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:

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: 

How Virtual World Rivalries Now Threaten the Entire Internet (And Therefore, the Entire Real World)

"How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet" is a good long weekend read from Wired, and it's the bizarre story behind the Mirai botnet, which last year turned armies of IoT devices into a zombie army which launched denial of service attacks that damn near brought down the entire Internet, pretty much. Turns out it wasn't created by Russian or North Korean hackers -- but dumb college dudes who owned a Minecraft server, and wanted to attack rival Minecraft servers:

Inside the game, individual hosted-servers allow users to link together in multiplayer mode, and as the game has grown, hosting those servers has turned into big business—players pay real money both to rent “space” in Minecraft as well as purchase in-game tools. Unlike many massive multiplayer games where every player experiences the game similarly, these individual servers are integral to the Minecraft experience, as each host can set different rules and install different plug-ins to subtly shape and personalize the user experience; a particular server, for instance, might not allow players to destroy one another’s creations... The huge income from successful servers had also spawned a mini cottage industry of launching DDoS attacks on competitors’ servers, in an attempt to woo away players frustrated at a slow connection. (There are even YouTube tutorials specifically aimed at teaching Minecraft DDoS, and free DDoS tools available at Github.) Similarly, Minecraft DDoS-mitigation services have sprung up as a way to protect a host’s server investment. The digital arms race in DDoS is inexorably linked to Minecraft, Klein says.

Yes: Minecraft rivals are developing new DDoS technology that criminals and other bad actors can now use for their own devious ends:

Minecraft Enabling Console, Mobile & Win 10 Users to Craft Together

Nothing virtual world or VR-related announced at E3 this year has exactly excited me just yet, except for the news that Minecraft is going cross-platform:

A game all about teamwork, building together and creating communities shouldn't be restricted to one device, which is why our Better Together Update introduces cross-platform play, breaking down the barriers and letting people play the same complete Minecraft with each other across devices! We've wanted to integrate cross-platform for ages, essentially making a version of Minecraft that's consistent no matter what device you're choosing to play on. So going forward, the edition you'll find on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, mobile and VR will simply be known as 'Minecraft', a separate entity from 'Minecraft: Java Edition', which is the original PC game (that we'll continue to support, of course). This means when you buy 'Minecraft', you're buying a game that can you can play with friends across devices.

Assuming this scales, it's a pretty great step forward. Would love to see Minecraft expand its user concurrency numbers per server too, but can't have everything as once.

Watch Out Sansar & High Fidelity -- Minecraft to Add Marketplace & Virtual Currency for Third Party Developers

Watch out Sansar and High Fidelity -- you too, Space. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't done this sooner, but now they finally are:

Set to go live in the spring, nine businesses will be selling feature packs within Minecraft -- such as new storylines, in-game activities or landscapes to explore -- with prices ranging between about $1 and $10 per creation. Other companies can apply to be allowed into the marketplace over subsequent months. Users wishing to purchase content will need to buy a form of new currency -- Minecraft Coins.

Given Minecraft's quirky LEGO-like graphics, it's more directly competitive from a consumer standpoint with Roblox and Linden Lab's Blocksworld, than high realistic virtual worlds like Sansar and High Fidelity, not to mention Second Life. However, from a third party developer perspective, Minecraft has a huge competitive edge above them all:

Why Minecraft Not Second Life is Most Successful Virtual World Ever Made

I tried explaining why it's so short-sighted to say Second Life is "the most successful virtual world ever made to this day", but this new video from Vox may do a better job. Minecraft was first launched as a survival game but it quickly also became an open-ended sandbox with a genuine art scene and real businesses making money to develop within it, even for branded experiences promoting movies like Batman vs. Superman. As Vox explains in the accompanying article:

Why Second Life's Prim-Based Era Was Its Golden Age of Creation (Comment of the Week)

"Lost Gardens of Apollo" - a classic from SL's prim era

Veteran Second Life builder P. Gibbs wrote a really interesting rant on the state of Second Life creation today in comparison to Minecraft now and SL in its pre-mesh era which is worth excerpting here, because it expresses some key challenges Project Sansar faces now: 

Just let me get some things out of the way. I love SL, you really gotta like something to spend 8 years of your life logging in daily on it, learning to create, perfecting your modeling, learning a new programming language and everything else that comes along with it to be a successful builder. I am a user and I create content, I love to visit other people’s sims, check out their own creations and pretty much the whole experience with "be what you want, do what you want".

But as it helped me grow as a creator (it drove me to study 3D Studio Max, Blender, Photoshop, Gimp and a bunch of other softwares for years) it didn't follow along the growth rate, and every minute studying just helped me to notice how harder it was to make something nice for SL than anywhere else. If you ever work with UDK, Unreal 4, even Unity, you will know that it's much easier to get something there to look and behave as you intended than it is in SL, and that is hell to content creation.

PG goes on to compare this to creation in Minecraft:

It's Now Possible to Make Video Calls from Minecraft

Yes, this was sponsored by Verizon as a marketing gimmick, but that just means it's one of the few (only?) cool things Verizon has been involved with:

Streaming About a Virtual World While His Real House Burns

"Japanese streamer Daasuke took a break from playing Minecraft to show off his new oil-match lighter," reports Kotaku. "That’s when things got bad. Real bad." Specifically, at about 4:45 min -- after which, it rapidly goes from bad to worse:

The child-like digital voice you hear, by the way, is connected to the IM text stream on this guy's video feed, which someone on Reddit helpfully translated:

• "Behind you. Behind you. Look Behind you."
• "The fire extinguisher. Use the fire extinguisher."
• "Call 119" (Japanese 911)
• "Don't you have a futon (thin Japanese mattress) you can put on it?"

According to translations of early Japan news reports, the Minecraft streamer and his family (he lived with his parents) are injured but fortunately alive, though their house is now largely gone. Two thoughts jump out at me, watching this:

John Carmack: "Crass Commercialization", Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse

Joyce Bettencourt is a longtime metaverse developer (and Rhiannon Chatnoir in Second Life), and she got a chance to grab OculusVR CTO John Carmack at the company's recent developer conference to talk Second Life, Minecraft, and the Metaverse in general-- so let's watch:

"[H]e leans more towards platforms like Minecraft, which is coming to Oculus and GearVR as having potential to lead towards a metaverse than say Second Life." Joyce summarizes. "He mentions that the lack of implicit 'what do I do and gameplay' as downsides to SL."

That's a very valid point, something I've discussed at length here and with Second Life's co-founders -- both Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, who expressed a desire to see Second Life add a gaming system after leaving Linden Lab, and then went on to lead Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR.

Anyway, more from Rhiannon, who provokes a good point from Carmack on how the metaverse will come about: