For all the newcomers, and old fogies..

My first week on Second Life was so much fun - playing in the sandbox, talking with the Mentors and meeting new people. But then I got anxious and left for the mainland with hopes of meeting more peole, playing games, visiting exciting places and maybe even owning some land myself. It has only been about a week now but somehow I feel that 'over-hypped' sensation. Sure there's lots to see and er.. buy but... well, that's it.
It looks as though people set up their homes and then just left them to collect dust. And the shops, Everywhere! Even at the University, the first thing you see when you teleport in is an ATM for slexchange.com, surrounded by stores! The 'classrooms' are just fenced yards and there was no clear sense of direction like a big directory sign or arrows.

I'm teedering in the middle of somehow working up to owning my own land and making something or labeling SL as a virtual version EBay. Much of the land is high priced ($99999999??? - Why bother listing it!) and alot of the ones that are affordable are surrounded by billboards, duplicate stores and ads. Sometimes it seems my only option is to buy an island with real money. I've heard of jobs but there doesn't seem to be a high demand for human employees where all you need is a primative with a script attached.

---*---
My Questions are these:
For those of you who are just joining Second Life, what are your plans for the future? What would you like to contribute to the society?

For the veterans, What are your opinions on the current state of SL? Has your stay been what you've hoped for, and what would you change if you could?
---*---

This game/program/community has the potential to be so much more with the right scripts and models. In my opinion people rely so much on programming that in many cases, there's just no need for a virtual world. What is being done in SL that can't be done with a webpage?

In the long run what I hope to achieve is to create things that people will want to use for both themselves and their friends. I'm sure that is/was the intentions for most of us but I want there to be more usage of the world itself and not just small 'watering holes'. I want everyone to be able to participate and use the creations regardless of income and computer processing power. I want to see more ambience to the locations and make them feel alive, as if people are around all the time, even if we can't see them.

And I want it to be done in the least amount of primatives and cost as it can, while still looking sharp .

- Jolan

A first land can be bought for 512 L$ which makes a nice piece of starter land. Perosonall I skipped it and bought near beach land.. a 1024 for 5k and change

Currently I 'live' or at least my persona lives in a lvoely area, where me and my persona's fiance paid around 10k for a 2048 m2

Going premium mainly gives you 512m2 free tier and you pay for the 500/week stipend with the monthly fee. it's not that much compared to other games (I know one I looked at ran 30/month) and its far less constricting.

If you want a good time just look around, and remember: half the fun of SL (at least to me) is meeting new personas. I love exploring.. check out the teleport rings in Furnation.. just like Stargate ones. Lots of creative minds there too.

Hiyas Jolan! Sounds like you got your first dose of culture shock in SL. There'll be a few more aliong the way. FWIW, 'Dress the dolly (aka your avatar)', 'Play with the Dollhouse' and Junior Achievement (who remembers that one from high school?) all factor in big in SL. Next up comes the <cough> delights <cough> of cybersecks.

So what's the answer? Art as a weapon! Stuck in a neighbourhood full of mind-numbingly suburban builds, indentikit castles or dead-end shops? Build something truly original and stunning that shows up their mediocrity for what it is. Someone built a lagmonster club or mall next to you? Rip your house down and put up a 100-metre high statue of Godzilla bringing down a sledgehammer on the offending build. Or maybe a huge sandworm poised to swallow it up whole. Or maybe go the parody route and start up a 'Clone-O-Mall' loudly proclaiming its wealth of identical retailers that everyone's already seen a bazillion times before so that they'll feel right at home.

The possibilities are endless.

Starting in Second Life is much like coming to a foreign country for a long stay.



What happens to you is largely due to who you are, inside your own head.

Does it matter what you, I, or anyone wants? We can't escape our nature, without changing ourselves inside first. Few bother.

Some people would be geniuses, artisans, wealthy in any place or time (or, stupid, expressionless, and broke I suppose).




Lastly - an old adage about the internet - people come for the tech, but stay for the community. It happens fast.

Eventually you might not care one bit about the latest upgrade, so long as you can still see your dear friends.

I would suggest considering SL as a training ground for whatever future 3D interactive web emerges. You've already learned a few things - although I'd venture the outrageously-priced land is not intended to sell and scripted sales tools are not necessarily the most effective means to connect with consumers.

There are people doing things with SL you can't do with a webpage. Find them.

When you see land set for sale at that price, the owners don't really intend to sell it. They're misusing the 'for sale' list as a means of advertising their businesses.

P2

The only real answer is to take away the option to trade L$ for real money. The day that trading started was the day the fun began to leave SL.

jolan:

you ask if my stay has been all that i had hoped for. and my opinion on the current state of sl.

"This world is a giant nursery full of squabbles over toys and greedy for their dolls and bits of straw and horses made of sticks." Joanna Russ

i am guessing the most enlightened view would be that we should all abandon such a world and seek to find our entertainment where it actually has meaning in our first lives.
the importance of things is where each person decides it is though.

actually, i have been through many changes, as sl has changed. in the beggining when it was small, you could be a ground breaker, start an enterprise no one else had done before you. there were no jobs to seek. now, as you point out, the goods and services are repeated ad nauseum. a year ago i was thinking there is no way a midriff baring shorts outfit can be altered and resold under a new name any longer, it had reached the upper atmosphere and no more changes were possible. i can be wrong obviously.

basically, i had no hopes or aspirations when i first arrived in sl. i had no idea what it was.
then i did find hope, and did aspire to some goals over time and as i reached them i would move on to other things.

i lost a desire for goals, for business. did that. mostly i just want to be amused by sl now. and i find amusement. my little business enterprise amuses me and others who participate in it with me, i hope. i have close friends and we gather at my house or someone elses house and we laugh and port other people in to laugh with and hang out and find new amusements. we rp some and we dont some. i dont shop and dread gifts because i probably have 3 similar items lost in my inventory.

your observation that people seem to build structures then they sit empty is on target. this is a blessing actually. i am surrounded by such structures in my current location and pray it stays that way. low lag being my joy.

really, you have to decide for yourself what is fun in sl. if the sl platform is not amusing you, then there is no point in staying. i am always amazed when someone tells me they are bored in sl. my response is, why are you here then? when i get bored, i turn it off.

right on!

Except, so long as L$ exist and can be traded in-world, you cannot take away that option. At best, LL could "ban" it in the manner of the more usual online games, except - as anyone who's played has found - this does precisely jack.

More than Lindens. So long as any item is transferable the issue exists. Actually, this also applies to any kind of interaction - including Chat.

While I'm not a true "leet" veteran (and my FIC card has been revoked, apparently), I have been around long enough to see the end of Second Life's "innocent" period and the rise of its massive consumerist ethos that runs the little world today.


My takeaway, overall, is it is a neat little experiment. The Lindens, from the getgo, set out to create a virtual world that followed the Snow Crash model to the letter. And, while it succeeds in many interesting ways, it is still far from the world model that I feel will win out in the end.

A large part of that is Linden Lab's existance as a for-profit organization. Their existing model incents them to retain control over a closed architecture and economic system. While that's great for the short-sellers, it's important to realize such a model is discretionary, and easily overtaken, should a better system come into play.


The closed architecture has then led to several growing problems at the backend that, if not addressed, will disallow the Lindens to compete over time.


To whit:

* Closed economy and sales strategy prevents Lindens from packaging and selling server code - except under exclusive NDA or business-related constraints.

* Inability to version the system, due to inability to divest assets outside the model. Content must function on the same "version" of the software throughout, leading to potential breakage with little or no recourse (of scripts, textures, primitive params, etc.)

* Lack of offline components, such as a building tool for prims. For the time being...

* DRM-based permissions system that is obsolete, due to several internal holes and external tools, like GL Intercept/OGLE.

* Inhibitive strategy of "bringing the web into Second Life" as opposed to "bringing Second Life into the web," as evidenced by the current structuring of web prims.

* Centralized asset- and software development model leads to a bottleneck of progress and dated graphics, audio, and physics standards.

* Centralized "Events" browser obsolete to a Google-like model. ROAM Search (an attempt at this) appears to use a dated model analogous to the first web indexers due to lack of Linden hooks...




These are all points that will need to be addressed for the long haul, whether or not they happen in Second Life. My personal opinion is changing all of this would warrant a completely new product. Whether or not the Lindens take that charge remains to be seen.

No, I believe the opposite.... the day L$s were able to be exchanged for real USD $ is the day the fun BEGAN.

SL is a bunch of computers, servers, which are rented by you and me. Even the largest 'land' owner in here only rents the land. In 512 parcels (enough for a tiny home) or much larger (entire HUGE islands using a whole server).

A great interface/control panel allows us the folks who sign up to do a lot of things. And our 'toon' representatives/avatars (godlike humans) have the a great degree of detail that can be varied widely. Great poses abound. For most anything you want to mimic in real life. The scripting language, LSL, is certainly very flexible. Wondrous 'builds' and designs, genius builders and designers make use of it every day!

Yes. We're pretty much on our own. We have a pretty mild TOS/terms of service agreement with the company. But, for the most part, it's a fairly laissez-faire operation. The company who runs the show pretty much let's things go. They do give extra support to folks who buy into the game a bit more than others, but for the most part, it's a pretty fair..'here's your avi..goodbye' type of thing.



Yes. Certainly an entire group is mainly interested in the sensual/the clubs. Many make alternate accounts to visit them, if they think their main account avatar's image would be 'tarnished'. And why not. Many a stuffy professor in RL never gets to go to a club and get down, dirty and be the happier for it.

Yes. With the initial and ongoing advertising about making 'real' money in this SL venue folks became mercantile rabid. And some of those shops/malls are ghost towns. Even the well rendered ones. But some aren't . There are a small, select group of shops, becoming a larger group all the time, of heavily visited shops of extremely well done things. So, the petri dish is getting 'better'.

Recently..well..perhaps this year..the 'game' was plugged as a great place to trial games. Slingo or tringo was one of the games I believe someone actually licensed after he trialed it here. Many more have been tried. Some successfully.

Right now, I believe Alt-zoom Studios is making a movie in SL. Why? Probably to see how it would go. To teach skills that can transition to rl, perhaps.

Teazers University in an entire sim. First Page is the owner. Selaras Partridge runs the classes which are standardized, and teach fun things to do or make here...and that knowledge helps you render or do things with rl programs at times.

SL, you see, is not all that mindless and mercantile and ugly in content.



But I have seen the culture/activities narrow, and the content contracting, not vary, not add, but subtract in diversity. Very unusual for a petri dish given a wholesome medium and open air. Why is this so? Well. The culture of a populaton can be skewed if those you meet, those who introduce you to that group/popuation present a skewed or narrowed perception of it.

You see, SL has grown so rapidly and so quickly that the company actually asks a groups of its customers to pinch hit in a 'live help' group. Mentors are another group that helps newer folk. And the real, paid employees of the company are few, far between and direct you to a more protracted, report-filing type of solution to most any problem. So these volunteers are important..to the company..and to you as a newby. Trust me on this one. IF you ever wish to look cool in front of an SL girlfriend and you have a box on your head 2 seconds before she's arriving you want to call 'live help' not a Linden.

The Live Helpers and Mentors can also belong to a group called Greeters, some being all three. Now, I believe..in payment for their services as a customer service department for Linden Labs, these folk are allowed to hand out notecards pointing out areas of interest to visit in SL to fresh off the boat newbies..sort of like YOU. These notecards quite often direct newer folk to the goods and services, clubs etc, of those helpers and mentors and perhaps their friends. NOT to the some of the better and BEST things to do and see in SL. So, you see. Why wouldn't some poor girl think that all she could do to make money is become an escort for a club, if she's given a notecard filled with BDSM shops and clubs? Why wouldn't someone think that there were only empty malls, if he/she is directed to one? And so the population..that stays..becomes directed in that fashion.

But, in their favor, mentors et al, do not get paid any other way. Just this sandwich board type of advertising in the welcome area. So the scope of the notecards that they hand out may be a bit narrow. Ask them if their are other points of interest besides what's on their cards. If they seem to run in the same vein, the same general area..ie, the greeter mentions MORE clubs, MORE pose ball vendors..look for another greeter. I'm sure the next person will go on and on about their favorite places in a non biased way. But, yes, as an aside, I do think you should try to visit their own personal shops. This is really their only payment for helping you get a box off your head--when the time comes

One note..to the Greeters, Live Helpers, Mentors...those notecards are due you and more, I would think. YOU are more important to SL than you know. Because YOU can sculpt SL better than Starax can sculpt Goliath by EXPANDING on those 'points of interest'. Do you tell folks also about Starax Statosky...one of the best sculptures in Second Life..whose work they should see as a model of the best that can be done in SL. Or just the closest BDSM store. Perhaps the sculptures of Lash Xevious ? Or just the closest club with escorts. Do you give landmarks to Nephilaine's creations..the best couturier in SL..or simply your own? Neil's? Juro's? Lordfly's? Lumiere Noir's Library of Primitives? The falls of Desire Night? Or only a landmark to your recently done mall. If so, you may be skewing the culture. Narrowing it by presenting a skewed and narrow 'welcome'. A narrow view of what is done and CAN be done in SL. But, I'm sure most of you go on and on about the many interesting creators here..and their creations, from Tayzia's Crescent Moon to Jenna's Edge. It's all good. AND it helps to foster diversity in content from the moment the newby flounders into Ahern.

So, yes. Please give Second Life a second chance...the CURRENT current events list and culture is hopefully only temporarily stunted.