How mainstream are we?

Even with Yumi on ignore I can tell pretty much exactly what she's saying.

Yumi: if a 3d environment doesn't have the problems you're complaining about, it's not a world. It's not even much of a game. No real competition, you might as well play solitaire.

You don't automatically "level up" to Grandmaster in Chess without actually getting good at playing chess, no matter how much time you spend pushing wood around.

As for popularity... solitaire is enormously popular.

Your comments here are not a response to my line of challenging you. My comments started by dealing with this false statement of yours :-



They have been following your line of reasoning about my challenges, not strictly about the actual question in the OP.

So once again I say to you there are no social barriers to creation for some people, the fact that you have a blockage that is social in nature is not symptomatic of the whole of SL and may even be atypical. I suspect it is as most people start by creating things for their own pleasure/satisfaction and only show things to others after the point of creation has passed. Sure, social validation at that point might encourage them to continue but it is not the reason they first started to create nor will it be the absolute and only decider of whether they attempt to create again in the future.

Again, the topic in our exchange is about the reason for creation and my challenge that it is not correct to say what I quoted you as saying about social barriers.



This is a cop out response and missing the point completely. Even by your own logic social validation must come after the point of creation, how did those people know they would get validation before they created for at least the first time?
There is no such thing as creative pre-approval for social validation. So there must have been at least a point in time those people who got the social validation you seem to think is all important, created something without knowing if it would be validated by their peers.

I have offered you my own experiences that show I have created and continue to create things that in themselves give me validation and a sense of accomplishment without showing them to others and you discard this testimony. What automatic social validation do I have?
Others have said the same to you. Where is the social validation if you make things that never get seen by others and are for your own amusement and/or use?
I am neither famous nor feted for creating anything and *everything* I have created started out without any kind of social validation even if later *some* of the things I have shown to others gained some small measure of validation in the form of people saying they thought it was good.
A person who discards the testimony like this of others is denying they are true, hence it follows if those testimonies are true, that person is in denial about those truths.

/me groans and groans

I think being successful socially is about three things

1. being there

2. trying

3. not getting all bent up about being ignored

AND - people who can't do it themselves can hook up with people who can.

Nobody has to be all and everything.

.

And I love how you can deny there's any problem with social acceptance while having me on ignore.



Again, my issue with SL isn't that you don't _automatically_ level up, it's that the levelling up is so affected by social issues that it's effectively random. I mean, people here have complained that I seem to be demanding people visit and directly help with ideas or do other things that would be "unreasonable" for them. Now that's fair enough, but the point is - some people _did_ get that.. because they just happened to bump into someone else in a sandbox. That's the point, the same interaction is "unreasonable" when forced but perfectly reasonable, natural, and beneficial when it happens by chance. And I believe that these interactions are actually critical to people's "levelling up" on SL, and that as a result, a significant part of that aspect _is_ left to chance - since after all, nobody can tell when the right time at the right sandbox will be, and as we've seen from the reactions to my similar posts, you can't "ask" or "force" an encounter of that kind because it becomes an unreasonable expectation on the other person for them to go out of their way to do it. And if it is left to chance, then only the lucky people get it - which will limit SL's coverage in that regard.

You can't say you don't have social acceptance - you have tons. Everybody responds to all your posts.

Not everybody can say that.

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Besides, I didn't say there wasn't a problem with social acceptance. I said that if a "game" doesn't have this problem it's not a world, it's communal solitaire.

And again, you have to say "some people". The original point about this thread was the question about why FR is *apparently* gaining users faster than SL when it has less facilities and less freedom, and I was answering that question. How many people are in your "some"?



As I mentioned above.. often by encountering someone _while_ they were creating for the first time.



That's very probable, yes. The question is, was it validated or not?



Once you're validated as a creator it's much easier to create things "purely for yourself" because you know there has been some respect to your ability - in other words, you know you have a potential audience to "level up" for the sake of. I don't know about the items you've created just for yourself, but looking at votes on XStreet, you've made at least US$255 from a voting board script.

I also wrote a voting board script, which was ignored. I don't mind not making money, but being ignored is a bad sign, don't you think? Another item, I spent around 4 months working on scripting; it was also ignored. A friend and I had an idea for a meetup location, and a professional builder offered to build for us for free; the build he eventually did completely transformed the theme into one I despised and utterly killed any passion I had for the concept, so I sort of left it to run on its own, and it was also ignored. I think I finally snapped when I learned that a friend who was running shows, which I was also interested in joining it with (but which interest was ignored), had purchased a script for L$10000 which looped llGetInventoryName, loaded the results into an llDialog, and then llRezObject'ed the selected item.

As long as I'm being negative and as long as they can have me continue to be negative, yes. Notice that I've posted twice in different threads now the comment that "SL forces you to add three-digit decimal numbers on a desktop calculator in order to make objects touch".

My dad used to say, "If you don't have problems, it means you're dead."

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Whether you get your kicks from creating or simply being a consumer
Whether you are socially extrovert or introvert
Whether you agree or disagree with someone else's definition of a world

are all moot, even if the statistics are in your favour

The only person that defines your world, RL or SL or anyotherL is you.

Rock

You're confusing issues here, you're talking of marketing, which isn't easy. What do you mean you wrote a voting board script and it was ignored? Is it on sale anywhere? Marketing doesn't equal social validation, not selling a script doesn't mean you personally are ignored.

Is your creativity stifled because your ideas and scripts aren't getting widespread use?

Well, "me personally" has been pretty much ignored ever since the start of SL. I don't think I've ever gotten to play the character I originally thought of because people either didn't care or were too busy asking me for help scripting things, so I've kind of gotten used to being a utility. From what I've seen that's pretty common though.

And "marketing isn't easy" is a bit of a cop-out - I mean, you're quite right, but the point is, if there's a marketing war then if someone wins someone else has to lose. It doesn't solve the problem that the resource is scarce in the first place, which could limit the popularity of SL compared with games where that problem doesn't arise.

Aren't we all in that club?

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Did you say something?

/me blushes

Hey, wait - was that a cross-post from the "How to Woo..." thread?

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Second Life does not cater to the mainstream.

The one thing that Second Life does well, far better than any other virtual world, is giving people a chance to create the world.

I don't think the creators are mainstream, though. I think the mainstream is looking to virtual worlds for easy socializing and easy passing liesure time. They don't want to put a lot of work into getting to the liesure. (The work being the steep learning curve that comes with Second Life.)

Further, the mainstream doesn't want to upgrade their computers every six months to keep up with their liesure pasttime. As long as Second Life continues to push the hardware requirements so quickly, it will leave the mainstream behind.

Linden Lab may see mainstream appeal as important to financial success. The new adult policies, for example, seem to me to be motivated to clean up its media image to appear more mainstream. Linden Lab also seems to be working to reduce the learning curve associated with Second Life. And though Second Life seems to be getting slower and slower every day, I am not aware that there has been any significant, you-need-to-upgrade-your-computer change in a long time (since mandatory Windlight?) So it looks like Second Life is trying to go mainstream.

It does not matter, you created something - ergo the act of creation did not depend upon validation to occur. If a person had the urge to do it once then they can get the urge to do it again. Social validation has little to do with it as there are many people who create and create regardless of what others think of what they produce. They are driven to create. We would not have many of the great works of art if that were not so. Many did not gain any validation from their peers and often died in poverty and/or obscurity for their art.

This I will address separately below in a few mins.

Do you really think that what happened to me via my experiences was as a result of social validation? Explain to me how social validation can get many people who have never met to come and buy my product from XStreetSL.
Do you not think the following factors are more contributory?:

1) I had a great product that differentiated itself from the others in this niche.
2) I had previously assessed that there was a huge need for such a product in a niche that was not being filled particularly well.
3) I researched who would want it and worded my adverts to tell them exactly why they would benefit from my system the most.
4) I discovered over a few iterations the best price point to sell at.
5) I persevered regardless of not having many sales at first.

So where did I do anything there that you could not have done exactly?

There is a longer story behind all this that may or may not interest you and everyone else (it being a slow thread week and all) but in the end it boils down to the same - I did nothing that was impossible for you or anyone else to achieve who had the same technical skills and it did not depend on having pre-given social validation to achieve and I was unknown for producing anything before this.

If your script did not sell Yumi then I am afraid you are going to have to face the facts that one or more of the following occurred:

1) The timing of introducing your product to the market was wrong and the need was not there at the time.
2) The feature set of the product was not a good fit for the customers who were interested in your product.
3) The price was wrong.
4) You didn't market effectively - your adverts did not sell the product very well.
5) You didn't persevere fopr long enough. It costs nothing to keep your adverts up on XStreetSL so what is the point in taking them down just because time has gone by without sales?

Again none of these reasons are social validation based - all are marketing/technical based.

You missed the point entirely. The fact that people would buy the product from you _was_ your social validation. I was trying to emphasize that you did, in fact, have it; and I did not.



I'm not, because all analyses of this type always assume that the customers have no free will. If you believe that customers do - and I do - then the overwhelming argument is that they didn't buy it because they chose not to.

*nods* However, the mainstream is unlikely to want to participate in a VW where they get to be that person.

Same here Yumi, I didn't envisage having to tell people why their adult animations bed wasn't functioning when I signed up, but I've done a bit of scripting this evening for someone and it was very fulfilling.



It depends upon how you term "lose". We won't all be super popular person of the year, heck I know that all too well. When I played WoW there were people who simply did not want to do group quests at an amazing rate of knots, those guys, and I was one of them, were left behind at the higher levels, or criticised because our gear was carp. People couldn't get their heads around people going at their own pace, but you don't have to follow the crowd, you can still enjoy WoW as you can SL, in your own time.

You seem to feel that you'll be considered a loser despite your talents, it doesn't have to be that way.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I'm getting beyond that. Plus, I'm looking at people like Marianne and Immy (who I mentioned before) who _do_ have roles that are respected.



I'm just looking at how people respond to me here and it seems that's how they choose to treat me, so I don't have a lot of choice.

Do you think that I made my sales the instant the product went up for sale? No it took months before I made a single XStreetSL sale and that was after weeks of tweaking the adverts and price/feature set. Did you likewise persevere like this? I will warrant not. I note that your voting script is not on XStreetSL any more - why take it down? What makes you think that it would not have sold had you kept it up?
If I got my validation in the end it was because I went out and demanded it by not accepting defeat and by changing things until I got it. There is nothing there that you or anyone could not do if you had a good product. All the way through this process I was of the mind that if I never got a single XStreetSL sale then it had not been for nothing as I had a great time making what I did and the income was just gravy on top - that did not mean I would just give up trying easily though.

By your own yard stick you have already got your validation - several products of yours on XStreetSL have high stars ratings. So how can you say you don't get validation when your same criteria applied to me means I got my validation?

So what is more likely? That one of the things occurred that I said or that everybody in SL simultaneously decided that because the product was from you that they would not buy it? Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?

My opinion still stands, you defeat yourself Yumi, nobody else - don't blame it on social acceptance or validation when you exhibit the following:

a) A lack of willingness to follow through
b) A pessimistic "expect-to-fail" attitude
c) A lack of recognising social validation when you get some.

Well Mari is respected in a tough area, I'm not familiar with Immy. However respect comes at a price too, there will be people who dislike Mari and Immy just because of that respect.



Yet people do respond to you Yumi, as others have said, if people had no respect for you they wouldn't respond to you at all.

My products no longer sell; and they were only plain scripted gadgets. Anything with any of my personality in it has been rejected.



Not at all. Free will means that people can choose not to buy it for any reason, or for no reason.



Any of these could be bypassed by others so the point stands.