The SL cultural gap

Building worlds is not the same as being able to build *within* worlds. I hope to see more of the latter in the future, not so much “modding/engine tools” if that makes sense. This spontaneous asset creation ability is something that sets SL apart from most, and being able to roll your own static world isn’t the same thing. I guess I’d like to see more poetry forums on the internet, than I would tools for people to make their own static poetry pages, to go with a web analogy- giving a soapbox to everyone is great, but giving people a space for conversation and collaboration is even better to me. I don’t know how that relates to Areae, we’ll all see that when it happens.

The very fact that you can call them all MMOs means that they have a significant level of similarity. That similarity is in part the definition of an MMO. The parts that aren’t are the places innovation can explore.

Think of it this way. We have a really large bucket labelled MMO and we can dump all of these things into the bucket. That’s useful when we’re comparing them to other buckets, like the Casual Game bucket or the Interactive Fiction bucket.

But it’s not useful when one of the items is World of Warcraft and another item is Second Life. So we don’t talk about MMOs; we talk about finer distinctions, like “game worlds” and “social worlds”.

If you’re a gamer, you probably won’t find much appeal in the social world bucket, but you might find lots of interesting stuff in the game world bucket. So interesting that you want to have lots of smaller buckets, like Diku-derived, space opera, skill-based, forced grouping. It would be unfair, however, for a gamer to write off all social worlds just because they’re in a different bucket, even if they might likewise write off skill-based games, because they like class-based or hybrid ones.

But if you’re interested in the social world bucket, then you might find lots of interesting distinctions there, too, like significant RMT, object oriented design, user-generated content, inter-user interaction. It would likewise be unfair for a social world enthusiast to write off game worlds, just because they’re in a different bucket. I’m biased, I know, because my background was in games, even though I have never tried out a graphical MMO aside from Second Life.

The differences between Second Life and other social worlds is important. They’re important because there are similarities. The similarities need to be acknowledged in order for the differences to matter. Some of the differences are good; some of them are bad; some of them… not so sure about. Similarities are context for differences; predictable patterns are context for disruptive changes.

Oh… and I hope you’re wrong about the gamers, because it suggests that, for those of us who want to change the game industry, there is no hope. And I like hope. I really like hope.

When people try to push the Kool-Aid of all the MUD-type of games as being like SL, and being proof that “nothing has been like SL,” they really are stretching their points way past the breaking point.

It’s like saying The Sims Online is a great social game that is part of the Metaverse. You can say, uh, ok, but it’s 2-D. It has no user-made content. It has very hobbling game constraints like having to go to the bathroom and feed yourself all the time and make money to prevent death, etc.

So TSO is nothing like SL at the end of the day — they only superficially bear some family resemblance. SL has user-made content, no game constraints, etc.

The idea that family resemblances should not only establish paternity and direct lineage, but also be invoked to maintain patriarchy just doesn’t wash with me : )

Sure, all the things that came before are like SL, but SL is quantitatively and qualitatively different. For those bent on clinging to their MUDs or wargames, of course it seems the same or even worse. That’s fine. Any objective study of the features and field testing will undo these prejudices. If they don’t, they are probably deeplly ingrained.

Active Worlds is an ancestor of

All of you are like saying, in a way, that Neandrathals and apes are ancestors of human beings as we know them today.

Yes, you can trace a line, especially if you are an evolutionist.

So?

Yes, those who are saying “SL is basically LamdaMOO are basically pretty silly, looking only at some basic characteristics and not other issues of scale and quality. You can say human beings are apes. You can say even that they are only $23 worth of carbon and other chemicals in a bottle. Or you can say there is something pretty different and amazing about creatures that can talk and think and affect their world far beyond what apes or a glass of chemicals can do.

I sincerely hope that Raph doesn’t try to make Just Another Wargame like WoW and also falls into the spell of Gigantism.

There is something to be said for allowing a world to be smaller and grow more slowly like Eve Online or even SL.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t attend a concert or play put on by other players, or purchase items for my home from other players, or go on a nature hike with a bunch of friends avatars. Those things happen all the time in the “game” worlds too – they’re not unique to SL.

Well, yes, David, I’ll have to take your word for it, but I just have never seen this happen and when I watch others playing WoW, they aren’t goofing around, listening to concerts or taking hikes. I think of all the people I know doing these games and discussing them, only Zero Grace (Tony Walsh) seems to do wierd stuff like just hike around WoW and look at it. I’ve tried it myself, but it’s hard, because you’re always feeling this pull, that you should be fighting, leveling.

I realize that the games Raph made had this berry-picking stuff. But frankly, hey, I know when I’m being put on the slower girls’ baseball team and when I’m not put at the Big People’s table. I know that if I’m on the berry track, I’m lame. That’s been abundantly clear. You can pat me on the head, but I know I’m on the feebs and choads list.

Yes, a seamless experience matters, because that audience isn’t tolerant of having giant penises pop up next to them for no reason. Yes, rewarding people regularly matters because nobody likes feeling stupid. Yes, guiding users matters because people who are confused walk away from things. Yes, instant enjoyability matters, because you lose people who find tasks onerous. People quit jobs because they are onerous, put parents in assisted care, walk away from their loved ones — mere Second Lives fall far lower down the scale than those things.

Raph, the miracle of Second Life, if I could put it that way without getting another whallop for being starry-eyed, is that even when the giant penis materializes in your community sandbox (yecth I had like 10 of them the other day, and set on physics and flexi prims and operated by 2 griefing script kiddies)– you somehow just keep going because it’s a footnote. The first member of our group called SimArts in the Sims Online who came to SL got the giant ramming penis treatment near the entrance gate, and got called names, but he still came back a month later and today is one of the main architects and content-creators. If ever there is a place that makes you feel stupid, it is the SL user interface, yes. Imagine, I owned an entire sim, before I found this thingie on the panel finally that actually showed my land listed so that if I needed to teleport to it I could. Once I bought some land and couldn’t remember where it was and had no idea how I’d ever find it again, and actually went for days not knowing about this obscure pulldown from a pulldown from somewhere — it’s really got a lot of under-the-hood type skirts showing that really, don’t need to show. (Like…I’m going to know what debugging is and want to change my avatar vertex — whatever that is lol — must be something abuot turning — if I’m not a total geek?)

But again…a footnote. It’s not the center of gravity. I also came to SL and then left for a year, it was too hard to fit in and figure out what to do.I guess I see a fair amount of that, frankly, people exist for 3-6-9 months. I realize that it’s not a solution for you. But obviously you’re the kind of guy who just makes your own game rather than wait around for everybody else to get theirs seamless : )

What I always say about SL is that it is good *enough*. Tekkies and geek types especially have huge demands on it. I’m easy. If the avatar footsteps don’t have shadows or the prims rubber band when being torqued, ok, well, fix it when you can, I’m good.

“And yet you can only say any of that because of your knowledge of history.”

No. I say that now because of my Personal Experience and Insight, not by reading or studying about someone else’s.

“You see a pattern where people who are otherwise intelligent repeat mistakes even though you believe they should know better. You anticipate the future and judge, based on these past patterns, that knowledge of history will not change the arrogance of people.”

No. I see a pattern where everyone – including myself – falls into the trap of arrogantly assuming that someone else’s mistakes will be avoided because of an assumption that they were lesser individuals or because they didn’t have History to guide them. That’s not based on history. That’s based on us being fallible, imperfect creatures with an occasional tendency to be overly certain of our own abilities.

“Your argument is that because some people are arrogant, there is no point to learning history, because those people won’t get anything from it. Do tell if I got that wrong.”

You got it wrong. I never said there was “no point to learning history”. I’m saying that learning history is not enough.

Furthermore, whether we fall prey to the same mistakes is often (not always) a measure of how well we deal with our own arrogance… and that applies to all of us. I’m plenty arrogant, but I try very hard not to assume that I’m smarter than the person who came before me and failed. I do that now based on my personal experiences. Instead, I tend to apply my arrogance to those behind me.

“I never claimed history was a silver bullet. Nothing is. To address your objection, you should be condemning arrogance, not history.”

And I wasn’t responding to you in regards to this subject. I started off by responding to someone else who made a claim I considered too far-reaching and presumptious. You then lept in to defend it by effectively arguing that knowing history and applying logic allowed people to avoid mistakes. Recall your assertions:

1) Studying history provides knowledge of history. 2) Knowledge of history permits comparison between the past and the present. 3) Comparison permits seeing patterns, such that you can anticipate the future based on similar patterns. 4) Anticipating the future provides you with the opportunity to change its course.

If you do #4, then you are either A) lucky, B) genius, or C) a student of history.

To #1 – incorrect. Studying history provides a limited knowledge of what has gone before. Not absolute knowledge.

To #2 – incorrect. Sometimes what we understand and know historically can be used in a comparison. If the information is biased or otherwise flawed or doesn’t sufficiently account for any number of variables, the comparison suffers.

To #3 – comparison sometimes permits seeing potential patterns. Nothing more.

To #4 – anticipating the future may or may not provide an opportunity, because any anticipation – especially any prediction based on limited, non-scientifically rigorous historical data – is only a guess.

“My claim is this: knowledge of history provides the opportunity to make decisions based on the anticipation of the future. The opportunity. That was what post #43 was about.”

Opportunity is not a guarantee. You seem to believe that by studying history one can avoid repeating the mistakes of those who have come before; to seize an opportunity and be successful. Recall your: a) lucky, b) genius, c) student of history. You somehow forgot d) failure. Because you neglected to consider that there even *is* a d), you’re saying that this “opportunity” always leads to success, thus you’re showing signs of arrogance. Welcome to the club.

“Knowledge can never provide anything but opportunity.”

Again, that includes the opportunity to fail. Knowledge that a bird flaps its wings X beats/minute led plenty of early aerospace engineers (one of my professional fields) to their death by mimic’ing them. By breaking from established convention, humans solved the problem of flight. Had they followed your guidance, we’d either still be trying to mimic birds and fly by flapping or would have concluded – as many did – that humans were not destined to fly.

“I’m not dropping it because I don’t think you’re stupid”

I try not to be. I’m not always successful.

“because I think you agree with me”

No. I don’t.

“and because I cannot understand why you’re still disagreeing, and I want to know why you are.”

And I cannot understand why someone who would apply logic to this situation would *not* carry it further and thus realize that there is no such thing as a perfect understanding of history. And that’s what you’re suggesting.

I don’t even understand some of what I do. How on earth can I ever get into the head of some historical figure, which is only part of what I’d likely need to avoid making the same mistakes under the same circumstances? How can anyone presume to think that they can fully put themselves into the place of someone else? That requires a level of arrogance even I don’t possess.

“And most especially, if I’m wrong, then I’d prefer to know so that I can throw away these big, fat books that I’m now being told are worthless, or at least con people into giving me lots of money for them.”

Once again you’re drawing conclusions that seem odd to me. I never said knowledge of history is “worthless”. I said assuming that studying history ensures us that we don’t repeat its mistakes, is a fallacy. We cannot have a perfect knowledge of history because our understanding of historical events varies in accuracy and relevance, and because historical events are not always accurately recorded.

Consequently, one can only look to history as an imperfect guide and attempt to apply it judiciously… as Prok is apparently doing. Nothing more. And one can only guess at the future based on that imperfect guide. How well one adapts what is understood of what occurred previously to the almost certainly different circumstances ahead, will determine success or failure.

Hi, Raph and Raph’s fans — it’s Miller Copeland of “In The Grid,” who wrote that quote you reference and respond to here. First, thanks for weighing in with your opinion on what I said; and now that I’ve seen it described this way, I think there’s definitely something to what you say about SL’s self-proscribed insularity. And more, I think most SL regulars would end up insulting people more when trying to justify the insularity, lending a lot of credence to the charge you mention of considering SL “exceptional.” For me, I can only answer to what I know; that Second Life is the first graphical computer “game” I’ve “played” with regularity since Galaga in 1983, and that I’m one of many middle-aged people who completely missed the entire console and Windows-heavy online gaming phenomenon. Like I said, now that you’ve put it this way here, I can see how that’s part of the problem; that to make SL more a part of the general conversation, maybe we in SL should go out and explore more systems ourselves.

A big part of it, of course, is that Linden Lab lets people have a powerful experience for free, as long as they want; not a lot of these other MMORPGs work under such a system. And of course that Second Life embraces Mac owners in a way that most of these other systems don’t; and I’m a lifelong Mac person (a former graphic designer — what a surprise!), who doesn’t necessarily want to give that up if he can help it. Also, as a former professional creative, the idea of a completely open-source universe is a powerful one; I’m just not sure how many of these other systems I’d be able to take for very long, if I wasn’t allowed full control over building my own stuff and running my own entrepreneurial projects.

I’d be willing to explore more MMO environments, if these things were to come to pass at more of them; or if I could just make some more discretionary income soon, and buy myself a screaming-fast Windows set-up that can actually handle all this gaming software. Maybe if I and other “SL exclusives” can branch out to some other environments, other MMO gamers could start embracing a little more of the SL ethos; and maybe finally we could get an environment with console-style speed and complexity but Second-Life-style user content (a goal I think many of us would like to see; how about it, Multiverse developers?). Thanks again for your thoughts, and for letting me see the subject in a new light.

“Okay, so should we just shoot the people who act illogically and leave them in a dumpster?”

I’m not suggesting that at all. I’m warning against the kind of arrogance I’ve seen over the last half century and which I’m starting to believe I’m seeing now.

“What’s your point? What does that have anything to do with knowing the history of your interests?”

My point was simple: knowing history is no guarantee of avoiding its repetition. Assuming someone like Prok is merely ignoring history is a mistake. There’s a big difference between ignoring something and knowing when it applies.

“What does that have anything to do with history? I know. Some people can’t count no matter how much book-learning they do. Why teach math? Some people are never going to figure out the subtleties of Cervantes. Why teach literature?”

Cute comments don’t change anything.

“Now I’m getting pissed, so I’m just going to back off and leave it. Then again, if I did that, I might have learned something from my own history. Gee whiz, what a thought.”

But you *didn’t* back off. Your sarcastic comment lost its edge the minute you hit “Submit Comment”. Was it arrogance that led you to submit this post after I was willing to let it drop?

However, as you’re getting emotional and do wish to pursue this, then let’s do so logically and without emotion.

Let’s start with a very simple and logical question: Is historical documentation flawless and complete?

And by that I mean, is it always objective or does it include subjective perspectives? And also by that I mean, does it include every facet that would be required to absolutely avoid repeating it? For example, if I read a history book about some event, will it include an accurate and sufficiently complete accounting of *all* the elements that went into the decisions made (including the personal thoughts and motivations of the decision makers)?

Ever heard the phrase, “The victorious write the history books”? Ever heard the term “revisionist history”? Ever heard news stories of school textbooks being revised due to inaccuracies deliberately passed on by those who didn’t want some things documented?

Given those things, does anyone believe that the articles we read on places like Gamasutra about the making of “game x” are unbiased?

I don’t. The people providing those 20/20 hindsight pieces are, you can be sure, careful in what they communicate. After all, they still have to work and earn a living, don’t they? Just imagine if a producer admitted that a project was late because instead of putting in the hours he was getting addicted to a drug on the side, or having an illicit affair. That kind of honesty would make the news because it’s almost never going to happen.

Now, if historical documents do *not* provide the kinds of rigorous scientific documentation necessary to treat them with the logic you seem to believe they deserve, then how are humans supposed to avoid repeating mistakes based on intrepreted, biased and often incomplete data?

They can’t. History is not scientifically rigorous. And *even* if people had the information they needed to make better decisions, my experience is that one failing above all others will lead them to repeat someone else’s mistakes: arrogance. Never fails.

instant enjoyability, guiding users, rewarding experiences on a regular basis, obvious interfaces, a premium on seamlessness (no lag, no disruptions, etc). if I had to pick which side would benefit more from a cultural exchange, there is zero doubt in my mind that it’s the SL side

I had to burst out laughing at this, Michael. Seriously.

Sounds to me like what you want is a *game*. You want this to be *entertaining like a game is*. But it isn’t. That’s not a cultural gap on the SL side, it’s a cultural gap on the game side. No, life doesn’t have instant enjoyment often; neither does second life. You don’t have a rote routine to enter in that assures you instant and sustained enjoyment end to end; you enter an open-ended situation where you might make your own enjoyment, or you might not.

It might be enjoyable for you to log on an have a game where a guy tells you to go spear the boars and you go spear them. That may give you inner satisfaction. It doesn’t me. I log on, there’s no guy, there’s no spear, there’s no pigs. I either decide to make the spear-pigs — see *I’m* the guy! — or I don’t. And I do some other thing. I go watch a guy script a chicken; I buy his chicken to decorate my yard, whatever.

As for obvious interfaces, what would that mean? the Wow interface looks to me as complicated as an airplane pilot’s console. I watch kids playing it and I don’t know how they can follow all the menus, boxes, inventories, points, powers, etc. It’s awesome. It’s obvious to them, but not to me.

The SL user face and activity is 100 times simpler than WoW, trust me. Or Eve OnLine, which I’ve also visited and tried to play. These games are damn hard. “The Escapist” once covered an article about a woman trying to figure out these things — they are not intuitive.

The SL user panel has stuff wrong with it — but it’s different stuff than you think, like parts of it being too geeky and Windowsy — it needs to have SEARCH moved from the bottom to the top, centered, and made bigger, even cartoony.

As for lag and disruptions, well, some of the things that create enjoyment create lag. I’m sure the 50 people at a concert or a sex club tolerate the lag better than you who find it boring because there’s no shooter game, or what there is, is consumed with lag.

Seamlessness is probably something you cannot expect in a world where there are other people making stuff. But that gives it its surprise and life.

“I think Prokofy doesn’t understand why it’s useful to look at the experiences of previous virtual worlds, text or graphical. It’s to prevent yourself from making the same mistakes that were made in the past.“

Why would I be foolish enough to ignore the experience of other worlds and previous worlds? State the case, and we’ll look at them. Unfortunately, the experience is about things that don’t apply at all in SL — they are all about a synthetic world, where the big debates seem to be things like “Gee, they made this level too hard!” “Gosh, they allowed gold-farming and ebay sales!” “Awww, they removed my favourite form of combat!”. I’m sorry, but these don’t get as intellectually compelling for me as issues like how you administer a land market to remain free and have equal access (if not outcome) in an emulated-land world, etc. — the issues are just more complex and more interesting. I realize that the TN eggheads can wrest the most bizarre thinky stuff out of games like “gender this and empowerment that and identity the next thing” in keeping with all the fashions of academe but again, it seems neither intellectually compelling or even academically rigorous.

No doubt there are many issues that are interesting — then articulate them? Don’t expect people to sit through weeks of leveling up and enjoying the WOOT in order to “get it”.

And, just because I don’t feel particularly moved to go sit in a MUD and see if my tiny me can be raped by some other tiny me, or learn whatever lesson I’m suppose to learn in an online environment *again,* doesn’t mean I don’t find it interesting. I always keep up with Raph’s blog precisely because he is able to write about the primarily game/war worlds in a way that *is* intellectually interesting and fun.

Ultimately, I remain puzzled why Raph felt he had to extrapolate from my one lonely battle against a prominent geek-hero like Clay Shirky that all of SL is a cultural wasteland filled with the “parochial” who are doomed to repeat history because they didn’t read about it in one of his books or another game god book.

I have no idea what csven’s insinuation is here, I won’t tackle it.

David, if the economic/social/crafting/puzzles aspects of these games were really the center of gravity you say — I’d be in them. I tried ATID for a good long while, but I just got sick of having to be forced into groups to “level up”. It was too hard and boring. I must have walked thousands of miles in that game, never finding a soul, carrying a sack of mud.

csven: However, sometimes the exact opposite occurs: poor choices and mistakes are repeated.

The point is to look at the past, not copy it. Poor choices and mistakes are repeated without looking. Why do you think Richard Bartle (used to be) on a near-constant rant about people on Terra Nova not having read the MUD-Dev list? They were asking the same questions over.

Michelle said: Ultimately, we could create a plane of ‘worlds’, with seriousness on one axis and by-design priming on the other. ‘Real Life’ is the most strongly primed, and very serious.

Real Life is actually very weakly primed. Like social network sites, you’re primed by the people who bring you in. Your parents, in this day and age, or whoever raises you, provide the first lens with which you see the world.

Michelle said: Michael puts forward an interesting idea for a means to help introduce players to SL, but this was the dilemma I was talking about in my second reply. A detailed new user experience along such lines would be stating that the point to SL is to make in-game items.

And I’m not convinced this isn’t actually true. (And if it isn’t true, then I would guess I could develop a learning curve for that, too.) There isn’t a whole lot to do in SL that’s generic to the world. Sure, you should learn interface controls, but that’s basic and as a friend of mine who tried Second Life last night put it: “kinda clunky. Also, it keeps crashing, which is obnoxious.” I’m actually a touch impressed she tried several times.

What else can you learn? How to chat? That’s covered by Orientation Island. Seeing new things? You get a deeper appreciation for that by building things and seeing what’s easy to do and what’s hard. Interacting with objects? Also covered by Orientation Island, though bad enough that I still can’t get the jet I have a copy of to work. Maybe it’s not supposed to work. =P

Come to think of it, I think my main barrier to SL is the fact that it’s graphical…

David, I agree heartily with absolutely everything you say, word for word. Stay in SWG. Please. Do NOT come to SL. Please. Please. Spread the word that it is not a good choice. Do a public service. It’s a waste of time and money for what you seek; it is also a huge devaluation of OUR time and money because most people in SL trying to build and script and do things there are NOT making combat games and do NOT want to play shoot-em’-up.

I’ll be blunt: all you get to do with the SWG/Star Wars/Jedi sort of themes in SL is pose in your kick-ass avatars with your kick-ass weapons and make screen shots, socialize, and fly around and do a bit of skirmishing but nothing at all even remotely like the fighting you can do in a real game. At best, use it for the times when your favourite shooting games are in maintenance, to plan raids or make fan fic or costumes. But don’t expect to *transplant* your game into this setting.

The lag, the problems, and the limits of the engine for doing FPS games are all huge obstacles. Trying to portray SL as some kind of sturdy war games structure is absurd. It just isn’t. Many fanboyz nobly try to lipstick this chicken — it doesn’t beautify it.

As a result, what you have, are angry, frustrated SWG players who have spent a mint sometimes on an island they’ve spent months building out with really beautiful builds which are only stagesets. And in their frustration, they turn to becoming griefing assholes.

I’ve had so many bad experiences with griefing, cheating, prim-overloading Star Wars RP types that today, I have to simply reject them as tenants. I say: “No RP here” simply because they will never be changing their true stripes and suddenly dropping guns and shooting and war RP just because they are in a suburban rental. I find that because I have some large and cheaper rentals, I get aggravated again and again by kids who play Star Wars dying for some place to go, since they are locked out.

The problem is that when I used to pay the tier on an entire sim and had a free and open combat sim, a lot of them couldn’t cope with the openness of it. They didn’t want a game that would wipe daily. So I made a non-wiping sandbox. I said, let’s have builds stay, just for a very small token price. But, like everything else in SL, instead of being a place where various teams could come and make interesting builds and play, it became a place you had to constantly police for people either putting up money scams or griefing the entire space in order to make it unusable. I was just a dilettante making a combat sim, without enough knowledge. It was one of my biggest mistakes in SL and I sold it quick.

A far more competent fellow named Clubside Granville, with 20 years of programming experience and a manager of various websites and other online games, came in and build a very compellilng and well-built combat sim. It had everything you wanted. It was even possible for a rube like me to actually walk into it as merely an observer and have the others not shoot me because I wasn’t armed and wasn’t signed into the war game. So it was a lot of fun, for shooters and non-shooters. But, like many such projects in SL, it died for a host of reasons — lag, builds disappearing, patches, and I think probably the inability of LL to find the time and the will to engage with the makers and users of a combat sim that were *not* in their ilttle circle of friends. Bedazzled once made an FPS sim too — it was a laggy disaster too.

It’s stupid. You can call me discriminatory as I personally attempt to deal with this constant problem in SL, but I don’t allowe shooting, weapons, pushing, security orbs because most adults coming into SL in fact are females and older males these days — look at the demographics. They don’t yearn for the activities of the younger male demographics involving shooting and first-person RP war gaming.

So please, stay in SWG. It’s more fun. You are absolutely right. You can only wind up spending way too much money on Star Wars memorabilia and assets that may look good in a screenshot, or be fun to play, but are like an elaborate museum or backdrop – you can’t really play them.

There’s a reason why games are like they are — closed, proprietary, even static. It’s because all those things are required to render the game experience people want. It’s not fair to take people who are shooters and then spend time chasing them around the grid trying to ban them for 3 days because they are shooting — I hold the Lindens solely to blame for that, because in their zeal to sell this platform, they cravenly appealed to the MMORPG shooter game crowds. They come in guns ablazin’, annoy the shit out of everybody in the welcome areas, and treat the whole of SL as their war sandbox. The builds that people have struggled to make for completely different purposes are constantly subjected to bombing and strafing and griefing sessions because the SWG types think, well, game gods have made this interesting setting for me to have my instance in. They aren’t wrong. They have, through their indifference and slavish devotion to licentiousness.

I totally agree that money-making should not be a facet for entertainment. The ruleset of expectations should not place the stress on people to go make money even to play the game. It would be one thing if, like the Sims Online, they had a ready-made job object to click on and get started with instantly to survive. But in SL, only the legions of dance-pad camp-chair kings that create a gambling economy are available, along with the sex industry, as readily available jobs. If the MMORPG expectation of having “jobs” that in fact are things like quests or pizza-making in TSO were available OR if it were made abundantly clear that there are no such “jobs,” then the annoying camp-chair phenom might die out.

In this sense, the idea of having the Lindens prime the world seems logical — shoudn’t they can the shooters on their front web page and the avatars in shiny armour, and focus on the couples and the socializing and the creativity of people making gadgets? But…they don’t. That is, advertising, that isn’t quite a “prime” of the world, might be a good place to start to dump the FPS types.

of course, I’m certain a fanboy will come on now and say, why, I have a sim with a combat game that is state of the art and we have 20,000 traffic blah blah blah. But, let’s face it — it’s laggy and doesn’t work. None of these lag and rez problems ever occur in WoW because they have their own content and not competing custom content.

what the Lindens have done instead is not prime but make it free. They say, well, try making a shooting game. Try keeping shooters out if you don’t like them. So instead of priming, they make ever more elaborate parcel tools to control every aspect of the shooting process. First, make it an option only to be pushed, Then remove all script action by non-group scripts. Then remove the ability of others to make objects. Or to even fly in at all, etc. etc. This confusing menu of options now is a hurdle new people have to cross — first they have to get shot, and seek help, before they begin to toggle all the right switches (that is why I proposed that all lots be defaulted to non-push, making the minority of shooters do the toggles, instead of the majority of non-shooters).

The Lindens persist in their licentious libertarianism — but then, they have their logic, as they want to make a world free for everybody and they want YOU to do the prime. But…I still feel a tiny bit of guidance wouldn’t hurt.

Don’t forget that their first moments in their own created world were dominated by them shooting the hell out of everything, breaking up buildings, and even accomplishing terraforming by bombing land to smithereens. There is a real inherant destuctiveness in this creativity that isn’t controlled. And it’s because they, too, came out of arcade and mmorpg culture which largely involves shooting and killing everything.

I think it will take more than a generation to evolve that violent facet of their creation out of them and other game gods. Or maybe never, as it is an inherent feature of the real human being, too.

I thought I would throw my perspective into this as an MMO player (ok, sometimes an armchair designer, but really just a player).

Recently, someone visited the forums for our SWG guild/city and made us a pitch about how we should all come play Second Life, where other ex-SWG players had created sets of Star-Wars themed skins, lightsabers, and all sorts of other Star Wars goodniess. And hey, it’s free to play, unless we want to own land, and that costs some money.

The response from just about everyone was a resounding “no thanks”. For many it was the idea that we’d have to shell out real money, and in some cases a lot of real money, if we wanted to do some of the things that we can do in very unlimited way in SWG for a $15/month subscription. To a lot of players, whether they’re the more social/roleplay oriented type of player or whether they’re the more adventure/hack-n-slash type of player, the whole RMT/microtransaction model is a scary prospect, because everyone is worried that they’ll actually end up spending more than they would have with a subscription (not to mention the social stigma around RMT in general – even in a world where it’s part of the world, people still feel a little wrong doing it). So that was a big reason that a large part of MMO user base just doesn’t “get” SL.

My response, and you can take it for what it’s worth, was that I am actually put off by a completely free-form world. I consider myself a “contextual roleplayer”, by which I mean that I roleplay within the confines of the established setting and use the setting to help build the persona of my character. In a setting-less game, it would be much harder for me to build a unique identity and roleplay within it, and I’d end up out-of-character more often than not. Now I realize that it is very possible to create settings in SL for people to roleplay in, but there would always be that knowledge out there that not everyone else is playing in the same setting is me or has agreed to be bound by the same rules of that setting, and at least to me, that threatens my level of immersion.

To use Michelle’s terms, I actually prefer VWs that do some priming by providing us a setting, and a ruleset of some form. It provides a sense of security – of some sort of rules of the reality that I’m playing in. It gives me as a player the expectation that everything I encounter is going to fit into an established context. I understand that’s not what SL is trying to accomplish, and it’s not really trying to be a “game” at all, but I think that this sort of thing may be a very big piece of the “divide” between SL users and other MMO users. Heck, I know a lot of MMO players who are all over stuff like MySpace who still don’t really think SL would be very fun.

It also doesn’t help normal players like me that nearly all the press we see about SL is about someone making real-world money by running a virtual business. We all look at that and say “it’s cool that they can do that”. But at the same time, we also all realize at some level that other players, potentially many other players, are the source of all that income. The press makes it seem like this is what SL is all about. Most of us struggle enough to achieve financial success in the real world, and we’re not really interested in risking what little of that we’ve had by trying to do it again (in our recreational time) in a virtual world. In other words, as long as it’s just Monopoly money, we’re cool. We’ll go earn it (in-context) and spend it freely. But tie it to our real world wallets and we’re much less likely to want to do that. Maybe if the media focused on other things – like some of the amazing user-created content that’s in SL – instead of focusing on how much money people are making there, then more people might be interested and might buy into the concept.

I think that society has potentially caused itself all kinds of problems with the word ‘game’. We’ve ended up having discussions over what should or should not be considered a game, without actually looking at what matters. Why do people begin to get involved with something? Why do they stick around? Is it fun?

Making something fun and enjoyable does not automatically make something a game, and the more fun something is, the more likely people are to dedicate themselves to it.

That’s why I’ve been using VW (Virtual World) rather than ‘game’. If you look at many of the industry leaders, the game itself as provided is fairly minimal, and a fair percentage of the playerbase is involved more in other activities than the game as originally provided. They run guilds, they roleplay (some games prime the roleplaying more than others, however), they create content.

If you look at the activities of many of it’s editors, Wikipedia has clearly become more of a virtual world than an encyclopedia, and certainly some people play the wiki game.

A theory of fun (the concept, rather than the book, but I hear it’s good ) is required before you can build a theory of ‘game’. Thinking briefly on the topic, a game is simply something that is taken less seriously than what you are comparing it to.

Ultimately, we could create a plane of ‘worlds’, with seriousness on one axis and by-design priming on the other. ‘Real Life’ is the most strongly primed, and very serious. Most MMORPGs are medium-to-strongly primed, and not that serious. Second life is without priming, but is not sure where it wants to be in terms of seriousness. Those using SL for business wish it to be very serious, yet those who arrive at SL from reading about it in the press are more likely to wish for something less serious than their ‘first life’.

Ace is entirely correct in saying that the users of Second Life provide the priming, as it is within internet forums and IRC. I’m not entirely sure however of the suitability of this for a commercial enterprise, however.

Michael puts forward an interesting idea for a means to help introduce players to SL, but this was the dilemma I was talking about in my second reply. A detailed new user experience along such lines would be stating that the point to SL is to make in-game items. Although this is how a significant number of players enjoy themselves, I don’t think this is something they would agree on, and it runs quite contrary to what Linden Labs needs to present in order to ensure their press appeal.

The discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is exactly why I partake in things here. Thank you, you’ve introduced me to a valuable resource for design theory!

Its interesting to see the different reactions in the “main stream” i.e tradiational gaming world to getting what the game companies want to get. By this I mean over the last few years you see article after article by the game makers talking about reaching a wider audience – finding new demographics etc.
When SL acually does this – the player base is largly different than “the core gamers” that the companies have been trying to reach past to widen markets. Its amusing to see the reaction of the “core gamers” and to a large extent the game makers that were pontificating about the broader marke when they see an example of what they are asking for.
Its like the Newtonians vs. the Quamtum guys all over again

Im not attacking either side , Im just saying its strange to see the huge reaction as people try to fit “what they say they wanted” ( in the case of the game makers, I dont think the core audience cared if the field broadened or not they already had what they wanted) into thier view of the game world. SL is just the first differnet online “game” to get big enough to have been noticed and I think we will see even wilder reactions in the future to new directions if the industry acually does spread out to new things and new approaches.

The natural reaction of all the sides trying to fit it into one view will be a larger hurdle than creating the products that reach wider or new audiences. And I think ulimatly futile. Most people will realise that there isnt one view of whats right or correct and all the hub ub will die down. The SL hype and the SL bashing will die off as the Newtonians realise that Quantum doesnt invalidate thier view it just discribes a different solution to a different problem and there is room for growth in all the areas. and the Quamtum guys will realize that thier stuff isnt that revolutionary and didnt spring full born from the navel of god and just get on with growing in thier area.

While they both gang up to fight off those new String Theory heritics.

You could say that the SL chatsphere is inward looking, maybe it is… There’s an element of siege mentality with us sometimes. On the other hand, you could say that a thriving multi-cultural exchange buzzing around all the other MMO things isn’t any more outward looking, because under the skin all those games are just the same thing. It’s like a lot of people enthusing about 100 varieties of apples pointing at the couple of people in the corner who got hold of a satsuma, and saying “aren’t they inward looking, they never talk about apples, they know nothing of the history of apples. What’s the big deal about oranges anyway?” People are still arguing over what kind of fruit SL is.

Michelle’s posts are a good reminder of the game/no game debate. She wants more priming to give people a clue to the rules of the game. I don’t like the game label for SL, not out of some need to rise above anything, but because it’s just really unhelpful. It’s pragmatic to say SL isn’t a game. You play whatever game you bring with you, or join someone elses. It’s playground stuff. You can play in the sandpit, or on the climbing frame, or play tag or dolls. The way people used to play before someone had the idea of feeding them scripted interactive vignettes to star in.

In some ways we are priming new user experiences- where they end up in their first couple of days can define what SL is to them, at least for a while. Just like in RL, where your “world” tends to consist of the places you visit daily- home, work, family/friends home, sports club, pub etc. All our worlds are different, and overlap in various places.

So when I signed up to SL last July, it was to visit a building that Always_Black made- a virtual construct of his website called the _blacklibrary. I looked round it for an evening and left SL for about two months not seeing any point. The next time I looked in again, there were people there to talk to, and something clicked. I’ve been in SL since, and did what I could to help out at the library, making it my home location for months. New people would visit, and I guess in some way their SL was primed for them by the group of people that hung around at the library- the same as was and is going on at all kinds of locations in SL. Most of the ones that hung around for a week with us at the library I still see showing up online- they “stuck”. I’m not saying we were the ideal greeters, but I suppose our group appealed to a certain kind of visitor, and they liked having a familiar feeling peer group with them while they discovered what was in SL for them on their own terms.

I am a big fan of the language of spaces and constructs- I like doors and stairs in a world that needs neither, for their iconic reasons as much as the fun of walking up or through them. So yes, a bench is a good indicator of a view to be admired. What’s better, though, is someone sat on the bench to say “Hi there, come see the view.”

Any kind of priming will have an agenda behind it- that’s the point, after all, to influence the early experience and development of the people in the world. What you want really is a way to catch new people to talk to and encourage without being uncool in the way that “help” or “orientation” places are. Who reads the manual, let alone submits to being lectured at? I put myself in the place of the “good stuff” new people rushed to- a sex club. Get people talking and you find they hit these places out of curiosity mainly, but when they develop friendships out of discussion they go on to do “more productive” things with their time.

That was longer than I meant for it to be.

I wanted more detail, Frank, so I found this site on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Faculty site, so I assume it’s credible. He swaps 5 and 6. http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom1.html The taxonomy seems more to be a directional list.

I wrote this a couple years back: http://raccaldin36.livejournal.com/506551.html and also wrote http://www.aqualgidus.org/definition-of-love.html#3.2 this summer.

I never thought I’d apply my musings on educational content to virtual world design, but it makes a surprising amount of sense. Thanks. So, digging in.

A dome for newbies? They have that. It’s called “Orientation Island” or “Welcome Island”. But you can’t really have much fun there, and who wants to sit and read notecards. You learn by doing in these places and having something you want to do badly enough that you’ll learn how to do it. And that’s why a lot of people don’t stick — they don’t want anything there badly enough to stick it out, and if it isn’t served up quickly enough, they leave.

That’s the point, Prokofy. “Orientation Island” is NOT the dome, because Orientation Island is bloody boring. The vast majority of games have an equivalent, but they’re a touch above boring. Most of these at least have you committing the great rite of killing your first virtual helpless blob. But it’s more interesting than reading a bunch of information.

The first thing you have to define is an educational objective that you’re actively trying to achieve. In the case of Second Life, I’d suggest it be becoming an active builder, to use MOO terminology. If you don’t make it that far, you would at least have sufficient knowledge to be a decent critic. If you don’t get that far, you would at least have sufficient exposure to be able to enjoy it as it is, rather than having a skewed image of it. The step after builder would likely be business owner, and LL is already working on that with SLdevU, and I’m still pissed they held in SF where I couldn’t attend.

So, I would put “desire to know” first up. The way you do that is by showing off things that other people have made. So the dome should include a museum gallery of sorts, windows into other places. Heck, make an interaction with them capable of transporting you there. James Au seems to feature a couple places every so often, and I know some other people are doing something similar, so that’s plenty of fodder.

Then you’d need to provide tutorials for actually building things. Last I checked, these didn’t exist. So take, say, three disparate components. Maybe a cube, a texture, and a cone. Teach them how to build something simple with these.

Then do something mindlessly simple as feedback. Have “recipes”, where the idea is to construct some arrangement/texture. Succeeding at this gives you points. The points are absolutely useless, though maybe you could convert them to L$ at a 1:1000 rate. Or perhaps let residents offer special deals or exclusive activities as rewards. Take these points, though–okay, I lied, not totally useless–and use them to unlock new recipes. Eventually, you unlock all the recipes. Intermediate arrangements should include scripts. Naturally, the last ones will be pretty hard to create, but succeeding will still give you that fiero of achievement.

When you’ve built it all the way to “the end”, you have nothing left to do, so like a college kid whose parents have gotten fed up with him, you get tossed out on your butt and you have to figure things out from there. If people don’t stick after they’ve spent all this time on the tutorials, then they probably wouldn’t stick anyways.

Whew. That was kinda fun. I have no idea why system design is fun for me; I just get an idea and start spinning yarns. Anyways, all the ideas re: the newbie dome/zone in this comment are free for the taking. No credit necessary, blah, blah, yay for MIT licenses. And now I need to spend some quality time with my subconscious, and whatever dark fantasies might lurk in those depths.

…like…angler fish? Pretty light…

Regarding your link to the Tree of Remembrance.

I appreciate this story; I appreciate that it is written in 1998; I appreciate that this represents a generic issue for all worlds and games, the nexus between the real person, who might die, and the avatar, who might find a way to live beyond death.

And it even mentions the Velveteen Rabbit, something I was going to raise here, but felt would only lead to be being harassed and pilloried on sites with names like Vom This or Vom That. But it’s like that.

But…Raph, seriously, do you think that if we hadn’t read that essay that is a touchstone for you from 1998; if we didn’t know the Norwegian girl; if we didn’t grok through the wierdness involved in this:

“Code was changed so that items left in this manner became permanent parts of the world.”

(gaah, a player has to *die in RL* to get these devs to change their damn game!).

But that’s ridiculous. To say that sort of thing — which you seem to be doing with all your pedigree stuff here — is to say something like, oh, in RL human experience, the African mother who loses her son to a war and weeps in the desert three centuries ago is unconnected to the Russian mother who loses her son in a war 25 years ago or an Iraqi mother who loses her son in a war today. They all have the same common human experience. They all lost their sons. The Russian mother didn’t have to first bone up on the African mother’s experience and learn the history of grieving to be able to know that she hurt over her son’s death.

that’s what I don’t like about your premises — the idea that those of us who didn’t realize, “Wow, a person online that I can come to know in some unique special way” through a MUD, instead of say, The Sims Online, or even Yahoo Messenger, are somehow lesser participants in virtuality. We aren’t. These experiences are available to be had, over and over again. People have died, and have been mourned in the Sims, in WoW, in SL, without ever having genuflected to the Norwegian ur story.

Fair enough, Prok. And I hope you know that I am not saying this in any sort of aggressive way, but more as detached commentary.

By and large, your English professors were right. It is extraordinarily rare to come across a good poet with no exposure to what has been done before, a musician who has never learned someone else’s music, and so on.

A user doesn’t need to know about the history of other virtual worlds. But I think that for those who wish to be involved in commenting on, discussing, debating, advocating, dissecting, analyzing, developing, extending, or otherwise getting down and dirty, it’s essential. It’s hugely valuable. At the very least, it provides common ground for discussion. You aren’t a tourist visiting a foreign country anymore — you’re writing guidebooks for others. You’re critiquing, you’re advocating change, you’re prescribing.

Keep in mind that what I described as insular was primarily the SL blogosphere, which is all made up of pundits. The pundits are the folks we want to be more widely read. (I like to think that part of the reason why people come to this blog is because though it is relatively tightly focused, it’s also broad and catholic in its references and sources. But maybe I’m wrong).

If I could give you an Xmas present, it’d be Julian Dibbell’s first book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, because I think you’d both really appreciate it, and because I think it would help give lots of context that would make our discussions more fruitful.

As far as interesting stuff — yeah, Runescape is a war game for kids. But the fact that there are extremely large networks of 11 year olds across multiple countries engaging in large-scale economic activity within it is fascinating. The way in which ATITD experiments with things like gender behavior research as part of their game design. The dynamics of voice chat versus text chat in high-level raiding organizations in WoW. Heck, WoW’s UI alone is a master class for Second Life in general.

Can these be separated out, strained from the broth, so to speak? Sure. I have done that before… I did it with reputation systems and I did it with trust mechanics, if you recall. I did it with multiplayer vs single-player, I did it with metrics and with interaction patterns and attention. All of these apply to the SL universe and worldview just as much as to any other VW, honestly. Heck, part of the reason to make the case about how the MUDs and the graphical worlds are the same thing is precisely in order to force us out of looking at each VW or style as being somehow radically different.

I am glad you think of me as enlightened. We will be announcing our startup in the next couple of days, and when we do, believe it or not, I hope you’re among those who are interested.

Michelle,

One of the key things I took away from danah boyd’s recent paper on friendship and social network sites, was this:

The networked nature of impressions does not only affect the viewer — this is how newcomers decided what to present in the first place. When people first joined Friendster, they took cues from the people who invited them. Three specific subcultures dominated the early adopters — bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man festival, and gay men mostly living in New York. If the invitee was a Burner, their Profile would probably be filled with references to the event with images full of half-naked, costumed people running around the desert. As such, newcomers would get the impression that it was a site for Burners and they would create a Profile that displayed that facet of their identity. In decided who to invite, newcomers would perpetuate the framing by only inviting people who are part of the Burning Man subculture.

Summarily, whoever makes the first mark on a blank slate will find the world revolving around them, whether they like it or not, whether they intended it or not. That’s pretty standard in terms of adoption curves, but it’s a little inverted. The designer has the first opportunity to make a mark, and the content team thereafter may as well. In the case of Second Life, they chose not to make a mark in the world at all and let the early adopters do that.

Part of the reason companies these days are encouraged to start a blog is so that they can “take part in the conversation”; and it’s pointed out that the conversation will happen without them if they don’t say anything. This mentality deserves getting ported over to community development: when you take part in the conversation, you lend in the Official Stance, which is all too easy to get absorbed by people who are true believers. In your average game, it’s far easier to become a true believer: that’s the point of roleplaying, to be immersed. So believing that the world is full of orcs and elves is pretty easy. Linden Labs did it differently; belief is about their status in the greater context of business, the Internet, and similar technologies. It’s harder to make true believers out of that, but clearly, it happens. Sigil is doing the same thing with Vanguard (“third generation MMORPG”, they say, not that I’m convinced), only less radically and not exclusively.

In response to Matt Mihaly’s post on the Shirky write-up, I said, “SL ought to set up a game for the newbies inside a dome… and have normal SL outside it. You could come-of-age by stepping outside the dome Forever.” It might work; I have no idea.

I’ll give your post a more thorough reply on my own blog, Raph, but I have to say, your remarks sound to me like some of my English literature professors who used to fuss and fume about people who wrote poetry without knowing any classics, and not knowing the Four Quartets by heart, or not knowing sonnets, or not knowing what a simile is. But college kids, well, they just write poetry, some good, some bad, and even if they go through the formal training and learn all the protocols, they may actually still suck as poets.

Oh, I grant you SL is insular. But it’s a big insular with a lot of open possibilities — certainly by contrast with WoW. You are forgetting that I did spend a lot of time in TSO and ATID and also visited There, and WoW and Runescape and things like that I tend to think of as war games for kids. I don’t see all this rich conceptually interesting stuff there that you and the TN types do.

I don’t get why we should be dismissed as insular, parochial, and not knowing the history of our betters just because we never sat and slogged through the geeky wonkiness of a MUD. I never want to have to go in the MUD, Raph. Do I have to??? Why? Aren’t we past that now? Can’t we be?

I don’t expect to completely absorb the history of a country when I visit it to appreciate it. In fact, if I go and “play” a country, it is only by entering it at its current, present level that gradually, I might unfold its history in some meaningful way.

I wish, instead of drawing elaborate pedigrees and geneologies and family trees you would speak more distinctly to the *issues*. To strain them out of this or that game context, and articulate what they mean. And that’s what is missing. You can’t have an interesting discussion about CopyBot with 14 other gameworld geeks who don’t have user made content in their worlds.

I don’t think of myself as having stars in my eyes about SL, or about being some hippie tree-hugging type that gets all giddy about some emotional high in SL. More often than not these days, you have a low in SL, not a high lol. But what I try to do is outline the various faculties of the human being. There is this or that spiritual faculty or property, this psychological property, that physical property. And a thing like SL reaches different places.

And don’t be all bent out of shape over me selecting to criticize what you’re writing about this, not only is it not personal, but I think of you as the only enlightened game god we have really talking to customers/players/residents these days. I’m certainly not going to be getting Cory Linden to be talking to me about CopyBot; even if he had his pedigree in arcade games, I’ve now been banned off the Linden official blog merely for posing a question to Cory calling for accountability in his endorsement of libsecondlife, whose members made, deployed, and justify CopyBot.

I think a lot of what I do write about is probably inside baseball to SL, and it may come out as sounding more meta than it is. But please don’t make me sit and struggle to level up in some dumb shooting game just to be part of the conversation about virtual worlds. I resist.

however, the PRIMARY lessons that SL seems to fail to absorb are ones that severely stunt its acceptance: instant enjoyability, guiding users, rewarding experiences on a regular basis, obvious interfaces, a premium on seamlessness (no lag, no disruptions, etc). if I had to pick which side would benefit more from a cultural exchange, there is zero doubt in my mind that it’s the SL side.

I actually intended to make a reply about such things in response to your ‘jam’ post. A good jam doesn’t kick off without any music, someone sets the tone for the event. But if that person has their own personal sound guy with them mixing and doing effects, it ruins the jam.

Similarly with all games, there is a spectrum of world-setting. You can start with an almost blank slate, like 1000 blank white cards or Second Life, allowing amazing freedom but requiring great investment and potentially putting people off until the next jam if they don’t like the feel. You can start with a vague world description and let players explore the concept. You can provide a strict world which players become fearful of altering (DnD forgotten realms crpgs? ). Or you can provide a strong setting, then give players the means to make it their own (the UO RP croud is still very strong).

Second Life didn’t like the idea of priming the world, in the manner that more typical virtual worlds would do. And what has now emerged is frankly off-putting to those of us who look in from the rest of the MMOG player scene. Whilst RP OOC politics is annoying, there is at least a game to many other virtual worlds, whilst second life’s game often seems to me to be politics and money making, much like the web itself. I registered for an account, but I’ve just not felt like putting the effort in I’d need to in order to make something of that jam session.

Sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant about SL.

That said, I still keep an eye on SL, and I know it’s developments are important for the VW industry. The adiction to microtransactions, the SLEX, the UCC rules, even the ToS blogsphere discussions and technology talks. I see aspects that can be used in further game models, means to make a living, and useful social experiements. I might even use that account one day to look around, as the actual experience of playing is a vitial one to true understanding. I actually see a fair few people outside of SL discuss similar things, I’ve seen such things appear on forums from time to time.

My walk through the SL blogsphere reveals that, as you say, the SL community does feel quite different. Part of me suspects that a lot of this is related to the problems that a lack of world priming has allowed.

Even in the most stratified of cases, most other MMOGs with strong world priming tend to still have a somewhat united playerbase. PvPers may hate PvMers and vice versa, but they still will agree on a few things, and come to understand the value in eachother. This also applies to worlds where players can build the world, but the world started off with such a strong primer that people built upon rather than worked around.

Second Life, however, does seem to have a number of distinct, non-meshing player groups within it:
There are the furries, who need little more than a means to talk to create their fun.
There are the FOSS and other ‘tekkie’ geeks, and I would strongly bet that these formed part of the initial critical mass needed to get SL off the ground.
The new media industry is looking to SL, too, and journalists, commentators and professionals are all invovled.
Academics find a lot of it facinating, with a good few postgrads studying aspects.
Commercial players are one of the aspects unique to SL, ranging from traditional business to the get-rich-quick players.
The regular person, who has found the game through all the promotional features that SL has seen.
The gamer-geeks, who want a game to play.
In some aspects, these different groups do support eachother. But from my reading, there is little they agree on aside from the “amazing significance to the future” of SL. Which, infact, is all that SL seemed to be primed with, and the biggest bit of information about the world that anyone outside of SL ever really hears (I can’t think of a nice word to describe this, help me out someone).

On the issue of emotion and code, which you touched briefly on at the end, I am reminded very much by some of the discussions over at Groklaw. A lot of these things really get very complex, especially in matters of law and design. From a design point of view, I find this truth over VW objects both academically interesting and rather frightening, because it highlights a degree of trust and responsibility that has to be considered.

Which thankfully brings me back to the topic at hand in order to close. Once again, the priming of the worlds and of the communities comes back into play. Such issues are typically resolved within the more-gamey/worldey (as opposed to UCC-ey or real-world-trade-y) games by a measure of the world priming. There are few illusions about who owns items, and in many respects I would argue that trust is placed more in the shared game, rather than in items and percieved ownership. As the ammount of primed game reduces, and the importance of UCC and real-world-trade increases, the importance of trust increases.

(This post was brought to you by the word “prime” and the numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17…)

The SL cultural gap

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