How mainstream are we?

I think most Lively early adopters only logged on to secure their SL names, perhaps like FreeRealms joiners. In lively, I could put up with looking like one of 3 Bratz dolls for 30 mins, but my goodness! There was nothing to do and nothing that caught my attention, nothing to make me want to learn. No skills to gain, and no way to give back. Not even any intelligent conversation to be found where I had landed (admittedly, it may all have been happening elsewhere).

The SL users who can make it through the first half hour are immensely more creative. Even if they play the basic game of shop, dress and dance, they have engaged with this world and learnt considerable skills.

We are all drawn to a world of open possibilities and diversity, and that says something very important about a group of people.

OK, so it's Warcrack/Evercrack for kiddies. If I wanted to play a game like that, I'd be playing a game like that. There's dozens of games like that on the net. Those games are the mainstream. They can keep it. If SL became THAT mainstream I'd be somewhere else.

There's plenty of combat in SL. Here's a post from this weekend about it:

http://hiberniaskids.blogspot.com/2009/05/repost-developments-for-naval-warfare.html

It's not just naval combat either; there have been combat groups here for years. Surprised you haven't noticed. Caledon itself as an estate launched a 'mysterious isle of Mondserrat' for a couple months there, where all sorts of things on the island (or other players) tried to kill you before you could find certain treasures. It's been done, done, and done again.

And yeah, slicing monsters a la Diablo is pretty much the same as cooking a virtual stew as far as I'm concerned.

I'd bet those monsters were mere ingredients for the sausage at a later stage.

Yes, I know about the racing too.

The most valid point on here is that it's a world meant for kids... and I could understand something like that.

SL is by far the most versatile I have heard of, but I don't think it's that mainstream.

It does take a while to get used to it and looks empty.

I signed up at FreeRealms as Gabriele Graves whilst it was beta and did a few of the quests etc. Then got in again when they went live.
The world is very cutsey, but not nearly enough of a free format to it. It felt very guided every where you go. Sure you can choose the order you do quests but there isn't anything to do that isn't a quest of some sort.
I didn't like that you could not fly (the pixie floating does not qualify), the combat was too basic to be fun, most people were either npcs or would not talk no matter how much you walked around and asked people stuff. Oh there is no building either.
In the end I got bored of everything being the same. The monsters in the sub-quests are in exactly the same places as the last time you fought them etc.
There was no social gathering aspect that I could see whilst I was logged in, though admittedly being in NZ my hours are not rest of the world friendly mostly.
Basically it looked fun and cartoony, the quests were fun for a short while and I can see this appealing to children a lot and adults who like their entertainment to be less thought provoking.

This is the bottom line, no matter how it looks or feels, if it's boring it has no longevity. When I was a lad I remember Dragon's Lair arriving at the arcade and wow it looked awesome, but when you played it, well it was rubbish. Manic Miner blew it away in terms of gameplay, although graphically Manic Miner was ridiculously inferior to Dragon's Lair.

Creativity is not only restricted on building, scripting or selling stuff. Someone who sets up an art gallery in SL and makes it run is creative as well. Someone who buys a virtual house and furnishes it is creative, even if she or he did not build a single piece by her/himself. Someone who sets up a community in SL is creative. Someone who sets up a virtual relationship is creative. Even the ones who do virtual sex in SL are creative. Everything in SL is a creative abstraction and a work of intellectual and sometimes emotional creativity. So yes, everyone who really spends more than an hour a week in SL is creative in a way.

The restrictions of creativity and the boundaries for activities here are only of technical nature, and that´s a problem LL as the provider has to solve, not the residents of Second Life. In fact, Second Life ONLY has reached its cutting edge status among the virtual realities because of it´s users and the unbelievable variety of creativity piled up by these users. Mainstream? Sure, but the advantage here is that mainstream is not a doctrine in SL, tho some senior Lindens who obviously NEVER ever "lived" in their own creation want to establish it as a doctrine.

The big barriers are social, not technical.

In what way Yumi? Second Life has lots of social opportunities, do you feel you don't fit in?

Wrong, you can be as anti-social as you like in SL and still be highly creative. You are just not ready to accept this truth yet.

As I've said.. when the whole reward mechanic of the world is based on others' free social behavior, it will never work well or universally because people just don't want to go out of their way to make it.

That's the way RL works too, to me the big social barrier is the group limits, there are umpteen social groups I'd love to join but my business groups have to take precendence.

I do however think that people possibly have trust issues here, many rightly so but with a little more trust we can make a more socially rewarding world, but it's a big barrier.

Once again wrong, I know you won't accept this because you are constrained by your own thinking.
However I know for a fact that there are things I have created in SL and out of SL, things that others will never get to see but have been highly rewarding in terms of bringing them into creation, the act of creativity only, which has been enough for me. So either it is just not enough for you or you will not grasp the truth that for others the social validation you crave is not strictly necessary.

For what it's worth, they are selling real-world "station cash" cards in stores, so I imagine kids at CVS or Target seeing the station cash cards and learning about it that way then signing up to check it out. I saw a TV commercial for it last night. So they're marketing it pretty heavily too, and it's free to sign up. But yeah, ultimately it is a lot of simple flash minigames strung together targeted at kids. But Desmond, if you haven't already, try out the trading card game.

One of the side benefits of using a Mac is I rarely can join something like that.

The 3D game building system at atmosphir.com might be more interesting to some here than FreeRealms.

You know, I'll pop in over there and have a look at it. Though it sounds really social, as a trading game. I guess that's a sort of fun thing.

Trouble is, it's just such a... a free realm. Land barony is nothing there... utterly meaningless! Perhaps that wouldn't affect the usual person. For me, it would be like a certified network administrator sent back to neolithic Europe.

I might suddenly snap, and sell someone a bridge across a river there or something. Once caught, the pixies will haul me away and make me cook...

With a few annoying exceptions, it can definitely be a plus, can't it?

... And so? We're thinking about comparing virtual worlds to each other. Virtual worlds will never have the same "you just have to deal with it" pass for unfair design as RL has. This is a problem and FR doesn't have it. If people are (for some reason) worried about FR's popularity compared to SL, that's certainly one place to look.



For some others, true. But for how many others? Certainly, the "mainstream" does want social validation - just look at the popularity of social networking. The mainstream wants social validation because it lets them confirm they're not http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exWHFj_T9Qw . And social validation isn't just saying things, it can involve helping too, such that there's some level of work quality that's impossible - or at least much harder - to produce without it.

Honestly, I really don't think there are that many people using SL for creation without some validation. After all, there are much better platforms for solo creativity - ones that don't require you to manually add together coordinates with 3 decimal places merely in order to make objects touch each other.

Also, it ignores the fact that the individual activities within FR can be enjoyable too, PLUS either offer social validation, or (and here's the real trick) not require it to be rewarded, yet at the same time offer rewards that make future social validation more likely.

This is the crux of your problem Yumi, you cannot concieve of the concept that the act of creation is validation enough for some people.
If even one person can create something without needing social acceptance before attemtping it then it is possible and means your social barrier problem is only a personal problem that not everyone suffers from, bringing us around once again to the issue that starts with you. Again I repeat, you are not ready to accept this yet.

You will now proceed to tell me how I am wrong even though I am a person for whom the act of creation was and most often is enough validation and you are quite clearly not. To do so is an irrational act, however people in denial clearly do not act rationally towards to their problem.

For some people, yes. But this thread is about a statistical comparison of two virtual worlds. If people don't like the result of that comparison, a fair question to ask would be: "is it _enough_ people?"



It's only a "problem" if you see people as having a definitive desire to create, at all costs, in a virtual world, and it is a problem because it is stopping them. But for most people who have this I suspect it is not a "problem" of that type, it's just the reason why they don't want to. But that problem still comes back to SL because, if they don't want to do what SL offers, they don't stick with SL.

As for the personal issue, everyone who's ever told me that social validation isn't needed, did have it themselves.

I don't see people worrying about it, wondering why it's popular is how some people view it but that's a human trait that covers just about everything, one man's meat is another man's poison and all that.

Well, that's a key reason why. That feeling of incremental improvement is the critical appeal of almost every MMORPG, and SL just doesn't prove it in a reliable way, because it depends on the social system to get it. Those who _do_ get it socially tend to end up being the most successful, so of course their voices are heard louder than those who didn't.

I believe the first truly mainstream virtual world will be the first one that works on a Playstation.

PS3Home already exists. The only statistics on it are that it's had 4 million downloads, but nothing on active accounts, since it doesn't have accounts separate from PlayStation accounts.