You know, I really do not want to come off as a curmudgeon-y, disgruntled new Second Life player out to piss on everything the established players hold dear. But sometimes I feel that way.
I think it because I am facing a this frustrating cultural attitude from the long term, established players* of Second Life – that the elders all know best, and that the observations and input from newer players is to be dismissed or glossed over.
So, people might well wonder, who the heck am I? Why should you listen to me? My avatar is all of three weeks old at this point and there is so much to learn. I should just be patient. And maybe stick to the new player areas.
So why should you listen to me? I am the new Second Life player. I am a representative of the forces at play at the current internet. I am the player who comes from the world of MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Eve Online. I come from the realms of Facebook and LiveJournal and the Google suite of applications. I am your console gamer and your casual gamer. I am your activist and visionary looking to play with something wonderful and make something new. I represent the new internet user who is not a technogeek or nerd and does not want to have to cob together my system by hand just to make it work.
In short, I am the current market. I am the gamer market Second Life must appeal to if it wishes to survive and prosper.
Otherwise we will determine that Second Life is just not worth it and go away.
Want proof? I’ve had three lovers who I am involved with in offline relationships who have tried Second Life. They are gamers. They have tried it at different periods of time. And they have gone away.
I have other lovers and connections who won’t even pick up Second Life. That would rather play Minecraft.
“Oh,” I am told, “but Second Life is not a game. It is a chat medium with ‘extras.’”
Look, if I just wanted to chat, even role play chat, I would stick with the free Skype, IRC, or chat rooms on the sites I am interested in. Or maybe hit up the new group chat feature in Facebook.
If I wanted to check out art work featuring furries, dickgirls, bondage or some combination of the three, I would stick with deviantArt.
If I just wanted to play dressup in conjunction with chat and casual gaming, I could go play Gaia.
If that is all Second Life has to offer, and if it is only attempting to appeal to one or two of those aspects, there are so many other compelling, lag-free areas on the internet. And i could even run them all at the same time.
If Second Life does not adapt to the concept that it must appeal and appeal to the gaming market if it wishes to be all the things it could be and strives to be, it will continue to become more and more irrelevant.
Another thing I get told is to just be patient. That id I just wait long enough, than I will be able to interact in all the fun in groovy ways I am interested in.
“That’s great,” the new player says. “I’ll be over here in these other fun, interesting, compelling MMORPGs which get me involved in stuff right away while I let my 30 or 60 day timer in Second Life run down...”
tick tick tick
Six months later, and an investment of 90 dollars or so in someone else’s game world...
“Oh wait, didn’t I have an account back in Second Life once?”
Be beyond that, why else should you listen to me? Why would my observations even meaningful. And that is because I am a long term gamer and internet geek. I am not some Johnny come lately to gaming and the internet.
I have been a gamer since the 1980s as both a player and game master. I have been involved with LARP since the Mind’s Eye Theater stuff hit the market in the early 1990s. I have played an assorting array simple, complex, diced and dice-less games. I picked up Magic: the Gathering when I first came out and have cards from that first year that some players today would sell their first born for. I play board games and card games, and I am notably vicious in Settlers of Catan.
I am a console gamer. My first system was an Intellivision (Intellivision on the DS? That rocks!) and since that time I have either owned or lived in households with just about every major system that has hit the market in the past 20 years. I play a wide range of games, including platformers, first and third person shooters, puzzlers, 4X games, RTS games, and both Japanese and Western Role playing games. The only reason I don’t have a review blog a la The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation is because I am lazy.
Oh, and speaking of Punctuation, if you want to know how to make Second Life fun again, start there.
I have played internet gaming since the days of MageWar and Shadowmere in the late 1990s (and holy shit, they are still around?). I’ve played World of Warcraft and Eve Online. I had a very brief period where I was able to check out MUDs in the early 1990s, but never got a chance to play with a MUSH. Well, that is until I came to Second Life anyway.
But I am also more than a gamer geek. I am also an internet geek from ages back. Sure, I was never on a BBS, but I was on Compuserve and AOL back when it was a pay per minute experience. I have played around on Usenet and if I search hard enough, I might still be able to find some of my old posts out there. I played around in and role played in AOL chats. I’ve been on IRC and have even moderated a few channels in my day. I have seen the rise of blogs and Facebook and Twitter as well as the rise and fall of MySpace. I am occasionally active on a few forums out there and participated on the Google Wave when that was active.
So I am not a Luddite. I understand UIs and I will gush over a well-designed one. Particularly when it follows what becoming almost industry standards for UIs.
Offline, I am a student and activist. I am study both psychology – so I have an understanding of the ways we collect and process information – and public relations – so I understand the ebb and flow of working with the people who make an organization successful.
And I am involved in the Leather community and have been in the BDSM scene for over a decade and a half. So I understand that people should not listen to a person just because they say so. And that experience and knowledge needs to be demonstrated.
Oh, and I am articulate. Obviously.
That is part of who I am. There is more to me, such as aspects of my spirituality. But that is where I am coming from as a new player talking about my experiences in Second Life.
And you can listen to me or not. The choice is yours.
* And by long term and established, I mean those players whose avatar age is between nine months to four years old. I would like to point out that I don’t think I have meet any players whose avatars are older than four years old at this point. A concept which is sort of telling about the long term retention of Second Life. I know people who have been and continue to play WoW since its creation.
As an established player in SL, there is nothing left that we hold dear anymore. After the Lindens slowly remove activities (deeming them illegal) and jacking prices up, nothing is sacred anymore.
ReplyDeleteI'm older then nearly all the Linden who work there, and they are all completely clueless, and out of touch. The few Lindens who did know what the hell was going on had all been fired, or they quit from their own frustrations.
The anti-noob sentiment isn't just in SL, but all online games, even non MMOs have "noobs" that people pick on and make fun of. Even in real life, ever been a freshman at school? Just how life is. And if you can't deal with it.. good bye.
Fair enough. The "We don't care about our first time visitors who walk through our door" is a business model. It is not the one I would generally recommend, because it does not do well to combat general attrition. But it is still a model.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, at least there will be less lag... maybe?
And yes, Second Life is a lot like high school. It is, essentially, a popularity contest after all. I do not see the people who create great things celebrated as much as those who are just very good at social dynamics. And there is a great article that illustrates some of the social dynamics at play in the high school popularity and why nerds are hated. The only difference is that Second Life that people are not actively persecuted – at least, not as far as I have seen yet. And they are not required to be there.
And so they take the advice given to them “If you don’t like it, then leave,” and apply it. There are many, many locations – both on and offline – which are new player and new visitor friendly. After all, high school is not really an appropriate model for doing things once a person is, in fact, out of high school.
In addition, being a freshman in college, for instance, is a vastly different world then being a freshman in college. In college, you tend to have collections of organizations going out of their way to recruit new membership. Rush week, for instance, is all about getting people involved in Fraternities and Sororities. I suppose we could have vampires running around and biting people as a recruitment tool since that would definitely get people involved in something at least, but... oh... oh yes, we don’t like that sort of behavior in Second Life.
Thus you are stuck with an environment in which the only thing left – as you pointed out in another comment – is sex, dancing and shopping.
What you point out about Linden is very reveling. The corporate environment has a powerful shaping impact on customer relations. And that is what we are, customers. But from the descriptions I’ve gotten, not only from you other players I have talked to, it sounds as though we are not seen as customers or clients, but as bothers, nuisance and hassles. It makes me wonder why Linden even continues to keep Second Life operating at all, if that is the case.
Thank you for your replies. They are appreciated. And gives me more to think about.