New World Notes

Why: Why Second Life Needs a Better Presentation & Starting Setpiece

Here's a good video from longtime gaming/SL YouTuber Luca, who is demonstrably more passionate about improving Second Life than most people at Linden Lab. In it, Luca basically argues that Second Life can and should modernize its presentation and first-time user experience so it appeals to current gamers, and add a great opening setpiece -- i.e. a dramatic, exciting experience that gets these starting users interested in finding out more about the world and how to use it. 

"Setpieces matter," as Luca puts it to me now. "They set the tone and perception of how modern or ahead something is more than words can do." (I said something similar about the opening setpiece to Scavengers, which a Linden vet helped create.)

"Other platforms are increasingly filling the shoes of dedicated social virtual worlds," Luca goes on, "and many that are not inherently social are adding more social features. Second Life's uniqueness in term of individual features is diminishing rapidly but it is still very unique as a whole, we just need to up our game in how we communicate that uniqueness and unique selling proposition." 

This is all true. As an example of what current games are doing, Luca includes some screengrabs from Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen, the MMO with a passionate following. But that's not to suggest Luca's suggesting Second Life look like Star Citizen per se:

Here's How Second Life's New iOS App Could Bring In a New Generation of Mobile Users

Pictured: Pocket Metaverse, a third party iOS app for accessing select Second Life features from 2010

With the iOS app for Second Life coming soon, reader and blogger Devin Vaughn sketches out a fascinating vision for how it could transform the virtual world. While the app itself is launching with very limited features (the late-lamented Pocket Metaverse from over a decade ago was actually more robust), Devin sees a chance to bring in a new wave of mobile users:

[I]t might be a sneak peek into Linden Lab's strategy of bridging SL and SL Mobile. This is baby steps for now, it takes time to develop code and app. But I could see it working that there are SL mobile-only sims that enforce both avatar and environment efficiency.

Imagine this: You want to 3D chat live on the phone with your friends? Teleport to SL Mobile Island 1. Oops, you are not allowed because your avatar is bonkers heavy with scripts and complexity. BUT you forgot to switch to your mobile, low lag, fast avatar first. So you just go to appearance, change outfit, and teleport is accepted. You land in a beautifully crafted environment, perhaps created by a well known genius designer who excels at kickass and fast. Much good time is had!

.....And later, you want to meet up with your special friend after work in the posh main grid where you wear as much scripts and fancy mesh as you want, or decorate to max, because the maingrid is still the wild wild west of freedom and zero enforced avatar or sim limits (if you don't mind the lag).

VRChat actually does something like this, for users of the Oculus Quest, enabling them to teleport to worlds that have been optimized to run on the Quest. That way, VRC users are able invite their Quest-owning friends into the "kiddie pool" of VRChat. (That's how I first got to meet Syrmor in VRChat!)

"Imagine if SL had mobile-only sims for mobile style avatars," Devin muses:

Dual Universe Already Has At Least One Embedded Reporter on YouTube

"This month has been great... if you're a shady individual of questionable morality." So begins the latest report from Charlie Traveler, reporter for Dual Universe Stellar Transmissions from the Dark Star Imperium clans... which is also the latest sign that a rich user community and culture is emerging in Dual Universe, the highly-ambitious, single-shard metaverse MMO we write about often here: That's right, since its launch last September, Dual Universe already has at least one embedded journalist. The news stories themselves are full of corporate vs. corporate intrigue reminiscent of Eve Online but on a grander scale.  Of course I personally think an embedded reporter is the best sign of a virtual world's future, but then I'm somewhat biased.

"We were inspired off of a need to catalogue the history of the game," the Dark Star team leader tells me via YouTube, explaining the channel's inspiration and news-gathering approach. "[I]f we did not do this then the interactions and happenings in the community would fade into obscurity, with many people never being able to ever know things had happened. We gather things through a mix of people being able to self report and tip us off on things anonymously, as well as having reporters who crawl and aggregate information throughout the community."

Also interesting to me (and this might be a sign of slow user growth): Mr. Traveler reports the top ten player organizations by user numbers, and they're all in the low four to mid three figures. Which suggests Dual Universe's active userbase is probably in the low mid figures? 

More Dual Universe stories below:

The Question About Second Life That Linden Lab Has Yet to Answer

Pictured: The Hilarious Hell Of The Second Life Noob Experience

Linden Lab answered nearly every reader question in response to my Ebbe Altberg interview recently, but there's one last follow-up to those follow-ups that they have yet to address:

Any plans for redoing the Viewer?

We are constantly revising, updating, and fixing the Viewer as with the rest of Second Life. There are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Viewer.

My question to that reply:

If You Think an Achievement System is Incompatible With Second Life, You Don't Remember How Second Life Started

Second Life's homepage from 2004, via Archive.org

"How to Save Second Life in Seven Easy Steps" is my latest editorial on Social Times, and I'm gratified to see it garnering a very interesting conversation there. The most curious reaction, of course, is to my suggestion to add an achievement/leveling system to Second Life, primarily to give new users a structure that will ease them into the SL experience in an encouraging and fun way. Sample objections: "That will just make Second Life like World of Warcraft!", or "I don't want SL to become FarmVille!" At heart to these objections is the assumption that a leveling system is fundamentally incompatible with Second Life, which is such an ahistorical notion, it's worth addressing here.

In point of fact, before World of Warcraft launched and FarmVille existed, Second Life did have a leveling system, and had one from very earliest days.

How to Make Second Life Mass Market: A Destination Guide to Others Online (Not Pretty Places Probably Unpopulated)

Every day, thousands of people try Second Life, but only a fraction of them become regular returning users. There's probably a number of reasons that 95% or so of those newbies leave, but what's the main factor that keeps those few retained? In an important study from two academics from the University of Michigan, which Grace McDunnough brilliantly blogs about here, chat is the primary predictive factor. Not making money, not creating content, not exploring the world per se, but active chat -- the number of fellow Residents a new user talked with, over a longer period of time. This is probably the simplest form of user-to-user interaction in Second Life, but as it turns out, it generates the best retention rates.

The problem, as Grace goes on to point out, is the Second Life interface as it currently exists makes finding people online to chat with extremely difficult and time-consuming. (This is likely why searching the dynamic map for the green dots of online users has become the preferred workaround solution, but not an ideal one for numerous reasons.) The viewer's "Destination Guide" will take new users to beautifully created places in Second Life, but owing to the world's architecture, it's likely they will meet few if anyone there.

How to encourage new users to chat? Fortunately, there's an easy and already proven solution, and it looks like this:

Forrester Analyst Suggests Second Life Stymied by "Iron Law of Oligarchy" - He's Half Right

At the last Second Life Community Convention, Chief Product Officer T. Linden gave a milestone presentation on the new SL viewer, aimed at making the Second Life experience more intuitive and user-friendly. Created by veterans of Adobe, TiVO, and other companies renowned for great UI design, it was an impressive and exciting unveiling.

And then T. opened his talk for audience questions. First one had nothing to do with the viewer. Instead, a gentleman demanded angrily, "When are you going to make it possible for us to belong to more than twenty groups in Second Life?" (Or words to that effect.) The rest of the questions for T. from SLCC attendees were largely in that vein, highly detailed concerns about outstanding bugs and features, which while important and valid, had little or nothing to do with the new Second Life viewer.

Tom Grant, analyst with the esteemed Forester Research firm, has a thought-provoking post which provides a name for this phenomenon, and suggests it's holding Second Life back:

[T]he Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users [who] wield disproportionate influence over the vendor's thinking about products and services... Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can't say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.

As the incident at SLCC suggests, there is some truth to that observation. I've seen a similar phenomena on this blog, in many of the responses to my editorial series on making Second Life more mass market:

How To Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 4: Become Cheap, Easy, and Always Available

The New York Times magazine's annual must-read "Year in Ideas" issue published yesterday includes an entry which quickly distilled to its essence what I've been trying to express in my "How to Make Second Life Mass Market" series of posts. Put much more succinctly:

"Good Enough is the New Great"

This adage summarizes a recent Wired magazine article by Robert Capps, "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine", which I recommend highly. In it, Capps identifies a pervasive market trend that encompasses everything from consumer technology to military hardware: when given the option, the market overwhelmingly favors the lower quality option that's cheap and available, over the product that's expensive but much higher quality and feature-robust. It's why consumers generally prefer the Flip camera over high definition video cameras, Google Docs over Microsoft Office, and so on. (I'm sure you can quickly think of other examples; I'm hard pressed to come up with even one where the rule clearly doesn't apply.)

The same phenomenon is observable with virtual worlds:

How To Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 3: Linden Dollar Prepaid Cards Sold at Retail

I noticed this display in my local drugstore chain the other day, a whole section devoted to prepaid debit cards for all manner of goods and services -- international calling minutes, iTunes downloads, Amazon purchases, and so on. You're bound to see still more of these display racks in retail stores over the holidays, as they make an ideal last-minute gift. Looking closer, I noticed roughly a third of the entire rack were prepaid cards for virtual currencies, for videogame consoles, social games, and some of the major virtual worlds and MMOs, including the largest web-based title, Habbo:

One virtual currency selection is painfully missing, of course: Linden Dollars. While Second Life almost certainly has some of the highest average revenue per user rates of any freemium virtual world, the payment process (via credit card, for the most part) still remains frustrating at best. A prepaid retail card would make it generally easier to buy Linden Dollars, while fostering mainstream adoption in several ways:

• Organic Promotion: The mere existence of a Linden Dollar prepaid card in retail stores would turn Second Life into "impulse buy".
• Market Adaption: As with Habbo, most of the large virtual worlds and MMOs popular with kids have a prepaid card offering. A Linden Dollar card would align Second Life with their buying habits as they turn 18.
• Boost Conversion: Most people give up on Second Life within the first few hours of installation. A prepaid card instantly acts as a conversion incentive, nudging them past the painful learning curve with the reassurance that they're entering a new place with spending money in hand.

These would be the likely immediate effects of a retail card. The likely medium term consequence is also a good one: by adding more consumers into the Second Life economy, the best content creators will have a reason to build and expand their business beyond the existing market, which counts about 465,000 or so, a number that hasn't substantially grown in the last couple years. (It was 300,000 in 2007.)

If you live in Southeast Asia, you actually can buy pre-paid cards for Linden Dollars. A small Singapore company called First Meta recently introduced this service. Perhaps not coincidentally, the nations with the biggest spenders of Linden Dollars are (proportionally speaking) Hong Kong and Malaysia, where First Meta cards are sold. But with the majority of Second Life spenders in the US and EU, real growth awaits the appearance of those cards in your local Target.

Part Three of a series, introduced here, to explain why mass market adoption is so important. Part One: "Deep Integration With Facebook", Part Two: "Point-and-Click Avatar Movement"

How to Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 2: Point-and-Click Avatar Movement!

World of Warcraft, the largest 3D online world with 12 million subscribers, has it.

Sims 2, which is often compared to SL, and is the biggest single-player 3D game for the PC, selling 13 million copies, also has it.

But Second Life, the largest 3D virtual world with only 750K active users, and a growth plateau, does not have it:

Point-and-click avatar movement.

With a point-and-click interface, the user clicks the mouse somewhere within the display, avatar goes there. Display camera automatically follows the avatar. The basic interaction is common to anyone who's ever used a modern computer.

With Second Life, by contrast, the default movement interface is still based on first-person shooter keybindings -- A strafes left, D strafes rights, and so on. The reason for this is simple: