Lost In The Crowd: The Trouble With Group Experiences

Last week I was at a large group event that was so crowded, I ended up feeling alone.  I took this screenshot during the height of in-world celebration over Barack Obama's victory, with nearly 50-60 avatars around me. Even if it wasn't a lag-fest, it would still be a sensory/interactive overload: a firehose of text chat, a cacophony of VOIP voices, and a forest of avatars with their names bobbing over their heads.  So not only was coherent group conversation impossible, meaningful person-to-person conversation was insurmountably difficult, too.  People would send me Instant Messages, but it'd take me minutes of searching even to locate the avatar who contacted me.  Trying to contact someone was about as unfeasible, because when I tried to click on them, I'd wind up clicking someone else who stood between us.

Of course, if we were in a larger space, and avatars were more widely dispersed-- seating still in an auditorium, for example-- all this would be less of a problem.  But then, that would also detract from the thrill of being in a teeming sea of people.  Last month we speculated that it was crucial to Second Life's growth that the technical limitations of the large group event were improved.  Thinking more about the actual experience, now I'm not so sure. Barring an audience context, where the group is focused on a stage or another isolated spot, I'd say the optimal number of avatars you want in a single contiguous space is somewhere around 12-20.

Comments

[Pavig Lok]

These events are easy to deal with, just turn "show names" in general preferences to "show temporarily", turn off bubble chat, open up a local chat window, and mute anyone who repeatedly yells "HOOOOOO!". :P

I don't think feeling lost amongst a crowd of sixty Obama supporters celebrating is a technical failure of the UI - communication would probably be quite difficult under those circumstances in real life as well. Large groups self organize based around learned politeness patterns and I've seen fairly large groups in SL with a central focus and no real communication problems. Mad party celebrations though.. well that's something different.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

At these events, I typically go into IRC mode - just open the chat history window, and ignore the graphics. You can also hit Cntrl+Alt+1 through 0, and turn off all rendering for the full IRC experience in SL! :)

[Tateru Nino]

Actually the viewer won't show you more than the closest 30, even if there are more than that.

[Richard Meiklejohn]

Hurrah! I've felt like a lone voice saying exactly this for some time. Everytime I've attended any large event I've had similar experiences, and yet still the push for more people in one place goes on. I think it would be nice to have a controllable cone-of-silence whose radius we could control to limit the chat and voice. But overall I agree with you that 12-20 is maximum for a useful social experience. 'Events' might be the one virtual experience that would benefit from sharding. Effectively at any normal RL event with a large crowd, you are limited severely in terms of the number of folk you can interact with.

[Mitch Wagner]

Mute anyone who repeatedly goes "HOOOO!" Heh. I love that.

Is there a setting in the SL client to shut off audio gesturing sounds? If not, there should be -- near the top of my feature wishlist for the SL client.

Although if such a thing did exist, and if I used it, I'd've missed out on hearing the speech gestures of lines of dialogue from "Airplane."

[xyryx Simca]

Right! Sounds like the parcel size was too small for proper avatar textchat limits to aid conversation. At the last BurningLife there was the Philip/Rangers interview in which they limited the # of avatars to 20 on the sim. The BurningMan Rangers thought that their interview was not attracting much interest compared to those sims surrounding theirs.Actually, the Linden preset the limits so that the interview would go off w/o a hitch..resulted in many expectant avatars camming in from the surrounding sims. Similar issue to today's Connected Health sim for AMIA2008 Symposium where there were no valid sims abutting the Connected Health sim. I think!Different solutions for similar scenarios.
=)

[Caliburn Susanto]

@Mitch: Before you go to any club or raucous event turn off Sound Effects (same area in the lower right side of the client where the music/media adjustments are).

Thereafter you won't hear any Hoooo!ing or YeeHawwww!ing or ass spanking other various and assorted obnoxious and idiotic outbursts ... just the music. Sweeeet.

Also, go to the General tab and turn off all tags and names. You don't even need them on temporarily, as mentioned above, since a Resident's name appears when you hover your mouse point over him/her.

Lastly, turn your draw distance all the way down to minimum (64), and reduce particles to 1024.

Peace and quiet and practically zero client-side lag. Ahhhhhhhh.

[Doreen Garrigus]

Caliburn, that is the most useful information I have gotten recently. Thank you.

[Mitch Wagner]

Thanks for the tip, Caliburn.

I still haven't entirely grokked the Zen of tags and names -- I leave them on most of the time. However, when I'm in a crowd the nametags are just clutter -- you can't tell which tag goes with which avatar -- so it's a good idea to just turn them off and enjoy the scenery.

Mitch Wagner