I got to watch the building process in action. Someone built a super star destroyer from Starwars in about 2 hours and I was amazed...and subsequently hooked.

When my account first rezzed in SL, it was not on Orientation Island, or Help Island. It was on some sim disconnected from the main grid apparently; there were no adjacent sims, and pulling up the map did not show any other sims no matter how far I zoomed out.

I do not remember the sim's name. Where I rezzed, immediately behind me was a huge chessboard, with pieces as tall as my avatar. Some distance ahead of me was a gargantuan two-story glass pavilion, with some ad posters in it. There were a number of people walking around, obviously newbies, and nobody was talking to anyone else. That's really all I remember from this island, except that there was no way off it - any attempt to use search to TP away came up with some kind of "region not found" error.

I became very frustrated, but I figured out how to escape this island -before- logging in, were you can choose to login at "Home", "My Last Location", or type the name of a sim. In all my internet searching (I admit, I hadn't done much), it seemed the place I wanted to go was NCI in Kuula, so I typed "Kuula" in the box and voila! I rezzed on the main grid with full TP capability and all the rest. NCI did not merely supplement my "OI training", as I'd had none; it was really the totality of my learning how to use SL. From there, I found some other newbie places, including the Shelter, which has a theater with some tutorial videos in it. I also found a link to an internet site which was an introduction to SL in the form of a story about a newbie - it was informative and enjoyably-written.

At the time, though, I could not set Home there. My Home was always that oddly-disconnected island I started at; so I "made" Kuula my Home by always typing in that sim name whenever I logged on. At some point I found Ahern, which was crowded and cliquish but not unsafe or unfriendly, and was able to make that place my Home. Using Ahern as a base, I did my exploration of SL, mostly using Search to find places that interested me. I found, and subsequently spent MOST of my SL time, at a "Philosophy Club" on a sim called Nuba. It was a bunch of tree stumps around a crackling fire, and we would sit for hours and hours as the SL sun went down, came up, and went back down again, while we talked and debated and argued over things that really don't matter. It was awesome, and this is how I spent my SL for the first couple of months. That were before I grew down, of course.

I (well, my original account) was immediately fascinated by the process of changing my av. It took me a while to drag myself away from the appearance tools to start looking round. This was when OI didn't have the n00b-HUD and patronising exercises in av control so I wandered around and found a dancefloor. Cue shouting a load of fellow newbies over for a dance. Loads of fun from something I now consider so mundane.

I soon moved out to a welcome area - Aherne - and spiralled out over the countryside to nearby sights. First were the maze, archery and bumper-boats. I soon found Lusk which impressed the hell out of me as a build, even more so when I found out, like almost everything else in SL, it was all user-created.

My first big retail experience was the shopping park at Aqua, most of which is gone now apart from the Chip Midnight store where I got my first freebies (thankies!). I spent a lot of time around there because there was a beach club with dance parties. I also spent ages making new avs using only the appearance tools... fantasy races like faeries, goblins, elves & hobbits. It was ages before I found out how 'n00bish' the standard hair, skin & AO were considered, although I found a freebie sexy-walk bracelet pretty early.

Someone I met early on directed me to a big freebie place... near the wall in Jubata, but I can't remember the name. *BIG* learning experience. It was a lot busier than anywhere else, and a great place to meet people (some of my best friends in the early days). It also showed me just what was possible with the SL build tools. Discovering a lot of stuff was available for free was a big help too... it stopped me getting conned into buying junk. I could look at items for sale and realise "I've seen that for free already" or even "I've seen *better* than that for free".

Things it took me a while to figure out:
Dragging inventory items to the ground to rez them. I spent ages looking for a "rez from inventory" menu option. It seems so obvious now, but it's not really intuitive. And yes, I had my fair share of vehicles etc. worn as hats.

Overriding the time of day. I spent plenty of time wandering around in the dark, wondering how people coped with it. IIRC, night was a lot darker 2 years ago, or use of local light sources was much less common.

That the default skin, hair and AO make you look like a newbie, and that some people treat you as a pariah because of it. Which didn't matter so much at the time because I *was* a newbie. I soon got rid of the newbie walk and bought some prim hair, although the hair had a 150 flexy ponytail and a bling hair band. So I went from newbie to blingy lag-monster in one step. One lives and learns

I came in and as soon as I had finished my 'look' (lol Ruth with slider clothes) I was whisked away to where a friend was hosting an event, and people felt sorry for me and gave me stuff

For the first few weeks my home was really on Help Island public, by the building tutorial boards. I was building boxes my second day (partied all the first one).

I just hit the streets after a couple of hours on Orientation Island and learned as I went.

I spent a lot of the early days at a place called Odds and Ends, and started reading the knowledge base and forum. Not having played any games or done any online chat before helped I think as I had no preconceived ideas to compare it to, and the fun was in figuring things out..

I never saw a welcome center. I did the basic stuff at OI, then zipped off to an island I saw on a website and logged in there for a few weeks until I rented my 1st little house. A nice area, wonderful people, and perfect for a newbie learning to count prims and place items.

Here it is almost a year later... I look at all I have learned and where I live now (and my overflowing inventory!)... and sometimes I think it would be nice to just go back to simpler times and rent a little basic box someplace.

Then I look at the sunset from my bay window, and think... NAAAAAH!

That [very bad word] beach ball! I was on a mac with the old one-button mouse, too. After a RIDICULOUSLY long time I gave up and decided those grapes were probably sour anyway. By the time I tried again I couldn't remember what my name was or what email I'd used. I must have either had a two-button mouse by then or there were obvious mac instructions because I don't remember anything particularly from that time except falling on some stairs. (Still do sometimes but it's not nearly as alarming!)

Before the Torley Tuts were hot & heavy, I was fortunate to find an excellent camera video tutorial series from Natural Selection Studios called Noob Be Gone. Not only did it give the basics but gave you the advanced movement tricks. Check it out at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LMcryDCIYk

On my second day, where I had the opportunity to really learn, I was directed to KMADD. Great store and not just because of the stuff for men. I met a fellow who helped fixed up my av's appearance adn told me where I could get some new clothes. He was very patience and nice about it.

Got some new clothes, skins and etc. I did some experimenting with Search, located in top right corner and found places for more clothes.

I came to in Ahern and wandered around there for a while looking for something cool. I found the map, and saw a sim named "Gibson" So I went over there and promptly got stuck in a wall.

Teleported back home (in Ahern, that is), and asked for advice, and ended up on Sables dAlliez in the sandbox. Within a couple of hours of building I was helping people with scripting problems... on my first day... and even getting paid for it.

I eventually rented the parcel on LostFurest dAlliez across from the sandbox, and I'm still renting it today. I miss Sables, though.

Landed at Ahern and thought "URGH!" as a gazillion screeching teenagers where running round spamming etc. I thought "This is rubbish" and went to the kitchen to get a drink - when I came back my then RL boyfriend had run over, found a dungeon and put me on a St Andrews Cross (how droll).

I spent my early days being hotly pursued by someone who looked, frankly, like a load of potatoes in a pair of tights with knots in strategic places for joints. Actually he was a former Royal Observatory lecturer and a relatively well known jazz saxophonist (I had proof of the validity of his claims!). I do remember the beach ball, I also remember I mainly was flying to the portal to get off the island.

I think that tutorial was much better in those days, but they should flash up a screen advising that the WA is possibly not going to give you anything like a taste of what SL is like, it's just a landing pad/launch pad and may therefore be chaotic. The amount of people I know who tried it and hated it at the WA point and never came back. I'd have been one of them, and I'd not have met the man who has become quite literally the love of my life online and off.