What's the point to all this?

I think many of us that have been around SL for awhile have hit slumps in intrest or creativity or whatever our particular thing is. I know I have. I recently took a bit of break limiting my time here to managing business issues for about an hour a day and then heading off to RL or another game. After about 3 weeks I was full of new ideas and desires to create my SL world.

Other times all it took was a bit of a walk/fly/drive around the mainland to see something that peaked my curiosity and got me going again.

SL is what each individual makes it. I can honestly say I was in SL a good 6 months before I had a clue what it was for me.

Hello Zoe...

In real life, we need to eat food and sleep, in order to maintain our health. How about in SL, having some kind of nurturing process, in that, our Avatars have to occasionally eat some food...? or have a proper snooze?

If we had to maintain or Avatars in that sense, it would open a whole new market for work too!... people could open restaurants or hamburger stalls, where different amounts of nutritional value could be placed on different food products. You could go and have lunch with your buddies, not because you want to, but because you HAVE to eat... and in the process, have a little social gathering and chat over a nice meal... a sense of purpose... character maintenance.

Do you understand what i'm saying?

I've had an idea... ok, forget about the whole 'adventure' thing... why not have the 'quest' as something as simple as maintaining a healthy Avatar? We spend so much time making our Avatars look good... why not take that one step further and introduce Avatar health? You have to eat... if you eat too much you get fat... you go to the gym or do some bike riding to lose weight... obviously, if you're Gorean or of another 'group type'(...sorry, couldn't think of how to classify different types of people in SL) you'd have some kind of physical thing more applicable to that 'role'... maybe horse riding or something. These simple things could also create opportunities and open doors for people who want to create new places for people to go to, rather than the endless stream of clothes shops etc...

Good huh?

... Good point.

84

The lack built-in goals is what keeps me coming back. I have a hard time taking orders from anyone so SL is perfect for me. I log in and do whatever I want, and I can still be part of the game/place, even though I'm not on some predetermined quest.

And making things is addictive for me, so I spend a lot of time in world.

It took me a while to get into SL; for the first couple of months I logged in, looked around builds, played with some clothes, bought a bit of stuff and then gradually started to log in less and less.

It was only when I found two things - a creative area that I enjoyed and was reasonably good at (scripting) which allowed me to change the world around me, and also a persona for myself which allowed my own goals to develop organically, that the addiction started.

I've said before that I've been in moods where I really don't want to be self-directed and I'd rather that there was some sort of challenge for me that wasn't set by myself, but to be honest, those moods don't come very often, don't last very long and one can always log off and do something else.

On any given night, there are 5000-6000 people logged in at the same time. Given that most people don't live in SL 24/7, if I had to guess I would say the current "active" userbase is probably between 30,000 and 40,000...

- Jon

I think there's a lot of very interesting questions in this area!

The basis of "quests", in most current games, is "you don't get to do what you want to right away, you have to do something else first". SL in a sense does have this - you have to make things to match what you want to do, and/or earn money and then wait for someone else to make those things, before you can do things. Part of the stigma attached to buying L$ on LindeX - and yes, there is one, especially amongst newer players - is that it bypasses part of this.

What I find interesting was an aside in the OP, where he commented that there were many things he had done but that he found them boring because no-one else was involved in them. I think this is getting far closer to the actual situation, that the difficulty in making the experience of SL being more than a graphical talker for users is not so much about providing extra facilities but about creating more reasons to be social. Casino games and cybersex are both innately social but riding around on a dragon, for instance, isn't.

In traditional online games, non-social activites (ie, killing goblins) have a social effect because they make you level up which then "automatically" gets you social value and respect from other players because you are more useful to have in a party. I know people feel very strongly, and with good justification, that SL should not be changed to allow players to "fake success", but in that case we need something else to draw people closer together, to mean that even activities beyond hanging out and chatting can become socially interesting the same way killing goblins can be.

And thats where many 'don't get' Second Life.

It's not a 'we need something... I dunno what but a vaguish notion -- lindens DO THIS NOW!'

It's 'we need something - hmm what can it be? - Oh I think it's THIS' and then YOU MAKE IT.

It's our world - we make the the things we need - if you need something to draw people together socially - work out what that thing is and make it happen with the tools available.

if the available tools are insufficient - THEN you petition the Lindens with your requests to make it happen.

And then, you are free to reap the rewards from your creation - whatever those rewards may be.

This is why things such as Neuterbergerville or whatever it is moderately successfull, whereas the voted request for a 'bill of rights' fell in a screaming heap.

One was created the other was requested..

One must first become the prim before a purpose becomes clear.

But this is the problem. It's the very fact that content in SL is resident created, that stops this from happening. If anyone creates a social system in SL then anyone who gets involved in it knows that the creator has a unique special status within that system. And maybe they don't to be in a system where someone else has that, maybe they'd rather have that unique special status for themselves, so they try to create their own social system too, but then that has the same problem and people get spread thinner and thinner. You can see this really happening with the huge number of clubs on the SL grid, but it happens in other areas too, including some role-playing areas.

This doesn't happen on most MMO games. If you are playing Minerva in SL then you know that somewhere there is someone in charge of Minerva and that you are "under" them - and have put yourself there by choice - by playing Minerva. But people who play WoW, for example, don't feel that with respect to Blizzard, because the creators of the game are outside the in-game social sphere. Some people don't want to rent land in Dreamland because they don't like the idea of having to follow Anshe's rules, but they have no problem owning say an apartment on Anarchy Online where Funcom decides every single thing you can have in your apartment (no editor!), because Funcom aren't part of the game.

Sounds like Second Life just isn't for you.

What is the point of the canvas? Of the ink and the papyrus? The point of the typewriter and the page? The telephone and the signal? The hypertext markup and the browser?

What's the point of any of it?

The point is that it is whatever you make of it. If you want artificial objectives provided by someone who isn't you, they'll probably be able to help you over at World of Warcraft. SL isn't about that -- it's about collaboration, creation and socialization, plus all of the related commerce that has historically followed those three concepts. If none of that is important to you, SL isn't really your thing.

And that's okay. Best of luck to you.



Only in the bizarro mirror world inhabited exclusively by yourself.

I don't know why you think that, Enabran. In my time around SL, with both new and old folks, I have seen numerous attacks or slights at people who buy L$. On this very forum I have seen people post things like "People without talent go here: <LindeX buy page>". When newbies have said that they want to "become successful and own land", and I point out they can own land anytime they like if they buy L$ and are prepared to tier, and will probably have more fun if they get to what they want to do instead of feeling they have to "earn" it first - the most common reactions are along the lines of "yeah, right". And I got attacked by several people in the newbie sandbox just for mentioning I was a Premium member - "can't you just earn the money?"

It might not line up with what you've experienced, but I'm sure SL is big enough that we can both have different, valid experiences.

Where are you meeting such retarded people?

(Maybe they end up in the teen grid before I can get to meet them?)

I've never met any of these people either or, for that matter, seen them on the forums that I can remember.

So then you MAKE YOUR OWN!... where you see the roadblock I see the path diverged in the woods.

Second Life and most other games like EQ are fundamentally different in the same ways MUDS and MOO's were in the days of text gaming.

One has content made by admin - the other has content made by residents.

BTW the Neuterburger Project or whatever it is is a social system where the creators DON'T have a unique and special place - unless its being recognised as being the creators.

The tools are there for you to make you 'life quests' and 'eat food' and 'go potty' if you like - this is not something needed to be changed in SecondLife - it's something you need to create if you want to do it.

Here's your big moment I guess - here is a perfectly valid project that it seems other people are interested in... Heres your path diverging in those wood Yumi.

The question is - do you take the road less travelled, or do you turn around and go home kicking the dirt that someone needs to give you a map?

Your choice - your world - your imagination.

That's a very good metaphor! The more times the path diverges in the woods, the more total paths there are.. and the less people there are going to be, going down each of those paths.

Those systems in MMORPGs don't just give people things to do, they let people depend on each other, or be better than each other, and I think that's the really important bit. It's not just that you get to be level 10, it's that you get to be level 10 when I'm only level 2.

You can't do that in SL. You can't shift the natural order. I say you need me to craft food for your avatar.. but you just detach the Food Game Box and then you don't any more. But then, you tell me how much land you own tier-free from sales... and I can't detach anything to make that irrelevant.

And why would you want to attach the Food Game Box in the first place? "Well, I could work for ages to make myself a better chef.. but that person who made the game, they can just create whatever food they like anytime, so why bother? Better spend the time making my own box so that I can do that too."

If you make the "subgame" voluntary nobody but the winners will want to play, and nobody but a Linden could make it involuntary.

It's no coincidence that some of the biggest areas of popularity on SL are clubbing and beauty contests (where you can "fake success" since your av can look better than you do irl), and Gorean/BDSM (where "being better than someone else" is explicitly defined as an aspect of the society); nor that making money (the coded-in "better than others" scale) is defined as success so much by new players.

*Bows down before the Master*
(Pun intended)

(Didn't catch the pun)

Hehe... get to know David.

Well, my quest is reproducing all the text-mode stuff I've created for the text-based precursors to Second Life... in 3d.

Which is going to be tough, because it includes things like a home built in a giant genetically engineered redwood grown around a comet in the Oort Cloud. Complete with realistic 2% microgravity. It includes things like a machine that sucks people in and converts them temporarily into otters. It includes an avatar that's sometimes a meteor crater, sometimes a babbage engine, and sometimes a pack of alien animals that form a group mind. It includes a literally physical path through hyperspace that you can walk along, with inhabited planets threaded on it like pearls. It includes a Lyfstrom Loop launch system, an orbital tether, a lunar colony built into the wall of a rille, and a shack in free-fall built from remnants of Space Station Freedom and recycled Space Shuttle external tanks. It includes a Bussard Ramjet crewed by group-minded aliens linked through a space-time infundibulum to its own abandoned self five thousand years downtime, and populated by a bunch of computer modules teetering on the brink of self-awareness. It includes, well, lots of stuff.

I do that, except for the particular cockamamie subplot I pick. One day I was a giant robot looking for someone named Yngvie.

....and each of those paths lead to success for those with the tenacity to explore them.

I'm snipping the rest because it's the usual 'woah is me someone else do it all for me' that I've pretty much come to expect.

... so your answer is 'two paths diverge in the woods - I stayed at home and waited for the DVD'

In a nutshell - you either don't get Second Life, or, perhaps it just fun for you to sit at home with your head in your hands.. any shred of sympathy I had for you and your plight has pretty much evaporated.

If you want that in SL - you should create it - but that takes time and effort better channeled into whining.

What kind of success do you mean?

It is surely obvious that the less people go down a path, the less potential for social success that path offers.

Ok lets go back to the top - you say that 'we' need 'subgames' like avatar health etc blah blah blah for 'social success'

I say - no 'we' certainly don't need such thing - but people who would like them - have the tools to create them... in previous threads you've also said 'there is nothing to create' well here's your chance.

You say 'if they aren't MANDATORY noone will do them! and thus only the Lindens should make such things' I say - 'Bullshit' if such things are by choice only those wishing to do them will participate.

If you were to make something that other people enjoy - people who enjoy the same things as you will go to it - and you will enjoy it together.

Is that not social success? Finding of like minding people - acceptance by your peers - and perhaps being acknowleged for you the things you bring to the world and to more importantly to your circle of friends?

Here is your 'ideal project' slapping you in the face - the 'new thing' that others aren't doing - and looksee, here are a bunch of people wanting to do the same thing as you (admittedly they aren't saying '*WE* need this' rather 'wouldn't it be cool if.....').

Balls in your court - you can actually do something about it or watch it slide by - either way the decision is yours, either way if I come back next week to another of your 'Eeyore style' posts I think we can pretty much say the problem is with you and not Second Life.


You can sit back and bemoan the world - I'm out there trailblazing, and with every new trail I uncover - every new thing I discover and create - the happier I will be, and the happier will be the people I create and explore for.

I'll send you the DVD.