Teleportation, Infinite Space, the Web Marketplace & Other Core Second Life Features Are Stymieing SL's Growth (Comment of the Week)

There's been much interesting reader response to my interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager, but this one from "EmptyEyes" intrigued me most -- pointing to core problems that are hurting Second Life user growth/retention, but are core features embedded within the platform: 

Second Life's social stagnation is representative of fundamentally how the game works and the culture that it exists in. 

Teleportation is the anathema of local communities forming near each other.

IMs encourage private conversations which leads to a quiet world.

Infinite space fractures groups, as people spread out away from each other to get their own small domains completely outside of others interference.

The [online] Marketplace means that there's pretty much no reason to be present to shop in-world.

These all end up having second and third order consequences that are also produce negative social outcomes. For instance, the activities in Second Life are building, character customization, talking, shopping, NSFW, sightseeing, and games. Because of the above reasons only shopping, character customization, and NSFW provide experiences better than or on par with other modern games. Pushing people towards these experiences and away from the others, making them feel empty. That emptiness reinforces itself forward.

Also to be clear, I'm not saying that I don't like these things, lord knows shopping and NSFW are single handedly holding what exists together. I'm just saying that they encourage isolation and anti-social tendencies. Which I don't know how a mobile client and a trust and safety team are going to fix.

Notably, argues EmptyEyes, the isolation and anti-social can't just be solved only by focusing on the mobile app for user growth (Oberwager) -- more is needed:

[N]o shade on Bradford, these are just my impressions based on his comments about making changes for the long term -- this seems like chasing a dragon of short term user growth (which is better than short term monetary growth) instead of introspecting the social dynamics of SL and engineering fixes or making policy changes to correct them.

SL is a deeply social game, just like EVE Online hires economists to ensure their markets are rock solid, SL should be hiring sociologists, psychologists, and MMO designers that focus on community building in games to ensure that its social environment and perception is rock solid.

Strong agreement with the last point, and much of the preceding. As I discuss in my book, the core challenge is ambiguity as to whether Second Life is more like a game world, or a fully open-ended platform. If it's a game, Linden Lab can (and should) add constraints to make SL feel more immersively world-like.

Relatedly, I think there's some relatively easy fixes to some of the problems EmptyEyes mentions. For instance, add a small L$ charge to teleporting, and bring back free-to-use telehubs that are available across the mainland, and an option for sim owners. That would subtly encourage players to walk/fly/ride in vehicles and socialize more.  

Image from Cajsa's post on Lola Ghost.

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Comments

[Luther Weymann]

Charge to teleport? I sat here and belly-laughed at that one. Who are these people?

[sirhc desantis]

Fascinating. Another 'user' that dare not speak its name (there are two 'emptyeyes' blank profiles in world - nuff said).

Lets see now - today I have worked on a few projects, added stuff to MP that also goes in to the inworld shop, had a quick drive round a new place a friend told me about and may just fit in a bit of a dance with people (gosh in a place that new users go to as well) to listen to a few tunes.

Oh look. More or less what I have been doing for 17 years..Not as much cowbell these days but still.

So its just another one wanting to force us in to 'communities' do me a lemon. They will be pushing for us all logging in to the Nexus next. There are thousands of disparate looseknit groupings already. People are too used to having it handed to them on a plate. Shakes fist at cloud, get off my lawn etc =^^=

'Sociologists and psychologists' study us, cupcake. Oh and 'social environment' being 'rock solid' == 'I need my soshuals wahhhhh'.

As for a teleport tax. Mwuhahahahahahahahahahahaha Ser Weymann is spot on there. That is classic Ser Neva (and long may They prosper)

[Sue R.]

If Linden Lab had created towns, each with a community center or square, instead of an amorphous, giant expanse of Linden houses... maybe.
Telehubs were an interesting compromise, but they had their cons too.
Charging for teleports isn't entirely absurd, there are MMORPGs that do something like that. In Ragnaok Online you had (still have?) to spend a gem to open a warp portal.

However:
- SL was still very social, after teleports were introduced. So I don't think teleport affected socialization so much.
- Other virtual words, like VRChat and Roblox, are basically a portal to different words/experiences/rooms and are more social than SL.
- Since the SL Viewer mimics a web browser, teleporting is like changing web page. Can you imagine paying to change/open a webpage?
- If traveling around is so important, then I'd rather improve and encourage that and vehicle driving/piloting, which rather poor in SL - and despite that, Drivers of SL is fun, isn't it? Imagine if SL worked better and there were better travel games/experiences - instead of discouraging and nerfing a very common, well established and useful functionality.
- Without teleport, I doubt people would go to a nearby community anyway: most people don't wander, barely look around without any incentive to do so.
In SL it's even ridiculous: it's common to have landing zones with sweepers, because many people don't move from there at all (a reason is "lag", but not just that). It's not just old avatars: at the Welcome HUB it's the same thing. Eventually they had to place the starting point amid the Community HUB or only few people would see it, let alone the nearby regions, typically deserted.

As for the Marketplace, it's our Amazon. And yet, plenty of shopping still happens in-world, let alone demoing furniture, poses, vehicles... that you can't do by just surfing the web page. Moreover, there are so many in-world shopping events, events with a gift for each booth, weekend sales, group gifts, hunt every months... that are even too much. I can't keep it up anymore.
Unless you go shopping with your friend, there is very little socialization happening there anyway.
And it's also a problem for merchants: costumers now have been "trained" to shop there, but merchants have to pay a fee just to be there and the available spots are limited. So those events favor big merchants. Also it's stressful. To smaller merchants the web Marketplace is becoming the only way to not shut down entirely.

Teleport and the other mentioned factors don't seem so impactful to me, as for socialization.

What may be the actual factors:
- fun, creative building with prims in-word, with other people in sandboxes => using Blender by yourself (the few who can use it).
- Chatting in-world => Discord.
- And so on, replacing parts of SL with something outside SL.
While these things are another level, compared to what SL could offer in-world, a lot of fun and social occasions are no longer in SL.

Also avatars are now so heavy, that it's common to enable the option to show nobody but your friends, when more than a handful of avatars gather. So you are in a crowded club or event, but most people there don't see you. And they go AFK. A lot of SL clubs seem avatar parking lots nowadays.

[Zidders Roofurry]

Paid teleporting? No IM's? No. This is insane. Nobody should be forced to pay for teleporting or have im's removed, that's dumb. These are quality of life features that should be part of sl. The fact is nobody's obligated to check out the majority of dime a dozen sims that are out there, and shouldn't be forced to interact. SL might have been interesting to explore early on but as it grew and more and more cloned clubs, copycat shopping malls, and empty mainland areas filled its landscape people figured out that either buying their own private sims or renting space on land owned by a friend or friend of a friend (or that is part of whatever community they're part of) is the way to go.

What is stymying its growth more than anything is the fact that it's owned by a greedy holding company who have zero interest in taking care of it or their customers. Linden Lab is its own worst enemy. They don't care about users, are extremely lacking when it comes to self-governance, and charge too much for land and services that aren't worth the premium people are paying.

Most of all they're behind the times in regards to proper updates, and are still working with band-aid laden code that was new back in 1999. Maybe if LL actually gave a shit they'd attract more users but as it is they're mistreating the small community of non-bot regulars they have left.

[Zidders Roofurry]

To add to my comment I think the whole studying SL thing is old news. People have done that already. What we need in SL is lower land fees, period. I just helped host a month-long Halloween event, and on top of the cost of renting two sims for the two or three months it took to prepare for the event and host it they had to pay another $30 US to upgrade their event server. It shouldn't cost thousands of dollars to rent sims for just a few months. Linden Lab made such a big deal about switching from physical servers to the cloud, and yet they're still charging a ridiculous amount of money for servers that are so lag-heavy sometimes it's impossible to do anything while in them.

They need to stop charging so much, and start giving a shit about their users. That, and stop employing people like Patch Linden. They let toxic/abusive people run rampant...some of them even work for them despite their having evidence proving these people have violated their own TOS.

That's what's killing SL. People have lost faith in Linden Lab's ability to provide them with a fairly-priced service that is well-maintained, and we all know that when it comes to getting rid of toxic people they're not going to do what needs to be done.

[Jude Connors]

One word... Unity.

I own and operate a radio station inside Second Life (as well as other virtual worlds) and work with a number of Second Life businesses. We have been forming a community of other communities for over five years now and rest assured; community is still a thing in Second Life. We have been a part of numerous events of our many affiliates and are partners with recurring events like Rock Your Rack. There are people, and they are still gathering and still forming communities.

But what has been a problem, especially lately... is FPS and connectivity. Hell, a lot of us even got a personal email from Philip saying basically: I know these issues have been happening... We are sorry we suck... Are things better yet? The answer, of course, is NO, the certainly aren't any better.

It is so disheartening to be disconnected repeatedly... over and over... ad nauseam. Even when I am DJing inside Second Life, which broadcasts to multiple regions on the grid, I am disconnected more than once per set. When I actually DON'T disconnect, I am forced to use the "Friends Only" button in order to not be in the middle of a lagfest.

The old LSL is garbage, but since 2003; the geniuses behind Second Life have patched and patched and continue to use this outdated technology that was never good in the first place. So why not just bite the bullet and go to Unity.

Want to see what a Unity-based Second Life would be like? Check out Sine Space. It's fairly new so the "marketplace" leaves a lot to be desired, but you can see the future in virtual worlds rests with the Unity game engine.