Theory of Community Burnout

If someone is talented enough and has the right attitude, they will have some success. If not Siegebot then something else. That person will not see the siegebot and think "Oh well, all is lost." They'll go on and do something else, in SL if they like SL. I, for one, would not hike out to the middle of the desert to invent a glass of water.

The big SL innovations that eclipse everything else are really just simple ideas. And the coding for a lot can probably be done by a lot of people. It's easy to see this now. But at the time they were invented they did not exist, and someone had to see the need for the creation. This thinking requires you to see past the burnout and how things already exist, and to make something out of nothing. Not an easy thing to do.

You think that the beta folks had it easy and just filled up the markets with all the basics, but these things had to be invented. The first person to build a vending machine was doing something very clever that hadn't been thought of before (I'm assuming here, as this was before my time). But even now I think there is plenty of room to improve the lowly vending machine, and plenty of money to be made with some fresh thinking.

You're talking about a community burnout, but you're just applying your inability to see past the umbrella of current products to the rest of the community.

RIGHT NOW someone is working on something very clever and new that will be seen as a basic necessity a year from now.

Um, pot...this is kettle...kettle...say hello to pot.

People create good things because they are driven to do so, not because it is easy to create. Someone who will be dissuaded from entering a market simply because competition exists in that market is someone who wasn't driven in the first place.

You could argue that the wild success of Seburo should have dissuaded me from ever entering the PvP products space. It didn't, because I don't think that way. Seburo taught me that I could make money if my product had polish and delivered on its promises. And that was an amazing lesson. I made siegeBot not because it was easy, not because the market was unsaturated (it's over-saturated) but because I was driven to create something really excellent. My mission, to provide a unique, quality, fun product at reasonable costs, paid me significant dividends. My competition was enormous, but I found ways to differentiate. I made siegeBot, and now Crusader, because I had to. For me. I was driven to create my vision. It was absolutely non-negotiable.

Not everyone presumes defeat before embarking, Yumi. If that's how you see the world, there's nothing anyone can do to help you. Only you control your attitude. But I urge you to stop assuming everyone else shares your limitations. We do not. There is ample evidence to support this in the thriving competitive landscape that is Second Life. Those with the intiative, drive and passion to create will create and will succeed. Those who lack it can be encouraged by their peers, but there's nothing else anyone can do for someone who has no fire in the eyes.

As for your voluminous repertoire of "what if" questions that don't seem to have any basis in general reality, I'll give you some advice a police officer gave me when I was a kid who asked too many questions:

"What if? What if a button popped out of the ground and you could press it and then the Power Rangers would come out of the ground and force you to take drugs," asked the cop.

"That would never happen," I smirked.

"But what if it did?"

The point being, we can ask a what-if question for any given situation. Does the question matter? Sometimes it really doesn't.

To be honest, i have one of the new Crusaders and now i have a sudden inspiration to build my own model. So let's turn it around.
Someone is wandering around SL looking for something to make, sees the Crusader, and as a non-conscious result does feel the inspiration to create a mobile weapons platform because they want something that is more their style. Two round bumpy things on the sides is so 2005.

See it can happen either way, and it does.


What do you know? who told you?
*looks around suspiciously*

That's also a great point. Some folks have an ambitious attitude of improvement and see the status quo and then demand to improve upon it. These folks are often quite successful as a result of this attitude.

Ok, so, putting an alternate spin on things here. I've just seen someone else post a message about how they don't feel there's anything they can contribute. If, as you say, these notions are false, then are there any changes we can make or think of to SL to disabuse people who carry these fallacies of them, or to foster the more positive attitudes? You might say "we don't need to, we can let them fail, not everyone gets to be an astronaut etc etc" but more competition is good for everyone and especially good for LL if people integrate and become more prepared to buy in.

I haven't discounted your theory entirely. Mostly, but not entirely. When you said . . .

"But on the other hand, if someone is wandering around SL looking for something to make, sees the siegeBot, and as a non-conscious result does not feel the inspiration to create a mobile weapons platform because they are no longer struck by the lack of one, I wouldn't call that "scared and lazy", but I would call it something that might push them away from a community to a different one"

. . . something there resonated with me. I'm thinking there is something in what you are saying, another way of viewing the same thing from a different position, or some kernel in there that speaks to me. But it will probably take me several days to turn over your points in my mind and figure out what that something is. (If even then I manage to figure it out.)

coco

This isn't a Second Life issue.

This is a life issue.

Not everyone possesses 100% of the initiative necessary for success in 100% of all arenas 100% of the time. Moreover, not everyone possesses the inspiration 100%, either. As in nature, human development is an oscillating pattern of growth. There's not a switch we can throw that will make everyone suddenly reach 100% potential. That's a matter of personal initiative.

There's nothing anyone can do to mother people into having good attitudes. There's nothing anyone can do to force inspiration.

This would all be a problem if Second Life products were a stagnant mess of four or five designers. It is far from that -- competition thrives. Will you run an amazing business in SL in your first week? I doubt it. It took me six months even to come up with an idea.

You can't force ambition, Yumi. It's either possessed or it isn't. Asking me for a solution to make successes out of the un-ambitious is like asking me to drive an entire dealership worth of cars to California on positive thoughts alone.

I'm asking this honestly: Why do you feel the need to be the mommy of Second Life?

Let people be who they are. If they don't have what they want, they'll either work for it or they'll whine. Sounds pretty familiar to me.

A constant problem is when some people attribute things to Second Life which are equally attributable to First Life, what is sometimes called "real life" or what I'll call "offline life". There's the archetypical mindset of approaching this like a game, so among other things, you expect:


Second Life really shakes that up! Just as, dare I say it, it's meant to. So we have all sorts of viewpoints here, and even with a lot of discussion, I'm not sure if anyone's really swayed.

But me, I'll speak about me personally. As much as I post, I listen even more on here, seeing what I've missed, seeing what's new and exciting. I look for the accurate, the astuteful, the silly, and the shameful, and really hope I can learn something from it all and be a better person in both my First AND Second Lives.

My brain is wired in such a way that it's difficult for me to explain some of what I experience, but as long as I have this community, I'll want to continue making an effort. I let things dribble and drool out simply because I realize I do not have a lot of the "big picture" yet. My mistake before has been thinking, "O, this is the END of the story!" when in fact, Second Life continues to roll on, and all the twists and turns along the way result in me g oing through various phases.

I've had quiet times, noisy times, and many things in between. I'm not a content creator (yet) but should one day I wake up after many other experiences on here and want to do it, I'm leaving that possibility open. BJS is what I call it, for "Bounce, Jiggle, and Sway". Like JELLO, things have got to be tasty and flexible.

I can't define intangibles like "inspiration", I won't even try. Heck, I'm a lousy explainer! But I know what I am: I'm hungry here, hungry for more Second Life, even with all the scrooed-up things that come our way, just like offline life.

So I will live, and celebrate (gosh it's 2006 AD already), and if I can't do something via theory, I will live, simply and truely, and by example, will hopefully show all of who I am. After all, that is who my avatar represents.

I don't really agree with that - and I don't really like the use of the word "force", since it suggests that the person being forced is being pushed into something they don't like. Have you really never talked to a person who inspired you to do stuff? And if they did, would you say, not that they inspired you, but that they "forced you to be inspired"?

In real life, I've done a lot of teaching. In SL, I've tried to teach people things too. And often, especially these days, teaching people well requires you to inspire them, to some extent. When I've done some basic scripting classes, usually far more valuable than any commands of events people have learned has been the idea that it is actually something that they might be able to do, as opposed to some mysterious technicial thing that flies over their heads. I can't claim to be that great at it, but I have to try.

And if it's "a life issue" - well, what would be so terrible about having things in Second Life which improve people's attitudes to First Life? Wouldn't that actually be one of the most wonderful things ever?

Try substituting mentor for mother and you come to a better middle ground. A good mentor does not make excuses for or enable self defeating behavior. That can be said of a good parent as well but the term mother tends to generate a more negative image here.

It would be wonderful!

Now get to work doing that instead of making voluminous excuse threads for everyone to fail.



Yes, that's a fair analysis.

So, quite doing that, Yumi, and start doing the inspiring and the attitude grooming.

I think, Yumi, you would have done better to find out about the successes as a starting point rather than create a theory of failure. To define an environment of failure around the current circumstances is to will that failure into being. Take cues from the successes, ask valuable questions about how they got to be successful, what drives them, etc. Be positive and it will be it's own reward.

Though you may not have meant to, you are creating a built in excuse. This can only hamper inspiration, creativity and drive. You used those positive forces in a most interesting fashion in creating your theory.

Great advice. I am successful today because of the examples set by Cubey Terra and Francis Chung.