Winter of Virtual Worlds? Or How Not to Make a World

Ice-fishing in Belarus homestead...

Ann O'Toole has been calling the dead pool on Second Life for ages. Just the other day she repeated a comment here that SL will only last "until July 2010". Of course, five minutes later I saw her reprimanding somebody on the forums who was dramatically leaving SL and telling everyone else it was dying because of [insert latest Linden decision here] -- and it should be just what you make of it yourself. Ann seems to be happily creating new things, and seemed glad to hear that the latest expression the kids have for sneakers in New York is "kicks". (They embellish their kicks by having their friends write things like "You Are" "A Retard" on the toes.) Well, furry floppy-eared plaid lumberjack hats are all the rage too and only $19.95 at American Eagle.

I have no idea if SL is dying by July 2010 or some other date in 2010 -- I don't think so, but I do worry. It's not because of accurate reviews like this one -- yes accurate, because the fellow honestly writes about the experience of a class of people who chronically have this same experience despite all our lecturing (geeks who don't avatarize well who hate the idea of virtual worlds not because they indicate "people have no lives" but because they might show up the fact *those geeks* have no *interior* lives of imagination, which is critical to virtualizing).

This critique that got all the fanboyz mad again is apt, as painful as it is for the die-hards to hear, because the question he asks is one many ask and then turn away: not only "why avatarize" (which can make you feel awkward and retarded) but *why virtualize*? One of the commenters describes an SL librarian enthusing about a little avatar climbing a ladder in a library to reach a book on a shelf and reading it. No wonder Info Island never has traffic above 500. There isn't anything more dumb-assed in a virtual world than trying to read a book, as each page has to rez and come into view, and that can take forever. Even Prim Perfect, which has delicious pictures and copy, is a chore to read in world -- I keep it around at my various sites more for the ambience of having a fashion magazine that you *might* page through than actually reading it.

Virtual worlds are not places to access information -- at least not yet -- even if you provide a compelling animation around it (and developers seldom do). They are places to access people who have information. Before you start taking my temperature and worrying I have Connectivism flu, I'll point out that people, not networks, are the entities that have knowledge, which is synthecized information and the memory of experience combined, and that's what's useful, I suppose -- but it has to be made more interactive and compelling. (My son's old grammar school has three modernist slogans painted on the door instead of something in Latin: "Make Connections," "Find Evidence," "See Multiple Perspectives". (I wonder if anybody stops to think that evidence is not something that will have multiple perspectives, and that you are unlikely to connet with anyone who doesn't have the same perspective on you at least on *something* -- so these three slogans may be as unattainable as a perfect virtual world.)

So virtuality wasn't compelling to the Gothamedia reviewer and his connected friends. Nothing grabbed them -- literally. He may not even be a war gamer, used to being grabbed by monsters and grabbing a gun to shoot them. He may simply be bored by the Rube-Goldberg process, as one witty blogger described SL, of having to go into a world, manipulate stuff, and have some sort of outcome -- information, visualization, socialization -- that you could get 20 times faster on Facebook or Twitter. Many more millions of people are happy with primitive little 2-D worlds of chat boxes in Twitter and with the 2-D ability to exchange comments and pictures that Facebook gives them, even with just their bitty avatar -- Raph was right about that part of it, I guess.

I've already explained what I don't like about the economic and political competition the Lindens are creating with this project -- it would be better to allow residents to do this and let them advertise in welcome areas. Perhaps they've lost faith that anyone, even their beloved Adam or Anshe or Desmond, could do this for them. The Lindens have experimented with trying to make the Linden Homes landing more instantly "delightful" as their buzz word has it but also "predictable" (trying to do both of those at once usually leads to solutions like "A Disney movie for this two-year-old to keep him occupied").

To be sure, Elderglen has a good bit of Disney in it and a sense of Assisted Living (as brinda aptly called it), but it is indeed genuinely delightful. You get a jar to catch fairies in -- and you realize that it is so rare in SL for your avatar ever to have anything in his hands such that you even notice his hands. Most people only put cups in their hands, or perhaps a gun, but hands in general are not occupied except with that idiot typing motion (yeah, so idiotic that when you go to Blue Mars and they don't have it, you become irritable lol). So having that fairy jar is cool -- and more cool, you can roam around and catch the fairies, and when you do catch them, you get a pair of fairy wings you can put on yourself. So it succeeds at all levels, giving people a casual game to play, much like Raph's game in Metaplace collecting the discs. It teaches people how to drag stuff out of their inventory on to themselves -- but of course, ideally the Lindens will get rid of even that one step, by having stuff become more instantly point-click-wearable as having to go into inventory, if you are not school in a war game, is a chore.

There are lots of freebies in Elderglen, lots of little nooks and crannies to see, and even an underwater part as I've been blogging with Posterous. After you burn through that content, you might want some of it *again* but...unless other people show up and you make friends, it's a bust. Will Wright had the right idea back in the day by building into the Sims Online certain paths that made you succeed only if you got help from friends and collaborated as a group, such as with the pizza. While a communit annoyance at first (I made a Go-it-Alone Guild immediately to try to survive on the gnome builder without the dorky group work objects in TSO), it was how socialization built up for most people, and people contented themselves for hours -- days -- years playing pizza, developing all kinds of abilities and lore around it -- as a visualization and game, it proved to be the most popular, even though others paid out more I think (mapping was so hard to do and printing required too much attention).

OK, but wait a minute. Now you're in that territory that Fred Wilson complained about, when he said that Second Life was "too immersive". By being "too immersive" it wasn't "productive" - not as productive as what seems like the incredible time suck of answering nearly every commenter on his blog with a one-line reply, a game that has kept Fred in handsome traffic and blog ad revenue for his trouble. Still, immersion=no life for many people, and that means you have to have the ability not to plunge and skate on the surface.

One world that has tried to solve the problem of this hating avatarization and not wanting to immerse is Near, this shopping world where you have no avatar at all, but are just a disembodied perceptual frame cruising around the world. I found it just awful. I didn't like having no avatar because it felt like the white blur from a bad teleport in SL. And I also didn't see any other people -- in fact, I don't think there are intended to be any, and without avatars, how could you interact with them, even if there were? If you wasted time shopping here, how would you have solved the "no life" problem?

Not that the "no life problem" troubles me personally -- or even as an intellectual proposition for how you grow worlds. As I keep telling everyone on Techcrunch where they hate virtual worlds, too (except WoW and City of Eternals that Arrington is touting for some reason): you spend all day staring at a computer screen (the Internet is a world) or your i-Phone (apps are a world) so -- shut up, already. You are already an avatar in a virtual world! Deal with it...

Notice I said "Doesn't avatarize well". That's a cover term for a variety of experiences, either avatars that are too hard to kit out or too embarrassing when you start or too hard to move. Having a screen that starts you out where you make your avatar in private outside the world helps, I suppose, as one of the two most frequent fears expressed in SL is: "I'm afraid I look stupid or/I can't figure out how to change my clothes". (The other is: "I don't know what to do.")

Still, it's not a cure for everybody, as some worlds don't give you outfit choices until after you get in the world, but it seems to be a staple of overcoming avatar fear. But "not avatarizing well" is really all about what Will Wright once explained to us long ago in the Sims Online, that you must have "the ability to invest your consciousness in a toy". In those old days, so often people referred to "My sim" or "her" in the beginning, not feeling any sense of "I" in making the transition from the game of the Sims that you controlled, to becoming a Sim yourself online. It took awhile, but the key was not clothing or skin choices but interactivity with others -- something that SL actually never really mastered, despite all the sex balls that enable you to fuck other people three ways from Sunday, yet never easily shake their hand or pat them on the shoulder -- two gestures in TSO that were the staple of the world.

SL, is of course, in danger -- and Linden Lab recognized that long before we did because they run it and have the server facts -- unless they've tweaked them beyond recognition for their own use. They have not been able to get the artificial land market formula right -- and maybe that's an impossibility.So they're rushing to try other things like content and currency and package sales.

There is a central, inherent contradiction at work that ensures the land market can never thrive except as a very slow and organic proposition no business could wait for: the company needs to sell more land as their revenue generator, but selling more land dilutes the secondary land market for residents -- which in turn dampens their desire to buy more land to develop. "Balance" is a chimera, because the drive to maximize profits on both sides of the server is normal and natural -- so inevitably the Lindens put out more and better land (themed continents, now even houses and landscaping) and residents chop it further and further or seize it and corner it more and more, depending on its location, and complain  more and more bitterly about its cost. There isn't a way for either side to win here. The Lindens thought if they drove non-content-producing landlords off by flooding the market they would get rid of opportunistic flippers and keep only those dedicated talented sorts who customize themes and content to "add value" as the Lindens always put it -- even as they've always been busy subtracting value by refusing for years to address problems like extortionist ad farming. That didn't work, either.

Then they tried to shake loose the arbitrageurs they've always loathed, but the people's capitalism always fins a way, and they turn to a product like the former homestead, chop it into pieces and rent it out, groaning with scripts. The Lindens counter with homestead repricing, then grandfathering when they realize the bath they will take is too huge, then they counter again with script controls (and that was inevitable, and necessary). Next stop: inventory caps.

Mainland land sales and rentals are especially retarded because the Lindens now consciously try to kill these off with their own offers, and they can simply make them better -- more prims, more content, more view controls. The question is at which point one should concede defeat. Those with a need for serious profits like Elanthius Flagstaff folded when it was clear that even bots picking up abandoned land and low-cots rentals couldn't compete with the endless Linden glut even with full-sim  mainland auctions not functioning -- and not only Linden glut, but the glut of residents abandoning land to move to homesteads which they can control better. I've written about the harsh taskmaster of Mainland Math and Homestead Math as well (no one will bother to rent or buy 8192 m2 for 3745 prims when for a little bit ore, they can have an entire sim with that many prims and 65,000 m2).

I personally set it to myself not to declare defeat by turning off a server myself, but to have the Lindens turn it off. That could change in 2010 unless there are more people -- it's too much hard work to wrest too little money. Because there aren't people. There  are only 1.3 million 60-day uniques, less than last year. And there are only that 475,000 willing to spend $1 or more, and most of them are spoken for by island rentals. There's a glass ceiling here....

Of course, my business or your business are not what enter into the Lindens' growth plans. Their growth plans of reaching a million concurrency (an artificially number pulled out of their asses not reflecting actual improved architecture, to my knowledge) can only be reached by something like Linden homes working (so far it isn't working for the one alt of mine who did get an invitation to the beta after I burned an upgrade to premium on him -- he can't get the menus to complete and has waited 4 days for a ticket response). Still, it will work for a simple reason: people need an easy place to have cybersex in, that requires no agonizing decisions about where to live, no wrestling with a prefab and no counting prims.

I flew out to the Linden Home islands the first few days and saw a fair number of paired green dots -- and upon closer inspection, I saw the typically "cheat on my RL or SL spouse" brand-new male alts with dancing female prostitutes in the vulgar ripped stocking/unreal high heel look in a number of the ugliest prefabs -- which people pick because they can fit the large square sex beds and allow for lots of animations on them -- try that in your cramped  round little hobbit house -- forget it! Midbies like Crap Mariner may bemoan the aesthetics of Linden Homes, but those day-old male alts are not thinking of house aesthetics....

And here's the other kind of people who chose Linden Homes -- clumps of mainly females, but sometimes mixed, getting together to show each other outfits or stuff they bought, furniture, vehicles, etc. So the clustered houses, even those strange Asian/suburban/unlike real life houses put in squares with courtyards facing each other might work for that purpose. For some people, SL is all about just clubbing around with a gang, shopping and dancing, and this works fine for that purpose.

Each sim takes only 13 minutes to populate with a machine the Lindens have invented for the purpose -- they anchor the prims on the next sim over or in blank prim land landscaped as a field or courtyard and create more prim space per parcel that way -- and ensure that the newbies can't remove the house.

I've only seen 50 dots populating this area of 64 plus sims so I don't know how popular it will be, but maybe there's a Mainland Math the Lindens can live with at $9.95 a pop.

All the changes the Lindens are making that are so unpopular with the core population now -- getting rid of freebies, charging higher commissions, rewarding content-makers in the Solutions Providers by giving them free advertising and other perks, creating a special SLE Workplace Market, adding script limits -- these are all about more control by Lindens over content and sims so that more people can go on them without individualized supervision and the already-very-tiny pyramid apex can really pay out for the few and be less accessible to the many who would dilute *their* market.

I'm reminded suddenly of the coefficient some official recently invoked for the Afghan war to be "won" (and therefore making it "unwinnable"); it would need one soldier per 500 Afghan citizens.

So by the same logic, if you give everyone their freedom on Second Life, you need one minder Linden to troubleshoot all the complaints that inevitably occur when that one person a) griefs b) overhangs trees) c) encroaches on their neighbour's or Linden land d) puts too many scripts out e) has some problem with their sim not working f) accidently lets their land go to sale to a bot; g) sexually harasses others, etc. etc.

I personally found it creepy that the Lindens were planning how to stamp out sims in 13 minutes to hold 38-50 people per sim in little boxes on the hillside, when what would be needed was to put a Linden in each cluster of 16 sims. But, as usual, the reply from the Lindens was:

"We had to destroy the village in order to scale it." What they are scaling is their land profits, what they are reducing is the ability of the user to generate content (and complaints) and making the land idiot-proof to remove most of those trouble tickets I just mentioned.

This brings me to Blue Mars, and why I really dislike it. I'd *like* to like it, because everybody would like some *other* place to go than Second Life, especially when SL is down with a DNS attack as it was yesterday (or so Crap tells us).

If you are a white person used to having your way in the avatar skin and features selection, now you can feel what it's like for everyone else in Blue Mars: the system forces on you what are apparently Hawaiian ethnic features. Adjust them though you will, you will still wind up looking like a sort of Polynesian white mixture. I don't know whether this is deliberate social engineering or the sort of ethno-centricity that you would expect by a game made in Hawaii, but most people will simply be too politically correct to mention it. I personally don't mind looking Asian -- I currently have dark-skinned Tajik avatar for thinking about Afghanistan -- but I like to have a choice and the choices are just plain odd in Blue Mars for a white guy.

Add to that the fact that your avatar both refuses to move when you want him to -- it seems absolutely impossible to turn him around, even by having him two-step on the annoying click-on-ground-ahead method. Meanwhile, when you aren't moving, his head bobs in strange ways, making him look like a bobble-headed retard. It's that dorky looking bobbing that makes me log off -- I can't get past that into the environment.

And why am I saying "into the environment"? There is no depth here whatsoever. All the content looks like it is a stage set. It has no weight and heft, which is what you get in a world of prims that you can right click and go into edit mode to see. There's none of that here. In the Sims Online, you could click on things and interact with them - nothing does that in Blue Mars (at least not yet). It lets me know that making a thing literally 3-D visually just isn't enough to give it the real sense of 3-D that you get from edit-mode. Isn't that odd, that the geekiest feature of SL -- the build and edit mode -- would wind up giving you the greatest sense of "world"?

Going to Desmond's elaborately-made Caledon in Blue Mars was like going to a postcard. Lots of pretty houses and shops, but very hard to walk into them, nothing to buy (no economy unless you arduously put it in yourself on each individual world) and nothing to *do* -- you cannot click on a goddamn thing. There is NOTHING repeat NOTHING to click on except possible a chair, and that's completely unsatisfying. I ran around this flat 3-D world in fits and starts, my retard's head with its dorky stare bobbing, and tried to run up a hill. Forget about it -- the land is a theatrical backdrop when it comes to things like a mountain, too, and I can't step up it.

Moving is *too fucking hard* and I *hate that* even after hours on a world. It's not that I'm not used to it. I wasn't used to Metaplace, either, but Raph's "click ahead" system worked quickly and efficiently. A few tries, and you got your little guy to go around the maze as quickly as a Pacman. Not so in BM, where you click and click and the avatar never moves forward or backward, only side to side or halts. What's most infuriating is the little camera icon that seems to have two arrows, one pointing left and one pointing right *that do absolutely nothing when you click on them, so they are pointless*. Are they placemarkers for the future?!

I briefly considered buying a land pack in Blue Mars as they went up for sale at reasonable prices this week, but two things stopped me: a) I can 't make stuff or even put out prefabs and I hate the hardship of movement b) John Zdanowski or Zee Linden showed up there as staff, he's working for them now. My most searing association with Zee is that he was the one who dumped prices on islands in order to sell more of them and introduced the openspaces which basically killed all the island and mainland rentals -- until they made a killing for those few who bought hundreds of them and flipped them complete with estate manager perms -- until Zee then pulled the plug on that savvy arbitrage and crashed the market again. So what is the guarantee that Zee, in his new incarnation, will not suddenly jack up or dump prices in order to sell inventory again in another world? Yeah, "get a new business model" and "evolve" you will be told...

Another big disappointment with Blue Mars is that I thought, if the user base basically signed away their content-making privileges they so enjoy in Second Life, and the tiny apex of the pyramid that "develops" agrees to provide RL information and register for the content-making program, that those content makers would get some sort of greater guarantee for copyright protection. The TOS isn't any different in terms of IP than SL. I don't know what I was thinking -- I had some odd idea that if you were bound together with the platform provider in a registered content-maker's program like There.com, that the company would consider your IP as valuable as its own and do more to protect it. But...what was that "more" that I was imagining? Having their lawyers go to battle for your IP? Not likely. Answer DMCA takedown notices super quick? Well, you can promise that, but the DMCA takedown is itself an admission of defeat of a DRM system. Shouldn't it be harder to copy stuff in this world that doesn't have user-creater-content (because it most certainly does *not* unless you capriciously define "user" as "those special content makers who can operate third-party 3D content makers and register for a program").

Please. Spare me the bullshit. I don't *care* if it is "easy" and "anyone can register". This is the song the smug burgher Desmond Shang is singing -- and it is indeed bullshit. "Anyone" is not me -- and I represent actually a pretty big chunk of the demographic -- unskilled amateurs willing to put in lots of times on these worlds. I will not be learning Maya or Collada or even Paint.net. Not going to happen. There isn't even a system for people like me to put out stuff made by others because it's just not set up that well. So I guess people like me are destined for death in these worlds as a class -- it is our winter, not the winter of virtual worlds. Too engaged to accept an utterly prefabbed world or a world where only professionals can make content, yet not adept enough to successfully learn the outside or even inside tools of the "developer class".

That niche group of people like me who are able to make a dock or a simple object like a mug or a square house and of course build and decorate extensively with prefabs and furniture that other people make is probably an exotic breed. I mean, there are apparently only 100,000 of us or however many are concurrent in SL. There are people who find the prospect of decorating their own house too daunting -- but they are mainly not here. If they were, I'd sell a lot more furnished rentals - but I almost *never* sell them, and that's because most people who bother with SL now want to decorate themselves and can at least go the few steps involved to edit and move and shrink.

OK, speaking of shrinking, that brings me to Metaplace. As many of you know, it's closing to users. Raph, the quintessential user-generated user-generator, is closing Metaplace to open membership by ordinary people, but keeping it open to...enterprises? Educators? It's not clear. He says he has some other commitment or contract that will keep it going, and keep some staff their jobs (like Cuppycake) but it isn't clear yet what it's *for*.

I have no special insights into why Metaplace is closing. Despite intentions to become more involved, I never gelled there and didn't spend much time on it. So I have no idea why it failed for Raph, and the reasons he might cite. I can only tell why it didn't work for me, and if you can multiple that by 100,000 other users -- power users, even -- then you might have explanations.

When I first heard Raph speak about Metaplace in San Jose in 2008, he didn't speak in sentences or paragraphs, but in entire pages -- in an entire book. And not just on the stage, when I was sitting in the bar having a beer with him. He spoke non-stop in these entire book pages for about 45 minutes, and it was a marvel. There were...sprites...CSS sheets. Plug-ins. Modules. Thingies. Reticulating splines. Stuff. He conceived of this world's architecture in a full-blown, articulated way that was incredibly ambitious. There was no Philip Lindenesque "Well, let me build this out here, and see what happens". It was like, "This is my front-to-back conceived world architecture that enables everyone else to come and build," too.

So why didn't they? Well, maybe that full-blown concept was too ambitious to actually *do*. It seemed like everyone tried fast and furiously but somehow it didn't catch. Maybe you have to *deliberately* leave worlds unfinished for that reason (the Lindens had no trouble doing that *cough*) and create them in stages. Maybe if you are going to make a world *along with other people* you can't have quite such a full-blown architectural vision -- on the other hand, everything about Raph's vision, from what I can tell, was interoperable and able to be plugged and played. So, I don't know.

It didn't work for me because building was just too hard. I don't know why as it improved with time. It's not that I'm that stupid, having wrestled with offline Sims story-telling, which requires manipulating files and such, and then wrestled with the wonkiness of SL, of course. It's just that I couldn't get it to work easily and with satisfaction. I didn't like not being able to go into houses -- and the way to make them pretty was to make them like stage-sets, not houses you walk in and sit down in -- and I didn't like that.

Google Warehouse, which was supposed to be the panacea for how you populate worlds like this with content, looked like ass. I'm sorry, but it *never looked good*. It was always out of proportion, even when shrunk, and didn't "fit the look of the world" which Raph had made. It also looked like exactly what it was: something snatched from real life or made for some other world that you were trying to plunk down in this world, and it didn't fit. The best stuff in MP was the stuff Raph himself and the staff made -- that looked like it "fit". Other things didn't, making for collage-like sites with disproportionate objects like cars plunked down in a cartoonish way that was off-putting. Scale to the world, and having things fit is important -- it's why bad sculpties don't work, or why things like pasting pictures of a nativity scene over flat prims look absolutely hideous in SL. A plain marble sculpture with minimal features that is actually in-the-round inworld looks better than magazine pictures hacked in -- that is what I put up near Notre Dame de Cyberie for Christmas this  year in Champaign in SL.

The 2-D bit didn't bother me in MP -- but the tiny avatar whose face I could never see, and whose outfits, even when changed, were hardly distinguishable, was frustrating. In the Sims, I could see the avatar faces and hands and their interactions -- even opting to put in a big zoom on your own world, which was the only way to accomplish it, you couldn't see a clear and compelling image of yourself, and that meant getting a grip on the world was just doomed. I don't want to be so tiny in a world that I'm supposed to make myself.

And wait a minute -- let's take that word "world" for a moment. I always found it faintly nettling that what amounted to a parcel in the Sims -- not even in Second Life -- was called "a world" in Metaplace. That was also overambitious. "World" should have been a term reserved for more ambitious developments at least interlocking a series of parcels. By making every little postage stamp a "world" like my little dumps on a square, it diluted the value of the term. They were not really worlds. A world is something that should have more to it, and perhaps even have laws of nature, an economy, etc. that would distinguish it. You could argue that Caledon is a "world" because it has become a "continent" with its own style of content and rules and events". You could argue to a point that even Ravenglass Rentals sprawling across pieces of many sims is a "world" although it isn't really distinguishable as such the way themed continents are like Nautilus. But to call one parcel a "world" is just not right. Faced with the daunting prospect of having to make a "world," with a tiny character I couldn't even see myself, with tools that weren't easy to just plunk stuff out with like the Sims, with Google warehouse items *looking like ass* -- and without the ability to control bans with one click or two, either -- I was frustrated. I have a LOT of time for virtual worlds, but when too many things like this conspire against me, the dummy user -- even a *power* dummy user, I log off. And I cry, because I wish I could fit into the game-god's universe, but I can't.

Or wait. Did I want to? The little beta world, was, like all little beta worlds claustrophobic and fanboyish. I had to overcome about six forms of revulsion to come into a social setting ruled by somebody named Cuppycake -- it isn't just that the name conjures up visions of sugar plums and you expect blue ponies to be around every corner in a setting that looks like a 10-year-old girl's bedroom, it's that I felt like it might be a lot like the experience of the mod in The Sims -- that try-too-hard-Tigger of the "hard-core" Dragon's Cove who was always reminding you that you were crunchy and tasted good with milk....

What could Cassandra Goth have warned us about in the future Winter of Virtual Worlds as she clogged up the toilets in the Sims offline, had we only listened?!

I guess I'm now developing a list of "how not to make a world" at this point, FWIW. I fully realize it's easier to explain what you *don't* want in a world than what you *want* (remember how cube3 couldn't answer the question of how he'd like his world to *be* then, after he was done griping about all the wrong ways they were made?) In fact, it is that "law-conforming inexactitude" that draws you forward with the Hound of Heaven. The expectation that this isn't quite right, and around the corner is the better thing, the more real thing, that will be *this* way. That's the gap built deliberately into the human being by God as a kind of universal Pulley -- as George Herbert explained it:

Yet let him keep the rest,     
But keep them with repining restlessness;     
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,     
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness     
      May toss him to My breast.

Or as Kazimir Malevich put it:

“Man struggles toward heaven, to the kingdom of harmony, but grows bored in heaven and yearns for chaos -- yet when man leaves heaven, he will yearn for it.”

How Not to Make a World

1. Don't call it a world -- it's a platform, it's a page in the Internet, it's a chat room, but worlds are not named in advance, they acquire the right to call themselves a world when they're ready -- and that may mean years of complex building and life forms appearing.

2. Don't make no avatar at all, or too small an avatar or an avatar without very visible features or an avatar whose features you can't chose and customize  -- people will only get a grip in a world where they can invest their consciousness and for that they must be able to see and identify with the character.

3. Don't force people to make up the avatar's look in public. Put the avatar making and clothing on a screen before the person enters the world to overcome their fears of how they look or at least make it very quickly dressable and changeable once inworld.

4. Don't make it impossible for the average user to build (content developers program for FIC only), make it possible to plunk out walls or prefabs. Have a scale for simple inworld decoration/basic building all the way up to very complex importation of builds if you must.

5. Don't make it too hard to move -- concentrate ESPECIALLY on the 360 turn around of the avatar himself. Pointing and clicking to advance is not enough. Also add WASD or the numeric pad arrow keys to move -- by making the mouse have to double as both mover and interactor, it makes for frustration. Having at least three ways to move is vital. Don't take away flying. That goes for idiots who turn off "fly" on their SL parcel. If you can't fly in a virtual world, you have no business being there.

6. Don't make interactivity with others or the environment a complex pie chart, a feature to be acquired only with getting or purchasing additional scripts or modules, etc. So many games give you a start menu of stuff like "jump" or "smile" or "wave" -- but except for the Sims Online, they have no starter *interactions with others*. That's what makes people socialize and stick. Have something to do with other people right away in order to advance.

7. Don't make people feel helpless to control their environment. I guess this is one rule that I would say sums up all other rules -- the ability to control your environment. If I have to passively consume, if I can't control problems like griefing at one click, if I can't *do* stuff, I will feel like I have no control over my environment. The most sophisticated problems of the evolved SL today involve "inability to control my environment" i.e. plan even a year in the economy given the roller-coaster of sim prices over the years -- to the most simple newbie problem of not being able to easily with one click get clothes on.

8. Don't rely on the semantics of games. I wish all the game developers would drop all these things they accept as gospel. "The inventory" is one -- why have an inventory from which you must store and take everything out all the time? Or at least, in the metaphor it is now, which is a hidden locker that requires searching and dragging out of constantly? Is there another way? Putting everything off line. Keeping little icons visible in a box on the surface for "most used". Putting things on you immediately if you opt that when you buy. I don't know, come up with something because it's a barrier.

10. Don't leave passive newbies stranded. If you want to build up the population, you cannot rely on the 10-20 percent who create and manipulate creations at a power level, which is all we have in SL in one sense. You have to have a group pizza object for newbies. Metaplace had Easter Egg hunts visiting other people's lots, but that was asynchronous collaboration -- real time is needed. There is a money tree system now is SL that enables newbies to slowly collect dollars by solo visits to other lots. But there isn't anything that forces them into groups to socialize and make money. I'm not suggesting that the game gods themselves in an open economy fund this -- but I think it is possible for an enterprising user to develop for other businesses to add to. I'll be the first to say, paradoxically, that I hate such collectivist Club Med stuff, but it works for other people that aren't self-starters and need a framework to get going.

But...this isn't a very good list. It presupposes so much of what people do not want in a world and I could be all wrong if I am in that dying winter demographic. This Christmas as I wandered among those over-priced stalls of knick-knacks on Union Square, for yet another year NOT buying any of the expensive hand-crafted stuff, I saw a lamp I liked and said to myself: I'm not going to pay $65 US for a faux Asian paper lamp, but I bet I could find it and buy it in Second Life...

You know what I got myself for Christmas? The Sims 3...

Comments

[cube inada]

"remember how cube3 couldn't answer the question of how he'd like his world to *be* then, after he was done griping about all the wrong ways they were made?) "

;)

i think my answer was more..
i "wouldnt."
not for free and not just to be virtually another " metapundit" with more "blog/conference cred" than actual product/viewser successes;)

Another winter is here. Good riddance to last springs weeds.;)

Next springs weeds should try to come with Nav'i hair... but Earths Gaia dont play that game;)

Happy Holidaze.

[AnnOtooleInSL]

You forgot to mention just how bad allowing your staff to develop a plutocracy through nepotism is.

Yes I still make stuff. Not as much as I used to. Maybe SL will survive. But I doubt it.

If you change Second Life into Facebook and lose the heart and soul of it along the way then is it still Second Life? Or is it just a barking zombie dog chasing the Facebook van?

The problem with all tech companies is their execs think they are superior beings above the law and know better than anyone else. Which is why they always run out of investor dollars and close up shop after everyone sees the truth and begins making superior decisions about where to place their limited resources. Phillip Rosedale got a long run out of Second Life by allowing it to grow like the organism it is and needs to remain in order to survive. He quit. That Second Life is over. Perhaps the new Second Life will turn out to have "more expect-able results" or less "unexpected content" or whatever corporate speak they are using to describe total control by the plutocracy.

Like those freaks that grow cats in jars. You have a more predictable "experience".

Merry Christmas Prok!

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, I didn't "forget," it's just that I figure everyone is tired of reading about the plutocracy.

>Or is it just a barking zombie dog chasing the Facebook van?

Now is that ever a vivid image!

Merry Christmas to you too Ann!

[melponeme_k]

Well, I really hope SL sticks around for as long as possible. There isn't anything else out there to compare it to right now. And I'm not sure that there will ever be anything like it again.

Basically because it attracts ornery pioneers, people who like to rock boats and are willing to work with wonky prototype platforms. When the people these VRs really want are the passive types who log into WoW.

I really do agree that the basis of the problem is avatar creation. The creation of an avatar is a deeply emotional and psychological experience. It requires digging deep down and actually...well...facing who we are as people. This isn't something people really want to do with games. They want to forget who they are in a VR environment not find themselves. Its why ALTS never work. We are always running into ourselves. Its inescapable.

[Yumi Murakami]

Happy Christmas and New Year :)

I don't think it's _quite_ the case of "virtualizing" bothering people because they don't have an inner life of imagination. I think it's because, if they want to immerse themselves in imagination, they want to feel _better_ than they do in RL. One thing about SL is that by enabling individuals to create, it reminds other individuals of what might be a painful truth - that they can't. As was posted on the SL General forum way back, "in SL there are less excuses, so it hurts more". Who really wants to immerse themselves in a world that leaves you feeling like a failure?

As for Metaplace, it's not hard to see what the problem there was: it was too hard to make it possible to actually *do* anything, and they had too many teen users (who were happy to create and spend time, but didn't have any real money).

[Prokofy Neva]

There were teenagers in Metaplace?

I think you're projecting your own chronic inner sense of inferiority and poor self-esteem, but at least you're more honest about it than most geeks.

I'm unable to do any of that sophisticated creation, but far from making me feel "pain," I simply buy it and rearrange it on my property, I love it. Can't you appreciate art and craftsmenship without having to be able to do it yourself?!

I got a few steps with Metaplace in making up a lot, and was getting a bit further when they added more prefabs but basically I was frustrated that it wasn't like the Sims. Ok, I was spoiled.

[Yumi Murakami]

Whenever I went to look in Central, the people there were always teenagers - or at least, they claimed to be, and as a result be unable to get credit cards.

Oh, I _can_ appreciate art and craftsmanship, certainly. The question is, would doing so be part of the "inner life of imagination" you talk about, and the answer to that - in my case at least - is no, and I think that's common. Most people don't have imaginary lives as art critics! :)

[Desmond Shang]

I had my first visitor in "real life" from my online life, the other day. A local and a decent chap; he's a Caledon citizen and Disney artist, in "real life."

He taught me something really valuable over some KFC, green beans and mash.

There's entertainment, and there's fun.

Entertainment, is what others can do to make you smile.

Fun is what you can do yourself, to make yourself smile.

* * * * *

Entertainment is typically the purview of the deeply talented; the movie makers, the dedicated artisans, the writers ~ to entertain someone over the course of a couple of hours might be a multimillion dollar proposition.

Fun, however... fun merely needs to be enabled. Unlocked. Made possible. People can then make it for themselves.

And in that, is a lesson. Fun is the raison d'etre; fun is the destination. And if entertainment occurs, all the better.

* * * * *

Other worlds were an inevitability.

Some worlds are quite young; others are in their golden age, and still others in the sunset of their days. Some will explode into futures more wondrous and unimagined than most would think. Which ones? It remains to be seen.

There will be a lot of fun, creating this new future. And yes, living in it too, as things mature everywhere. The only thing assuredly not fun is to never change, wither and die.

Not that any of this will be easy.

I do think the next generation will face intense difficulty, insofar as 'easy fun' will be a lot harder going forward. Both on the main grid and elsewhere.

But there's no going back. It's bigger than all of us. There's no way to put the XStreet genie or Linden Homes back in their respective bottles.

No way to return to the days when a few decent prims and a borrowed script could fairly reliably catapult Joe Average into respectable mercantile success. Or even Talented Joe, these days. It takes marketing savvy, business skills, and aggressive planning nowadays. Oh sure, there will always be a few longshot successes. But not for the masses. We are in a time of incredible shakeout, and it's painful. These are some of the terrible growing pains, I think, that Philip used to refer to on the way forward.

If I could pull a string and bring the past back... I would. Most of us would. But it's gone. It's a new day.

But history isn't over yet, however... and neither is fun.

And the ones who take chances and embrace the future, stand a better chance of having the fun.

[Yumi Murakami]

But that is the big problem, Desmond.. because if not everyone involved gets to have at least some fun.. then why SHOULD they virtualize?

[Desmond Shang]

I don't have any magic answers to that.

Perhaps a tale is in order, though. Once upon a time in the 1970's I used to play with electronics as a hobby. As a kid. I would get a kit, put it together, and it was pretty fun. Such things still exist, but at the end of the day, it's not possible to make the best cool things any more. Making the best electronic things became too hard without advanced expertise. Transistor radio's are one thing, but nobody is making an iphone from scratch. Nor would many people even consider trying to. Other aspects of it are interesting.

In the 1980's, it was fun again. I had a cheap Commodore 64, and I set about learning about it, and making my own fun. Good times. BBS communities on dialup sprang up ~ glorious fun! I remember the day I saw (on an Amiga 1000) a message that had hopped across dozens and dozens of links, from... Ireland. Wow! All the way to Southern California! But eventually, doing all the cool things required far more.

Enter the 1990's and the 1980's computers were all ancient junk; few die~hard hobbyists would even mess with them. But there was this new thing ~ the Web! And web forums!

Somewhere in that mix was an agonisingly slow~loading world known as ActiveWorlds. Wow! A 'world' on the internet! There wasn't much you could do with it really, but if you waited long enough you could eventually see a place where people had *built a city* online!

...I could carry on, but I think you can see the progression here. There's still a lot of "new" out there, waiting to be discovered.

And Yumi, as for the hard question you ask... I think that you may be one of the best, first people to identify the new wave of whateveritis, that next deep reason for fun, when it comes along.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond is really insufferable, truly. His instant homilies on my blog are really nauseating, truly.

When someone like him convinced that they are successful and others are failing all around get like this, you almost wish they would flop big. But I'm not the kind that wishes ill even on enemies.

[Desmond Shang]

Nor do I wish ill to you, Prok. May 2010 be a happy time for you!

You'll see me fail at plenty of stuff; I've already failed at a lot of things I've tried, especially in Second Life. It's just that on balance, the good outweighs the bad. Plenty would enjoy the schadenfreude if I failed big, I am sure, but hey... better to be *doing* something, and taking on opportunities, than watch the world pass on by.

Maybe someday virtual business and land barony will sour, and I'll end up Linden Homeless, wandering around with nothing but stories. But if that day comes, I shall know that I tried the very best I could.

Happy Holidays!

[Fogwoman Gray]

Desmond's success is more than homiles and business success. He has made a lot of friends (those are people who care about you even if you don't have a blog), which is a much better indicator of success than all the virtual real estate and money in the world.
Wishing you much financial success in the coming year.

[Prokofy Neva]

Fogwoman, I see you are as much of a pompous ass as Desmond. I think you'll find that this vast array of friends claimed by Desmond is less than meets the eye. Desmond is far, far more interested in financial success than I am, as his boasting of his new car and his rush to plant the flag in Blue Mars illustrate *chuckles*.

It's particularly misguided -- hilarious, really -- to portray me as a soul-less money-grabbing rent-seeking evil SL landlord, and Desmond as a jolly community leader. Er, have you compared our prices lol? I make no pretentions to being a community leader, but I've simply made a place where people have been fairly free to do what they like but without the burden of other people's encroachment (including the burden of maintaining an RP facade all the time), and I think that counts for a lot. I've made far too many sacrifices for it than are justified, the kind of sacrifices that bottom-line Desmond would never make. My tiny business is a fraction of Desmond's, and most rental businesses -- do you realize that there are quite a few people that have 100 or 200 or even 500 islands in SL they run successfully, and that I have...14? Hello?! And of these, more than two of those sims' full of 40 sites are free and open to the public and supported by a dozen friends who donate the tier, and many people who make financial donations. And I think that counts for something, too.

I'll tell you what a real friend is -- a person who cares about you *because* you have a blog and engages with you intellectually on it. (And my blog is no path of fame or glory either, go on virtualworlds.alltop.com and see that many other blogs have more traffic). I'm happy to have made a few real friends like that in SL through my blog that mean much more to me that the sort of role-playing sychophants that gather around Desmond. No doubt Desmond is an acquired taste, and there are those who genuinely have acquired that taste, but that doesn't mean it's the epitome of authenticity.

I do not count success as virtual real estate, profit, or reputation as a "community leader," but in being able to think deeply about many interesting things and compel others to think.

I guess you won't be included in that number.

[Desmond Shang]

>"I'll tell you what a real friend is -- a person who cares about you *because* you have a blog and engages with you intellectually on it."

Aww, Prok! How sweet of you to say!

[Prokofy Neva]

Barf.

*intellectually* I said.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Mmh this could have been three different articles, but they are definitely well-blended together — probably the best I've read during the holiday season!

I guess that one could summarize to say that, from the perspective of a SL resident, the major problem of almost all other "virtual worlds" is simply that... they are not a "better" Second Life, although that's what we all expect it to be. And no matter if any of those virtual worlds actually have good ideas/concepts here and there — like your thorough explanation of what Raph has put in Metaplace, which I had completely missed; and, naturally, the relatively nice (nicer?) graphics on Blue Mars — ultimately they fail to address *all* the points that made SL the success that it actually is. They might address one or two points, but never all. One can only wonder why. Are the techie developers behind those virtual worlds so totally locked in their own worlds (pun intended) that they never go out and see what others — successful ones — are doing?

Avatar personalisation, for instance, is not merely a trifle — it's one of the pillars of a virtual identity. We grumble about so many issues in SL (like, for instance, that to look good you have to lag like crazy...), but the truth is that the only "other" virtual world that understood the "need to avaratise" is... IMVU (no wonder Anshe Chung invested in it!). Blue Mars just thinks it's irrelevant.

Sadly for us, SL just barely manages to address all those issues — and often does it badly. Nevertheless, I think it still shows what is important *for the residents* — as opposed to what is important for the developers. It's just not developed as fully as we would all wish.

I always remember the first time I saw the immensely impressive waterfall on Blue Mars. It was designed to be a "showcase" on the incredible detail and realism that BM users were supposed to expect from BM. While I managed to borrow a relatively powerful computer to play around in BM (which doesn't support anything but Windows) — one that easily gets 20-30 FPS in SL on Ultra settings with shadows on — I managed to see BM with, oh, 7-9 FPS, enough for getting a good taste of it. Except... on the waterfall, where half a frame per second or so were not enough to navigate around properly. Oh yes, the waterfall is impressive, no question about that. And graphics performance will sooner or later improve, I'm sure of it.

But then, back in SL, I just realised that anyone can buy a "waterfall building package" for a handful of L$, and assemble it by themselves. They're just blobby sculpties with some good textures. They are assembled like Lego pieces, so you can be very creative when placing them. There are lots of varieties and choices — even from the pre-sculpty days. And guess what? The end result looks not like Blue Mars, but close enough to be reasonably interesting. Add a few Windlight settings, turn your graphics to Ultra, turn shadows on, and then take a snapshot; nobody will know the difference from Blue Mars. But it took a regular resident — not an expert content creator — to assemble and put in place, and tweak it to their heart's content.

While the waterfall in BM took possibly a handful of developers with PhDs and salaries of five figures to create in, what, a month? Two months? I have no idea. And you can't even interact with it.

I know this is probably not one good reason to switch over to Blue Mars. After all, perhaps I would have had the same thoughts about SL if I had joined a year earlier than I did... when it was barely come out of beta. But with merely 12,000 users and a hundred sims or so, SL showed potential. You had an idea of what could be done there, even if not all uses could possibly have been figured out. While the residents' creativity has by far outpaced the ability of LL's developers to introduce new features, at least you have an idea on what you can achieve — and I, for myself, always had that feeling on the past 5 years. While no other virtual world has given me the same feeling.

I guess that my point is that Blue Mars is not "special". There is really nothing in the platform that couldn't be created by any team of developers. There is no innovation. There is just... technology. In a sense, Blue Mars is just the blockbuster of virtual worlds: a lot of special effects, lots of promise, but no soul. Perhaps when it gets a few hundreds of thousands of people contributing with free content there, things might change. In any case, it'll be hard to compete with 3 billion items :) ... and I guess that's what will always be missed on any Brand New Virtual World, no matter which one will (eventually) replace Second Life.

I personally just hope that someone starts hammering some good sense in LL's stubborn heads and make them open their eyes :) Or at least force them to listen to what the residents are saying...

[Yumi Murakami]

Gwyneth, SL was special back then because it was the new thing and the pioneer.

The developers of BM have probably realised that they don't have that option, and so they have to compete with SL - as it is *right now* - rather than being able to work their way up.

Maybe anyone can build a waterfall from building kit in SL, but what you should compare is how hard it was to create the kit - and in SL that waterfall building kit probably took *years* to make, because it took years for people to learn and share the methods and tricks needed to build those things in SL.

[Desmond Shang]

I know the guy that did the Blue Mars waterfall. Seriously, it's not terribly difficult nor did it take a long time to make.

While there isn't a waterfall in it, check out my Pavonis level. One day's work. *All* of it. Did it myself.

Could I add a waterfall like on the Taki level? Yeah. 20 minutes, maybe.

* * * * *

It's an old classic to say "this will never work" on a forum or blog or something, thus causing people to carefully and painstakingly spoonfeed information about how to do... whatever it is that wasn't supposed to work.

In this case, I'll just say: go see for yourself. It's not difficult stuff. How hard is setting out prims that shoot particles? It's about that "difficult." Just different.

And this is so typical ~ people commenting without doing any solid research.

I'm sure if the Blue Mars social mechanisms had been rolled out ahead of the graphics, people would be screaming "where are the graphics!? Don't you know you need graphics!?"

And yeah, sure, everyone knows all this stuff. It's not like anyone is investing millions only to say: "gee, I should have spent twenty minutes thinking about the social tools and interactivity ~ good thing that blogger brought it up or it would have completely eluded me!"

It's a new platform. Takes guts and vision, research and initiative to see what others don't see yet.

It was the same with SL.

The longer that disinformation and nonsense hangs about, the more visionary the few who did their homework will seem, when the platform does mature. Of course, there will be cries of unfairness, then.

World's a big place, opportunities abound! Embrace it, dig in and make the most of it :)

People thought I was stone cold crazy or stupid for planning a non~gambling, non~sexual, antiquated Caledon in SL back in 2005. I was constantly assured of its imminent failure, or its imminent crushing downfall at the hands of 'cool kid' competition. But stupid me, I just didn't listen. O foolish, foolish Desmond!

I wish I had saved some of that commentary; if I had, I would put it up on the walls of the Guvnah's Mansion in Victoria City now.

[Yumi Murakami]

Well, I guess it doesn't count as difficult if you don't include getting approval to develop for the BM grid..

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond is utterly full of shit here -- the tell-tale sign is this claim that anyone criticizing Blue Mars "hasn't done their reasearch".

Er, what's to research, big guy?!

You can't turn around or move easily -- check. That is a fact.

You can't run up the "mountain" put as a stage set behind Caledon -- check. That is a fact.

You can't put out stuff yourself -- can't even buy stuff in the empty stores. THAT I wouldn't care about, it may come later, but I don't see that an interactive user-to-user economy is even planned (or physically possible).

I don't care if it is easy to make a waterfall in 20 minutes. The point is, you cannot make it with inworld tools, or buy it in an inworld store. You can do it ONLY if you register as a developer and work from behind the scenes, offworld. And that is "easy" to do like...scripting in SL is "easy" to do, too. Yes, if you study it, have some skills going into it, put time into it.

What's absurb about what Desmond is saying is that this world has "potential" and yet only he is gutsy, innovative, savvy, blah blah enough to see it, and no one else is. You do have to wonder why the other people even more grabby and greedy and innovative than Desmond, like Adam or Anshe or a hundred others, aren't there.

And I think the key to it is this: the makers of Blue Mars found him and flattered him. Flattery works on Desmond -- and he uses it on other people to get them to develop for free. Desmond has to justify his investment, and that's why he keeps flogging it like a fanboy, without any critical faculties working at all.

I definitely don't want to get into that position. I remember I took SL very slow and built up my business over time. And -- I'm not a "developer" and a savvy business person like those keen to show off. In fact, I'm a painfully slow learner, because business is not my forte.

I was not struck by any beauty in Blue Mars because the retardedness of my avatar and his inability to move easily simply sucked out all the fun and beauty that might be there. And these were not overcome in about 3 tries of various log-ons. I don't even feel like going back and struggling again, to be honest, which gives me insight into how a lot of people feel about SL.

[Desmond Shang]

That was one of the most disinformation~packed posts you've worked up in a while, Prok! Stunning, actually.

Ah, I do trust that even you would find your arrow keys sooner or later, or... maybe not. Pretty much anything outside of the Agni grid mainland is well outside your comfort zone. And that's okay. You can stay there. I wish you well!

And no, I don't intend to smooth out every slope to the point you can climb it, Prok. I don't have latches on the cupboards or baby gates, either. Some things can't be climbed, and if you had discovered my teleporter to the top of a mountain range, then yes, *gasp*... you might have Fallen! Without being able to get up! Oh no... :)

Prok's also strangely focused on me ~ there *are* lots of familiar names there already. Sure, I'm an early bird, but both my engineering and gaming background came in handy with regard to getting Caledonia established quickly. Even so, Whyroc and his crew was even faster. Watch dozens of other regions flood in shortly. I know a lot of the owners.

* * * * *

Yumi, there's no approval process to become a developer. Sign up and you get an activation email within seconds.

For any would~be designer willing to take two steps out of their comfort zone, this is an incredible new opportunity to start in a young world.

[Prokofy Neva]

Glad Desmond has confirmed that this is not a mountain you can climb, but a stage set.

Desmond even tracked down Adric Antfarm's goofy little-read blog to respond to a perfectly accurate report that Adric wrote about all of Caledon's stores being EMPTY in Blue Mars. Because they *are*. Desmond showed up to bluster for half a page there, too, basically saying "They're empty, yes, because I want to impress you all with being an eager-beaver first mover and shaker in this world but I'm not so unselfish as to actually spend money until I get more free labour in here."

Honestly, it is too funny to watch!

Of course there's an approval process to be a developer. You can "just sign up" if you are an idiot who doesn't grasp that the system requires that you actually have ability to create things in 3-D tools outside the world. Desmond seems to determinate to mispresent things in the same way that the company floggers are misleading people and making it seem like "it's open to anyone" but that's ridiculous. It's open to those *who have the requisite skills to make content*. That is not being being "open". It's also clear that Desmond got the pioneer's special as BM FIC.

I've got a lot of tolerance for wonky virtual worlds. I spent ages on the Sims, and I spent many hours in Metaplace, probably 10 times more than Desmond did. I just don't have the burning need to be the first cool kid the way Desmond does, if anything, I find myself rather repulsed by a world that has him so in-your-face in it. And that's something that should give the makers of BM pause -- that they may have overplayed their hand there.

I don't know who Whyroc is, I'm out of date I guess, but bully for him if he's in faster than Desmond, even! I can see everybody has found a new *game* lol.

The thought that Second Life might be emptying out with some of the more arrogant blowhards is faintly pleasing, but then inworld, I don't pay much attention to them. If Desmond can take Hypatia Callisto and keep her busy and out of the Concierge List chat for whole hours at a time, I'd be happy to put some bluemars dinar in his tip jar just for that...

[whyroc]

It's a good article actually! I too have followed the rise and fall of Metaplace with interest.

Who's whyroc? It maybe was me who made your sculpty waterfall kit in SL (or maybe someone stole it and sold it to you;). I am also a Blue mars City dev for Gridrock City. So? what? you ask? Well its fun, I like it and I think others will too.

In our city we aren't satisfied with a static movie set kind of world either, and although under construction have started to build our Sci Fi Role playing framework into the city. If Blue Mars can find a niche within a year of falling close to IMVU then it would be a success in my mind!

We are committed to using free tools for BM development and have opened up a guilds program where our members can learn how to make stuff.. its challenging but easier than sculpties I would say. (to get good results)

So make of it what you will, we are a small tight and agile team having so much 'fun' on the Blue Mars platform. Nuff said!

-w

[Simon Newstead]

Nice article, enjoyed the leisurely read over the weekend. Although I missed point number 9 :)

Agree with your recommendations about having an avatar, letting them experiment in "private" (not many like getting changed in public) etc

The bit about creation, I think its about usability and interface, if you can present it in a simple way and not mixed up with your core features like chat/interaction with scene it can work (we get a lot of users jump in and make nice things on their first visit, although we place creation on its own page/menu)

On the movement part, that's tricky because different people have different expectations. I used the arrow keys for example on MP and ended up walking in strange zig zags to get where I wanted to go... didn't figure out the single click path finding until much later.. and IMVU has done really well without any movement at all =_=