Lords and Peasants

You tacitly assume that any skill can be learned by anyone given enough time and effort. Although that is a nice thing to believe, real evidence suggests that it isn't true.

And holding them back? I don't think it's quite that. I think it's the case that a new player doesn't really see SL as a group of people contributing and sharing things. Instead, they see it as a single experience that they can choose to have or not to have. So when they say it's unfair that they have to pay money for cool stuff, they don't mean that you should give your stuff away for free because they don't yet see enough of the game to seperate you as an individual from "the SL experience" as a whole. Instead, they're asking why they should buy into an experience that's going to make them feel like a loser.



No, the majority of complaints that I see seem to be either that:

a) they feel they are entitled to do what they wish in SL as they would be in any other computer game because they have not yet percieved the full nature of SL, or don't care to percieve it; or
b) (the "FIC" argument) they feel discriminated against because they are being required to compete against others who have advantages that they cannot gain directly by any amount of their own effort (although they may be able to do so indirectly, but that's too unreliable a process).

(Edit: Incidentally, it's also not true to say that "the successful ones are not born with their skills". Aimee Weber was born in Jan 2004 and, according to an interview with her, was creating clothes the same month and opened Preen in the Feb. So yes, effectively she was.)

My success or failure is my responsibility and no one else's. My risk and my reward belong to me. It has always been this way.

The rich get richer? Nonsense. Success isn't a captured bird that sings perpetually. Success is a seed that must be planted, a tree that must be nurtured. You cannot harvest its fruits without wetting its soil and keeping it free of weeds each day and each week.

In my days of hardest work, I brought in enough to pay RL rent. Today, with life taken up with a new job and other responsibilities, I pay some tier and the cable bill. If I don't get new product out the door, in six months I'll barely even cover tier. If that happens, it's not because Marcos ran me out of the robot market and stole my revenues. It's because I didn't provide consistent work and reliable output. It's my fault when I fail and no one else's.

The rich get richer? Only when the rich work harder.

Business is an organism that lives or dies on its ability to satisfy need and provide value. What is valuable? What is needed? These things change every single day. Working to meet those changes isn't easy or quick work.

Life is so very simple when you accept personal responsibilty. These discussions are not about Second Life, about Lordship or even about inflation and stipends. These are ages old discussions of personal responsibility.

Get yours.

What a depressing worldview.

I played EQ for five years. I had to work up in levels to be able to kill the top mobs. Anyone who says there is nothing you have to learn and work at in most computer games is fooling themselves. No one starts at level one being able to kill the top creatures.

And I'm not picking on you. I have seen this argument before. It bothers me and it just doesn't hold water for me because of what I stated above.

This is a testament to my gumption and enthusiasm, not evidence that I was born with skills. My clothing looked like a horse's ass back then. Anybody could have done the same quality work on their first week. It took nearly 2 years of dedication before I reached my current skill level.

One other thing you have to rememeber is that when I started making clothing in SL, there were already well established designers who got featured on the the SL website and enjoyed the media spotlight. I saw them as inspiration rather than obstacles. I still do.

Have you read the "what is second life" page recently?

"Adventure in castles, space stations, dungeons, Wild West towns, and cities in the sky—virtually everything from the infinite universe of the imagination. Travel on foot, or by planes, trains, and flying saucers; gondolas, fuel-injected muscle cars, mechanical unicorns, fearsome gun ships, giant snails, smog-belching mech robots, stardust-powered magic broomsticks—or on your own power, with the innate ability that all Residents have, to teleport and fly at will. Alter your character’s appearance to look like anything - an imaginary superhero, a mythical monster, or your own mirror image."

Now, if you saw this on the back cover of a computer game box sitting on a store shelf, would you expect to be told, on buying the game, that you couldn't do any of these things - not that you couldn't do all of them yet, but but that you couldn't do any at all - unless you paid more money, or went into business competing against people with far more experience?

"But SL access is free". Sure, but again, if you download a free demo of Diablo, you expect to get to play Diablo for a few levels worth - not to walk around a landscape getting killed, unable to do anything, because you have to pay for the full version to get armor and a sword!

If you start to see SL as a community then it all makes sense, but most people aren't going to see it that way at first blush, and LL aren't selling it that way. So yes, most newbies are going to have some sense of entitlement.

According to your interview, people saw you wearing it and asked to buy it, which was why you set up a store. I doubt very much that there were many people who were really keen to pay to look like horse's asses.

t's alright to admit that you have talent. You are allowed, you know.

You have to remember that with the fashion at the time, a horse's ass was "the new black"

The only thing you're not entitled to as a paying SL player is stuff made by other players. That is pretty different from other games.

Yes, true, but you miss out an important point...

... levelling is done by doing the things you signed up for EQ to do.

You want to kill monsters? You kill monsters, then you level up.

In SL, some people probably come here wanting to make money - cool. Some people might come here wanting to do something that makes you money, like being a fashion designer or being a programmer - cool.

But what if someone comes here wanting to do the kind of stuff they talk about above? What if someone wants to come here, for example, to role-play being a superhero? They can't do it unless they go and do other stuff first, stuff that costs money or takes a lot of time and effort. And given that they'll have to find a group of people who'll support that role-play anyway, they've got the choice of either doing all that other stuff or spending money, or simply contracting with the group to ignore the graphical side of SL and do everything textually. And the more work that's needed to compete, and the more money that's needed to make it worthwhile doing something graphically, the more people are going to choose the second option.

Well, exactly. And now, fashion has advanced, so no-one else can do that.

And guess who's one of the people who's caused that to happen to fashion? You.

That's where they "they're holding us back" argument comes from.

(Tries to put in enough smilies to indicate she's trying to be wry about this instead of offensive.)

<--- This is my angry emoticon eating your wry emoticon *SMUNCH*

BWHAHAHA!! *goes off to kill a bunch of Lindens to level up*

Sometimes people take things too seriously. Remember too, everyone has a differing opinion on what makes SL their service they like offered to them. I use sl to curb my gaming habits and to help me control my urge to pay for play games. SL is my major free addiction, like I told the populace. Day i settle down in sl with land and store is day i renounce my video gaming addictions. But that'll prolly never happen cuz sl is another vid game for me

Alright, alright.

But it's something I've seen mentioned before. Because SL is a capitalism, standards of life for the general population tend to rise over time. However, because SL doesn't have inheritance (or at least, because it can be limited via "no transfer", the standards for newly born residents don't rise. In fact, they effectively fall, because the society's expectations compensate for the rising standards while the standards for newbies stay the same. Before anyone made their first custom item, you could go to the biggest party in world wearing the default avatar and nobody would complain or single you out.

I came here and made my Kamen Rider V3 avatar for $10L. I did upload 2 or 3 sound files also; so that was $30L. I dont see the big deal.

Let me know when the First Lord gets a shoe deal.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=6992

Yeah but before you can kill the monsters you want to kill, you have to start small. Same way in SL. Unless you are saying that levelling up in EQ doesn't take a lot of time and effort????

Actually, it is true. There's a wonderful book which I'd highly recommend you read called "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". One of the things the author ponts out is that virtually all young children draw with the same ability. In fact, from a compositional standpoint, the drawings of most toddlers are equally as "good" as those of accomplished masters. Obviously, the technique of a 2-year old is not going to rival that of a learned artist, but the sense of composition is there, and so is the potential to learn technique. It's something we're all born with.

As we get older, we tend to focus our attentions on specific tasks. Those who continue in the arts retain the knowledge of how to tap into the ability. Those who focus on other things tend to lose touch with the ability, but it is still there. With training, there's not a person on the planet who cannot rediscover it. It's hard-wired into our brains on a very fundamental level, and all it needs is exercise in order to function.

Were artistic ability not something that we all share, none of us would be able to recognize it in others. Every single person in the world can look at a line drawing of a face, for example, and know that it's a face. How is that possible? If you really think about it, 2-dimensional smears of graphite on a sheet of cellulose do not resemble a human face in the slightest, yet each of us instantly makes the association that it does. This is because we are all pre-programmed to make such recognitions. It's one of the fundamental things that makes us human. Without it, we would not be what we are.

The author of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" has had tremendous success teaching millions of people (that's right, millions) who never thought they had any artistic ability how to draw. My own mother learned to draw by reading the book when she was well into her 50's after not having drawn anything since childhood. Once again, everyone has the latent ability. It's simply a question of activiating certain parts of the brain through exercise and learning to have conscious control over them through practice. That's it.


If someone believes SL "makes them feel like a loser," I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that they felt that way long before they ever encountered SL, and they'll continue to feel that way long after they leave it. I'd also be willing to bet that every time it happens, they blame it on some external experience that they happen to be encountering at the moment. Self image, self esteem, and self confidence come from within, not from outside. People who don't accept that will always feel like losers.

It's a bit like those parents in the 80's who blamed their son's suicide on Ozzy Osbourne and tried to sue him over it instead of looking inward and facing whatever the real cause might have been. Never mind that the kid also listened to The Beatles and Beethoven. There's one song on one album among the hundreds that he owned that has the word suicide in the title. Never mind that the song itself isn't even about suicide. It's easier to blame someone or something else for our problems than to blame ourselves, so let's do that. Please.



First of all, I've been a gamer since Pong, and I'm not aware of ANY computer game (or even any non-computer game) that lets you do whatever you want. The nature of games is that investing time and effort equals eventual rewards, and that to succeed one must adhere to a set of restrictions. That's why it's a GAME.

Anyway, as for some people not perceiving SL's nature, I would agree. I think the majority of people wander around for the first few days going, "Okay, what do I do in here?" The absense of externally imposed goals is something that is pretty unique to SL, especially from the perspective of those who are used to gaming. In a game, the player is told right from the start, your purpose here is this. To achieve this, you have to do that, so go do that.

In SL, however, defining purpose is up to the individual. That can be a little overwhelming at first. Those who find a purpose, whatever it may be, stick around. Those who don't end up leaving, which is sad.


I'll agree with you that many people unfortunately see it that way, but I must point out once again that that vision is flawed. There's not a single person who can't learn to do anything they want to do if they have the desire and the will.


You're kidding, right? You can't honestly be implying that someone's SL join date and their RL birth date are the same, can you? Coming into SL with experience gained elsewhere is hardly the same thing as being born with some kind of advantage over anyone else. Aimee is talented, and clearly she had been developing that talent before she got here. So what? That in no way means that somone who hasn't been using their natural abilities can't start now. As I said before, "it's never too late to be what you might have been."

Ok, let me say this.

I am one of those "shopping is an art" people.

I was in the newbie area and saw someone with a cute outfit, so I asked where she got it.

Turns out it was some freebie things thrown in with a shirt she made.

This was less than a week ago.

The truth of the matter is that if you're willing to work at it, you can make it. Sure, it's gonna take a while, just like in any online game/platform.

Every store starts with one thing, and it's never the best thing out there, but if you don't start with one thing, then you start with no thing and no thing get you both no where and no bling bling ca-ching.

So start something.

Why is there such eagerness in Second Life to make assumptions about how and where we all fit in in relation to everybody else on the grid. I've been sorted, slotted, labeled, pigeonholed, classed, cataloged, categorized and compartmentalized so often since I've started here it makes my head spin.

It's just another thinly veiled form of bigotry and class hatred perpetuated by ignorant people. No one ever fits neatly into the boxes people try to put them in. It's just an attempt to marginalize people, and it says more about the person doing the classifying than it does the people it is used against,

omg ur a fic!!!!1

Yup, gets old doesn't it? Funnily enough, this didn't go on to the extent it does now for most of the history of SL. It's a relatively new phenomenon that has popped up in the past ten to twelve months. I am going to think on the whys and wherefores of this before trying to formulate a hypothese(s) as to what is causing this.

I will say this however. I must always give pause and wonder about the folks who spend exorbitant amounts of time trying to convince others of the "unfairness" of it all. Wouldn't that time be better spent learning a skill(s) that would enable one's self to be at least semi-successful in SL?

I came to SL with no Photoshop skills, and my building skills were TSO and The Sims level - which is nothing compared to what they are now. I taught myself Photoshop because of SL, and I keep discovering new things about it all the time. I had never done 3d modeling before, yet that is my forte in SL, and I have been told I am pretty damned good at it.

I was one of those people who always told myself, rather forlornly, my entire life, "I am just not artistic." Yet SL has unlocked the artist in me. For that I am very happy and grateful. I have family members and friends who are gifted artists and musicians, and now finally I have something I can use to bring my own artistic abilities to the surface.

Just. Do. It.

SWOOSH!

I think the whole analogy of Lords/Peasants is just wrongly stated at the beginning of this thread. Lords and peasants inherited their status by right of birth (or wrong of birth?) Lords did not work at all if possible, peasants knew nothing else and they could NEVER have leveled up to the Lord status no matter how much money they made or time and effort and talent they put into it unless a lot of lying, cheating and deception was involved, and even then they could be put to death for trying to leap from common peasant status to Lord/Lady status, right?

I started in April, bought Lindens, bought a custom made house, a few nice skins, the clothes, the hair, the bling, etc...I don't sit around and complain that anything is owed me. If I want it, I pay for it. I support content creators and land barons and explore great builds in SL. Sometimes I write, but I didn't come to SL to have a second job or try to earn money. I own a club with my partner and we entertain guests quite a lot, not to earn money or dwell, but because we like to socialize and meet new people. My partner likes to be outspoken in forums, while I go there to window shop. We've invested in our lifestyle in SL, but we don't have to work at maintaining it...

Both of us posses rudimentary building skills. We can alter an open source script when it needs doing. We can texture and upload music and make our own gestures and give new residents advice on anything from where to get great freebies to how to buy first land...

Where is the category for us? No, don't answer. We don't like being categorized either