Lords and Peasants

Sorry for the slightly off-topic post but I just returned home to find that my slaves have somehow managed to unbolt their sewing machines from the tables in my underground lab. If you see a couple dozen people wandering around in a daze, acting as if the sunlight is burning their eyes, who have sewing machines chained to their legs, please let me know. Thanks!

How on earth do they sew with no arms!!!???

Who cares as long as they make quota?!

No, computer games let you do what you want. No individual game lets you do whatever you want, but each individual one lets you do something and you get to choose which game to play. If you want to be a soldier, you play Battlefield 2. If you want to be a king, you play Civilisation.

And yes, investing time and effort equals eventual rewards, but the time and effort in most games is spent doing the thing that you wanted to do and that the game as about. In SL, unless your actual goal is to make money or to be a successful content creator, you're going to wind up having to do something else to earn the L$ to support what you actually want to do. It's like what Battlefield 2 would be like if before you could start playing the actual game, you had to spend five days active play time clicking the mouse to do press-ups in boot camp. Well, actually it isn't, because that doesn't require you to go learn a different real-world skill. It's like what Battlefield 2 would be like if before you could start you had to write an essay on the horrors of war and send it to be marked by EA. Saying that that's the same as ordinary Battlefield 2 because you would have had to spend time and effort learning tactics and practicing your aim just seems way out there to me.

And yes, even the "low level grind" in EQ is part of what you sign up for the game to do.



Well, people do use the word "born" interchangably and I assume that those using it here were using it that way. And I think that "all the people successful in SL were talented before they joined SL" is a lot closer to what a new player is likely to feel than "all the people successful in SL were born talented". Also, as was pointed out elsewhere, Linden Labs on their own page say that you have to already be a content creator before you start. (Check it! I didn't realise, but it says "If you are a 3D content creator... then..", presumably talking about you at the time you're reading the page, ie, before you join. It says nothing about learning the skills in-game.)

You don't happen to live ... in a van, down by the river ... do you?!

I find Enabran to be largely correct with regard to success here, and furthermore - I find Second Life to be a relatively 'transparent' environment.


What I mean by 'transparent': it is obvious how to succeed on your own terms.

A *non-transparent* road to success may be found in a world such as Lineage II.

No matter how much money spent, or hours played, you are *not* going to gain the Throne of Aden without a singular quality: Leadership.

Leadership: an elusive, rare thing among men by its very definition. Second Life is by far a lush garden of opportunity, compared to other worlds.


Humble Peasant,

- Desmond Shang

*note I said peasant, not 'farmer'

Yes, but in a good, Lewis-Black-Sorta frusterated WHY WON'T YOU WAKE THE !@#$! UP!?!sorta way, man...

God, that's exactly it. This subject inspires in me the vein-pulsing, exhausting rage that Lewis Black so successfully channels into teh funnay. I can squeeze no funnay out of it except in person, however.

I can't tell you the number of times I read something here about (edit) success "being too hard for people" and want to scream "Why don't you get it, you imbecile?!" Nothing else can generate that frustration in me while reading these forums.

/me offers to test that theory, see if it currently applies ...

*blush*

Some things are too hard for some people.

Then, too, some things are harder for some people than they are for others, but they are motivated to do it anyway.

Sometimes, though, the thing is just really too hard to be worth it.

coco

Then there's always World of Warcraft.

edit: or TSO.

So true. But the motivation of some of us to address these varying needs is the desire to increase the population.

coco

Address them how?

I just like to practice at that.

To give them more things to do and more reasons to be here than those things which might be too hard.

coco

What things? What reasons?

From whom?

At what cost?

To whom?

It isn't at all.

If your terms of success are not in terms of becoming a content creator, then there seems to be an impossible wedge between:

a) not using the graphical environment and doing everything in IM, thus wasting all the point of being in SL;
b) using the graphical environment, but this requiring so many L$ and so much work to do anything that - especially if you have an RL job - there is no time left afterwards to actually do the thing you wanted to do.

I at least don't see any thing wrong with people who don't want to create stuff. I'm firmly in the do what you want in SL. My objection is to people who say that content creators are "keeping the peasants" down.

On the second point, not everyone creates for others. Happy is the person who creates stuff for themselves for their own amusement, pleasure whatever.

More entertainment and more ways to be productive.

Out of Enabran's personal Linden bank account.

coco

No, really, in all seriousness.

How?

You tell me, Enabran.

coco

I refuse to be classified!

"This, for example, goes under 'H' for 'toy'...."

I don't need to. It's not a problem I think needs solving.

Just thought I should point this:

Peasants and lords.. arent the peasants the one who used to do all the work, where as the lords did nothing but live on their backs, doing nothing at all?

So far it seems like the "lords" that the poster have tried to point out are actually doing most of the work - much more then the supposed "peasents".

Just an amusing point to concider.

Quite being so evasive Enabran. You should always offer solutions to problems that you don't believe exist. *Hands on hips* *Hrrrrmph!*