New World Notes

Since Second Life is So Difficult to Use, Linden Lab Should Pay New Users to Learn How to Use It (Comment of the Week)

Minecraft's simple building interface

Great long comment from Will Clip, who's developed popular games for both Second Life users and for other platforms, responding to the point that understanding Second Life's complexity has become a kind of game in itself:

In my opinion Linden Lab could do so much more helping to ease the 1st steps for new users to improve the user retention rate.

I am a content provider in SL myself. Whenever I find some time to create something new I try to come at it with understanding that for most of the people facing something new, something they are not used to is scary and frustrating.

Creators goal should be to make 1st steps for people when they are trying the new product as easy and fun as possible. Good user interface experience makes distinction between a good and bad product.

Often to the point that even if the product looks better looking, most users will prefer to use the product that is easier to use because using something that is easy to operate is already rewarding by itself.

In my opinion Linden Lab should maybe employ or temporary hire an user interface specialists that would look at SL as a whole and come out with some pointers about how to make SL more easy to use. LL should use the new knowledge to organize content developers, give materials (invest, market) and provide new and better tools for content creation in Second Life.

Will says he's seeing similar complexity in Sansar. But unlike most other virtual worlds and social VR platform, Linden Lab has a key advantage. Which leads Will to propose a novel idea: Pay Linden Dollars to new users to learn how to use Second Life. As he writes:

Second Life's Open-Ended User Interface as an MMO is So Complicated, Mastering the UI is How to Level Up

Pictured: Cassie demonstrating Lelutka's Axis HUD for customizing highly detailed SL Avatar expressions

Great conversation about the difficulty of customizing Second Life avatars, which now include countless user-made systems (like the one above) built on top of the default system, with reader "Scott" making this point:

While I don't disagree that creating a beautiful avi can be complex and difficult for new users, I don't agree with the implication this is a problem for Second Life. I remember the difficulties and frustrations of learning how some of this works. I still don't understand all of it, but it was (and still is) enjoyable to learn. I get a sense of accomplishment. The subtleties of second life avi construction become an "inside joke" with others who have had the same struggles. Not only do you get a sense of accomplishment, but you get the feeling of becoming a member of the "club" who have leveled-up and made a kick-ass avi.

This is very true -- while Second Life is not a traditional MMO, the very complexity of its user-experience has turned avatar customization into a kind of leveling mechanic. (Which is not too different from many traditional MMOs where you can immediately identify veteran players by the special details and features of their avatar.)

Seen this way, buying customization options from other users becomes a short-cut for leveling up:

Creative User Hacks to Second Life Appearance Make Avatar Customization Incredibly Difficult for New Users (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: User-Made Mesh Head Heads-Up Display (reviewed by Cassie here)

Commenting on the appearance of professional makeover agencies in Second Life, reader "Pulsar" points out this is partly the outcome of innovation among the user community, as users came up with creative ways to improve avatar appearance options beyond what the default viewer offered:

And to think that once you could create your own hair style straight from the viewer sliders, as well as everything else (you still can, but it's outdated).

Creative users took advantage of each update and new feature to improve their avatar looks, sometimes even with hacks like the "invisiprim". Avatars became prettier and prettier, even incomparably better, but on the other hand fashion became more and more complex.

Instead of sliders, you had to edit your prim or sculpt attachments, then you had to use alpha layers, then merchants would sell their rigged mesh without setting the attachment point, so you have to carefully "add" it (or add to another attachment point) instead of "wearing" it, in order to not end up naked, just because you grabbed an ice cream. Then appliers, various HUDs, then you have a bunch of products from different brands and that aren't compatible with each other, as well as legacy content, so you have to know what's compatible with.

In other words, with every creative workaround the Second Life community added, avatars became more and more difficult to customize -- and became near impossible for new users:

Sansar User Growth Slowed by Massive Experience Downloads Up to TWENTY-FOUR Gigabytes (Comment of the Week)

A virtual hangout as huge as Skyrim?

"I can give you another reason why Sansar interest is starting to tail off, from my own perspective," writes reader Mondy, commenting on the social VR world's slow user growth:

6 months ago I was pretty much enjoying being able to log in and enjoy pretty much the whole of Sansar in desktop mode, I don't have a VR setup. I could join in with the activities, engage with people on voice or via text. They even set it up so that people in VR could view text chat while using VR. At one time they couldn't even do that, so unless you used voice things were pretty much one sided. Several updates later, despite the minimum requirements not changing a lot of experiences can no longer be reached, places like Draxtor's 114 Harvest experience which so many activities seem to revolve around take up to 24 gigabytes to download.

To put that 24 gigs in context, the file size for the classic game Skyrim -- the entire virtual world and everything in it -- is less than 15 gigs. I confirmed this with a Sansar developer, who also noted that 24 gigs is on the high side, because most Sansar experiences are relatively smaller... 5-8 gigabytes. Which is also still quite massive: Even people with extremely high-end broadband would need 15-30 minutes to download 5-8 gigs, an aeon for a casual social VR experience.

Mondy says some in Sansar's user community have been pretty dismissive of these technical hurdles when they're raised:

Sansar & High Fidelity Not Growing Users Because They Miss the Point of Social Virtual Worlds, Says Expert -- But He May Miss the Point Too

Despite multiple partnerships with major eSports brands and an official tie-in experience for Spielberg's Ready Player One, Sansar's actual usage by actual users hasn't significantly grown. Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, believes the reason for that is obvious, and spells out why in a rather passionate rant:

This isn't a mystery at all.

Sansar misses the point of social virtual worlds, and flies in the face of open world persistent spaces like Second Life in favor of localized spaces that focus on form over function. The overarching mechanic of this approach has been done to death and constantly flopped:

BlueMars
Worlds Inc
Cybertown
and many others

There is an underlying set of "givens" when dealing with this stuff, mostly derived from even the moderate and persistent successes of predecessors. Historically speaking there is plenty of precedent for this stagnation, but nobody wants to acknowledge it; instead plowing ahead and constantly trying to dictate to the market what it wants so long as it's whatever it is these projects are offering while wholesale ignoring both history and precedent in the industry for what actually worked. Ultimately, it is entirely a tone deaf approach to virtual worlds on the whole.

He also addresses a recent conversation I had with him, in which I played devil's advocate and asked, "Where's the evidence there's actual market demand for a metaverse?" Will's take:

Sociologist Meets a Second Life Fairy in the Virtual Woods -- And the Disabled Woman Behind the Keyboard

Powerful comment by Alejandro Salazar, a sociologist reflecting on Tom Boellstorff's US government-funded study Of how virtual worlds affect disabled users. While exploring a forest in Second Life, and came across a fairy, who owned the woods. Then he saw her RL photo in her SL profile: 

[S]he lost two legs, one arm, one eye and can only speak with a voice device. She is a fairy in a forest designed to delve into the history she has created in her forest. It is a beautiful place where you can feel peace. When I started chatting with her, we immediately made a connection and after some time of conversation, she told me her story, that it is difficult for her to leave the house. She only goes to the doctor, some shopping, and occasionally goes to a park.

 

As a sociologist I did a mental exercise made by Max Weber, where we divest our values, thoughts and perspective that every human being makes of ourselves with our own life experience, and I entered in her perspective. Imagine having a life where you can not frequently see someone, without talking to anyone... thanks to Second Life, these people can have human contact, socialize, smile, create, fascinate others and touch our lives. 

He was so moved, he e-mailed Linden Lab's CEO about it:

Has Minecraft Prepared a New Generation for the Metaverse?

The conversation on concurrency tests and which virtual world deserves the title "metaverse" continues, with reader Matti Deigan nominating a world that's usually not under consideration by the metaverse cognoscenti:

Minecraft communities (Yogcast) have stuffed 2600+ users into a single server. And that's already an example of being able to connect multiple worlds together on a single server with teleporting between the worlds and services using portals…. Can that be then considered a metaverse as well?

Good question. Especially since, eight years after I first interviewed Markus Persson about his little indie game, Minecraft still counts 91 million monthly active players. Reader "LoirL" concurs, and jumps off from that argument:

I consider Minecraft to be the first breakthrough virtual world, created by its users, a prototype-metaverse perhaps. A new generation is accustomed to playing, creating, communicating, watching, listening, and reading via Minecraft. That children and teens are having formative encounters with games, online social experiences, and user-generated content across media platforms through Minecraft suggests that the future for virtual worlds is robust.

As youth grow accustomed to participatory imaginary worlds in which they can communicate with friends, customize avatars, create, play, share information, have fan experiences, follow characters and stories, compete in games, and strengthen media and computer skills in order to show off to and compete with their peers, they bring the elements of virtual world participation into everyday life. Since Minecraft emerged organically from single-player games into user-generated multiplayer synthetic worlds and a community-created virtual world, the experience of Minecraft is an experience of agency and empowerment.

She argues that High Fidelity's concurrency tests, while still small relative to Minecraft (or Dual Universe), remain meaningful: 

Animesh Update Reportedly Hurts Performance of All SL Viewers, Including Firestorm -- Linden Lab Investigating

The title to last week's post, "Linden Lab Update Borked Black Dragon's Viewer Frame Rate In Second Life", is not quite accurate, because as Black Dragon creator NiranV writes in Comments, the JIRA bug report he filed, "Animesh: Massive performance loss since animesh update", relates to any viewer which incorporates that update. That includes Firestorm, the most popular viewer among the SL userbase by far. Niran argues it will take awhile for Firestorm users and developers to realize that problem, or implement a fix:

Worst case (as it is right now) no one will notice, since no one hasn't noticed yet even with the huge amount of testing of animesh. Then it will go to Firestorm, Firestorm will be blamed for their shitty stuff once again, and boom everyone got a smack in their face because one single tiny thing slipped through testing.

It might get fixed someday or it might not. Problem is Lindens often don't use the Viewer they are developing enough to make such concrete observations, they are way busy with other stuff like getting this stuff to work in the first place. So it's up to testers to see this stuff.

Problem is because most people use Firestorm they will disregard the possibly lower framerate as it simply being "Linden Lab's Viewer", besides most people testing the Viewer for what it was made = animesh, rather than normal usage.

This causes no one to notice until it hits their own Viewer, which in case of Firestorm, with its extremely long release cycles, could be a problem. Even if they were to notice it shortly after release, you most likely wouldn't see another update until another half a year. Most users will assume that it's simply Firestorm's fault and their usual degradation of quality and performance over several updates -- which if you followed Firestorm's development, you'd think is "normal", meaning you start ignoring the issue, no one might investigate and this thing, will have sneaked into all Viewers, reducing everyone's framerate for no reason.

And this is how fast shit can hit the fan.

Fortunately, Linden Lab has acknowledged the bug report on Jira, and is investigating, and calling for further feedback:

When Does a Successful Virtual World "End"? (Comments of the Week)

With well-known Second Life-focused media outlets expanding their focus to other virtual worlds, some readers have become bearish on SL's prospects. For instance, Clara Seller:

A few years ago, I always thought that Second Life's end would look like a mass exodus to a new world. Now it feels more like mass extinction.

I'm skeptical that there's enough commonality to hold these diversification models together. It seems like they are just extending a big net and hoping there's something out there to catch.

When you start to see successful people jumping out of tenth floor windows toward nothing, it's not entirely crazy to think there's fire up there.

When SL goes down the drain, it's going to take a huge amount of imaginary money and hope down the drain with it. Whatever worlds exist in that aftermath, are going to have to deal with the "Remember what happened to Second Life" reality.

Small businesses go quickly and quietly. Now you see it, now you don't. I'm starting to think that this will be the real foundation challenge that the next generation of virtual worlds will have to contend with. Maybe all of this technology floundering is the easy part.

Penny Patton, a RL graphics artist with a longtime commitment to improving SL visuals, has perhaps a more nuanced view:

Who Really Wants a Massive, Contiguous, Single-Shard Virtual World to Explore? (Comment of the Week)

Great rant from reader John C, responding to praise for Second Life being (largely) a massive, contiguous, single-shard world. John C doesn't agree at all:

What is this obsession with linking endless worlds. This is not how I experience the real world. Of course I know in my head that the real world is like this, but I do not really experience it this way. If I am in one town and I wish to visit the next, unless I have some obsession with experiencing the countryside between them, I get some form of transport. And this transport cuts me off somehow from the environment around me. But I do not mind, because my objective is not the space between my social events, but the events themselves. If teleports existed in RL would not the majority of people use them?

The only real use for contiguous worlds is in games that require large uninterrupted play areas. An intensely social metaverse does not require that I am able to travel for hours on end to meet my friends or my partner. Even if I wished to explore some natural virtual external environment I am sure that an island of no more than four SL sims connected would be ample for me and friends to wander through without the need to just walk endlessly seeing the same repeating trees grass and rocks into infinity.

Sure, there is a nice feeling of being able to see a mountain in the distance and imagine you can go visit. But how many times do you virtually wish to repeat that journey? In the real world, we live mostly in small spaces, we create small spaces like the little animals we are. Surly the only use for virtual worlds, beyond games playing, is social interaction, and by far the majority of the most beautiful sensual experiences you can have socially take place in the smallest of spaces. And if you truly wished to experience wandering endlessly in a beautiful environment then try the real world, it beats the hell out of any virtual world you will ever find. 

Now having said that, I am quite clear in my mind that the virtual is far more interesting than the real. But not because it can be huge and endless, that is just some tech challenge that the big virtual players want to beat at the moment. But because it allows me to connect with thousands of other people who I would otherwise, because of time, distance and social barriers, never meet. 

Even if I were rich enough to build the vast virtual city I have always dreamed of building in some virtual world, I would most likely consider breaking it down into smaller virtual chunks. 

I learned very early in my virtual building career that the vast majority of people have no desire at all to travel even shortest distances to their desired destinations. And the first thing you have to install in any good virtual environment is a good teleport system.  

There are many highly popular games, such as the GTA franchise, Skyrim, and Minecraft, which are contiguous simulated worlds. But John thinks their appeal is limited: