New World Notes

Here's How AI Bots Could Help Improve Second Life's New User Experience (Comment of the Week)

In our latest post about improving Second Life's first-time user experience, longtime reader/retired tech exec Luther Weymann details how AI might help with that:

AI bots are assigned to each new user. Read the IP address; if the new user is using it for the first time, they cannot disconnect the AI bot until it finishes. If the IP is a repeat user, allow disconnect.

The AI bot takes the new user through most processes, including how to rez, change clothes in a sandbox, tour important SL sites, and click a dance ball and dance. How to Add or Wear, how voice and text work, just a great list of things to know.

It takes 30 minutes, maybe longer if it's fun, entertaining, and you're getting a great intro to SL.

He contrast that with the current first-time user experience, which involves reading many in-world signs:

Reading signs on a walkway has never worked. I've tried for 16 years to help Day 1 people. Almost none of them know how to rez, that free clothes are on the SL Market, what a rez zone or sandbox is, how to change clothes, or what a dance ball is where you can join a group dancing.

You guys at SL have to overcome this. Lead them by the hand and see if concurrency increases.

This all sounds right. I think the key thing is differentiating the AI bot from a human-controlled avatar. I would actually recommend making the bot part of the viewer, a disembodied voice which can also enable relevant controls in the user experience to light up, when giving tutorials.

I've even recommend making the bot a character in a Second Life world narrative.

For an idea of what I mean, check out this first-time experience from Scavengers,  a recent multiplayer game with a lead designer who once worked at Linden Lab: 

Give New SL Users Their Own Private Second Life Instance or Noob Continent (Comment of the Week)

Interesting comment thread on Second Life's nooby-booting problem. (I.E.,  that many of the best Second Life hangouts and locations have orbiters banning new users with accounts under 30 days old.) My suggestion is to add a VRChat-style trust system, which is just one (imperfect) way to help address this challenge; I also like this one from longtime reader Martin K:

What about putting new users in their own private instance of a world instead of banning them? In this way, new users could at least visit and explore a world on their own. Visiting private instances of a world has the added benefit of protecting new users from the toxicity of other users in many worlds.

Their own private Second Life! I imagine you'd want select veteran SLers to also be able to access the private instance, as greeters, tutors, and event staff. But something like this has promise. 

I've been thinking about a variation of this:

Virtual Worlds Are Relatively Safe Havens for LGBT People -- But Many Concerns Remain (Comment of the Week)

A reader who signs themself "LGBT+ anon" throws some important and necessary cold water on my tribute to virtual worlds as safe havens for LGBT people:

Virtual worlds are surely helpful to LGBT+ people, gender expression and more, and in general I agree, but since we are talking about safety and "safe havens" after this election, I think it's important a word of caution. Apart from some abusive people you could meet also in virtual worlds, I won't feel safe with USA-based Internet companies, as David Bell said, even less now and in the next years.

Second Life is an especially bad case: communication is still sent plain-text and it's logged, with anything you did and where you did go. They keep the info for long, also the employees access to those logs, your other data and your inventory. That's for tech support, but also to investigate abuse reports. For those purposes it is fine, right? Except it's well known... that US government agencies spied on virtual worlds, among which Second Life.

Now, think about all this under a hostile government. Yikes!

More from LGBT+ anon and my reply after the break:

The Pros & Cons of Telehubs & Taxing Point-to-Point Teleportation in Second Life (Comment of the Week #2)

Telehub image by Ciaran Laval

How do you make Second Life feel more like a serendipitous social space? Expanding off some good points raised by EmptyEyes, I suggested this:

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.  

Lots of interesting reader comments (and guffaws) around my idea, especially this from 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 Ragnarok Online you had (still have?) to spend a gem to open a warp portal.

However:

- SL was still very social after teleports were introduced. [In the mid 2000s - WJA]. 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 is rather poor in SL - and despite that, the Drivers of SL [group] 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.

All very valid points! To discus them one by one:

Once Human Update: Yes, You Can (Mostly) Avoid Combat to Play

Good question from reader Elle Couerblanc on Once Human and its cozy virtual world gameplay:

Well, this game looks interesting! I see there is combat involved? Is it more PVE or PVP-oriented? I thought cozy MMOs did not have combat.

OK, technically Once Human isn't cozy; instead, say cozy-ish, or at least, cozy-able. Gogo, who I interviewed for the post, answers in Comments:

You can play Player vs. Environment or Players vs. Player. This isn't a cozy MMO, it has some combat elements, but on PVE you can pretty much avoid most of the combat and just play however you want. I focus on foraging, farming, hunting, etc. Sometimes I kill some zombies, but I don't love it!

That's gameplay video of Gogo above, toodling around the world and harvesting gold before being rudely interrupted.

In Once Human, you do need to level up to get better items, but that doesn't always require combat. More background from fellow Once Human player Sparkle:

Fact Check: "Primitives" Preceded Second Life With VRML from the 90s!

Important fact check from longtime reader Joey1058, on my rant about Zuckerberg talking about adding "primitives" to Horizon Worlds, a term I suspected he lifted wholesale from Second Life:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 'primitives' isn't new to SL either. We'd been using prims in VRML for half a dozen years before SL left the lab.

Joey is right -- pictured above are primitives from VRML, the early 3D web coding language from the 90s, as noted here:

Richard Bartle & Readers Opine on Irena Pereira's Theory on What Went Wrong With WoW

Lots of interesting reader feedback to my interview with Irena Pereria, on what went wrong with WoW, based on her insights as a former Blizzard designer/developer. Irena's core argument is that changes to World of Warcraft starting with the Cataclysm expansion degraded the sense of World of Warcraft as a dynamic, living virtual world and hurt its appeal as a virtual community where you wanted to socialize with other players.

On my Facebook feed, Richard Bartle -- who literally wrote the book on designing MMOs -- stopped by to offer some complementary thoughts:

The deleterious effects of many quality-of-life changes were obvious to most experienced designers as soon as they were discussed, and the effects were exposed by Asheron's Call 2. It put them in and it failed. Nevertheless, most modern MMOs now put them in as standard (or, for some things like fast travel, sell them). Some such features are unavoidable, though. When WoW didn't have a LFG mechanism, there were addons available that provided that functionality (albeit not with instant teleportation into an instance). Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back in again without changing the bottle.

Instead, it's better to nudge players to play with each other, as they do in countless Minecrafter servers, as Bartle writes:

Self-directed entertainment isn't just entertainment: it's fun. If people merely want entertainment, they can passively watch TV or listen to music. If they want fun, they can play games. Minecraft isn't just entertaining, it's fun. When an MMO becomes the equivalent of a movie but you have to play a combat mini-game between scenes, the fun is leeched out. The same thing happens when other players become objects rather than subjects: you may as well play a single-player game.

Some reader responses, some concurring, some disagreeing, after the break -- though I'd read the original interview first to get the full context:

 

New-ish Second Life Brands Recommended by Readers: Dope Pixels, Neutral Tones & Star Quake. What Others Should Be Featured?

Loving the variety of new-ish SL brands recommended by readers so far, including:

• Dope Pixels (Facebook): "We make beautiful, scene-changing skyboxes from real-world photos, renders and AI, but mostly AI lately! It's gotten so good," says owner Adrienne Lowe (Andi Ayashi in SL) 
• Neutral Tones (Instagram): "They started off with really unique shoes but branched out into doing more interesting fashion accessories that could only exist in Second Life," writes Anya Ohmai. (Like the balloon-lifted wiener dog accessory, above.) "Brilliant mind and creative!"
• Star Quake Shapes & Beauty (Primfeed): "Definitely check out Starquake by my dear friend Theo (Lore Olivieri)," writes Peter Stindberg. "They are very new, aspiring, but with already good items. Theo makes unique shapes and focuses on non-binary niche - they even run their own blog about queerbodies."

I'm still looking for more recommendations to highlight, so please add more in Comments! Here's the full criteria to include for consideration:

How Virtual Worlds' Creator Economies Can Exert a "Big Sort" Cultural Effect (Comment of the Week)

Responding to my post on VRChat's emerging new creator economy featuring the video above), longtime reader Martin K. has some provocative thoughts on the sociology of virtual worlds:

One interesting thought that jumped at me in the context of monetization was this: 

When your world is Quest-compatible, more kids get in; it's just a fact - an uncomfortable fact, because it's also people who don't have as much money - who can't afford a PC - who get a Quest.

All this is probably true, but one might jump to the conclusion that Quest-users spend less money on microtransactions (on average) because they are younger (on average), and that's probably not true for microtransactions targeting children: as Roblox and many other free-to-play games have shown, children might be quite willing to spend a few dollars regularly on (exploitive) microtransactions. (And that inclination is in addition to the larger number of Quest-users compared to PC-VR users.)

Of course, the offerings have to target children; your typical, over-sexualized Second Life skins probably won't sell well to children.

Which reminds me of the idea that The Big Sort is not only happening in real life but also in virtual worlds with creator economies: specific metaverse-apps with creator economies attract specific audiences.

Martin's referring to the highly influential sociology book arguing that people across the United States have been "sorting" themselves by culture and worldview, to the point where even differing neighborhoods in the same city can hold widely contrary values and opinions.

Martin argues that different kinds of commerce can have the same sorting effect on virtual worlds:

Civil Discussion About Virtual World Trolls (Comments of the Week)

Last week's post on Dr. Ruth Diaz's new project to interview and better understand virtual world trolls helped provoke a pretty interesting reader conversation that's difficult to summarize, but here's one particular highlight -- longtime reader Martin K. makes the provocative argument that trolls are somewhat necessary to the long term health of virtual worlds:

[T]rolling and toxicity might be important for many virtual communities to stay stable (and relatively small) by limiting the influx of new users (and thereby avoiding the "Eternal September" problem). I consider Second Life, VRChat, Rec Room, and Gorilla Tag examples of such communities.

By Eternal September, Martin's referring to a phenomena back in the early 90s when Usenet was opened up to mainstream Internet users, causing a backlash among the established user base of Usenet groups. In other words, trolling might have the effect of driving out noobs while maintaining stability and group cohesion among the dedicated community. 

But how can a platform expand? Martin again:  

The way to grow a community beyond those limits appears to be the fragmentation of a community into smaller groups ("bubbles") with limited communication between groups. Facebook has perfected this approach, but long before Facebook (and other social media), competitive team-based multiplayer games have strictly limited communication between competing teams to limit toxicity.

Whether social VR can adopt this approach of fragmentation to grow larger communities is an open question. 

VRChat actually did keep growing its user base beyond the infamous Ugandan Knuckles troll era of 2017/2018 and now boasts over 10 million active users. That's largely a credit to the platform's karmic system (as I discuss in my book); arguably the fact that individual VRChat worlds tend to have a small capacity (20-30 is ideal) helped enable sub-communities to avoid both trolls and noobs.

Anyway, in response to Martin's argument,  Samantha Venia Logan, a colleague of Dr. Diaz and herself a PhD candidate, makes some important distinctions: