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Second Life Hype vs. Anti-Hype
The new GigaGamez site, part of the OM network, has a look today at the hype fight over Second Life. It's the new darling of media companies, but is increasingly attracting negative feedback by people who know a thing or two about the industry. James Wagner Au tries to sort out who is saying what, and provide a little context for the discussion. From the article: "Can they really build a fully streamed world comprised of tens of thousands of servers? That's way above my paygrade, but I'll guess that task fits under the rubric of Fricking Hard. Can they fix a profoundly unfriendly user interface and thoroughly disorienting first hour user experience, which are aggressively, almost intentionally unwelcoming to the vast majority of interested users? Both shortcomings are at the heart of Second Life's poor retention rates, but neither have significantly changed in the three years since its commercial release. You have to wonder, whatever their stated intentions, if Linden's tech-centric corporate culture simply puts their improvement at a low priority."
Sorry to any big fans here but my experience sucked. The user interface is incredibly unfriendly and unresponsive, the graphics are appalling, the animation shocking and the sound lamentable.
After playing WoW for a few months and seeing how fluid, beautiful and easy to use a virtual world can be, Second Life was a shocking kick in the nether regions. It reminded me of very early 3D games with no collision detection and collosal clipping issues.
Yes I know it's streamed and if that's the primary cause of it's issues then it shouldn't be.
Additionally, for my first hour I wandered around trying to find something to do but was profoundly ignored by my fellow "2nd lifers", presumably because I looked like a newb.
If the developers could at least sort out the shocking camera and other control issues I may consider retrying it. I spend about 10 minutes of my first hour working out how to unzoom the camera which was permanently stuck 50 yards behind my guy.
...(3.5 years and counting), I've seen it explode from scarcely 50 people online at a time to now more than 20,000.
:)
Since it began it's always had a hard time keeping new users. I think the way it's setup (completely user-created content, so there's less of a "wow" factor to people who just want to consume) means that you either "get it" and stay there, or you don't and leave immediately. The 10% churn rate cited in the article soudns about right; I've introduced something like two dozen people to SL, only one (my gf) stayed on, and that's probably only because I'm such a big fan of it.
SL needs a more compelling new user experience (professionally done content, some sort of direction, quests, whatever) if they want to keep people there for more than five minutes. PRoblem is, no matter how much professional content you throw at the newbie, once the newbie experience is done, you're still thrown in the middle of the content quagmire of SL; cube houses, poorly textured sex clubs, and rigged casinos.
For someone who just wants to experience things, unless you're incredibly social, you won't last in SL. For the creative types there's more of a stick.
Generally speaking, though, if you have to ask "what's the point of this place", you dont' get it.
hookers and grits.
Don't we wail about Newbies everywhere else? There could be a side benefit that only certain people "get it" and stay. Anyone who doesn't ... "doesn't deserve to be there".
...
And the benefit is that you have a Massively Multiplayer Game that lacks the Massively Multiplayer part
I could be wrong, but from my understanding Second Life was a game that was largely based around user generated content; the game gets better as you attract more people to develop interesting content within your game. If you actively discourage people from playing a game like this you will probably scare away a lot of people who could bring a lot of value to it; consider that a lot of "artistic" people have a great deal of difficulty just "getting" a user interface that makes sense to technical people.
I haven't played SL much. Just a few days as a n00b. But from what I gather, building objects (the confusing part) is a technical AND artistic. Designing objects is one thing, but then you have to script them to make them do interesting things. Scripting is technical. There is really no way to get around that. One might liken it to designing a website with Javascript and server side scripting. Doing it well is not easy. And it isn't for everyone.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death