No, Cloud Party, You're Doing it All Wrong -- Once Again!

A Bubble Factory in Cloud Party. A featured destination in Cloud Party by Albertini e Moioli.

I spent a frustrating 45 minutes on Cloud Party last night, lured there by a blog by the awful Hamlet ne Linden Au touting it as now a frontier populated by artists like Max Graff of Rustica (originally in Second Life).

I remember what a huge fuss Max made some years ago when his island was copy-botted and he blamed Linden Lab for poor response. I sympathize and I'm a big champion of intellectual property rights. What was more murky was why he didn't get a lawyer and fight in court -- but it may have been too expensive or required exposing his real identity -- that's the problem with trying to protect IP in SL. He stormed off to the open sims, although somehow, I think he remained in SL.

Now he has built a sim -- or a ...whatever they are called in Cloud Party -- a cloud? -- and it's -- well, ok. OK if you like scanning a postcard on line. That's what these non-SL worlds always feel like to me -- just going to gawk at something that doesn't involve me. You can't even gawk very well in Cloud Party, as there is no pan that goes easily all around the sim like control-click for panning easily in SL. You can't fly, which is the biggest frustration you constantly feel in CP. So you just sort of look at somebody's cut-outs they made on some third-party graphics program.

Or should we call it CCCP. One of the worst things -- THE worst thing I've discovered about Cloud Party is that every single object that is rezzed out displays a notice "CREATED BY" and then it puts the *owner's* name.

This is terribly confusing and wrong and in fact pernicious and should be fought tooth and nail by creators and anyone who cares about IP. When I first visited Philip Linden's home in Cloud Party -- yes, he's there with his Facebook sign-in so it's him  -- a home identical to all the homes with their twisty uncomfortable stupid staircases up to silly boring houses -- I saw all these beds rezzed out that looked like the cherry wooden bed in the Library in Second Life. I clicked on them and they said "Created by Philip Linden" and I chuckled thinking he had made something like what he might have made early in SL. The beds were all ranged around as if he had a big sleep-over at his CP house.

Actually, what was more likely, is that he had the same trouble any of us had in dragging stuff out of the library in CP and getting it to set right in your house. And he didn't make those beds -- they're in the library.

I couldn't rez anything to test it myself, so I went back to my own home base, looked at my couch, taken from the library, and it said CREATED BY me.  Not *owned* by me. CREATED BY.

If this is what is going to happen to everything taken out of inventory, existing as stock or sold or exchanged, then this has GOT to stop. They simply have to have "created by" and "owned by" or they really fuck up the metaverse on principle. And it's a principle I wouldn't be surprised Cory Ondreijka (a CP investor) has, since he was always for open source cultism in SL, didn't care about copybot or the reverse engineering even of his own proprietary code, and he was reputed to have left Linden Lab over a dispute with Philip that may have involved the question of how much LL was going to fight for copyright or not -- or some variation on that theme of whether the server code should also be released and everything should just "be free". We'll never know because no one is talking about what happened there.

While this "glitch" may not affect items being sold on a marketplace going forward, if Max and company really care about IP as much as they claim, they have to care about what objects say and about who made them. I did not create that couch.

In fact, I couldn't create a couch or even a covered cube or painting. That's what's so fucking frustrating with CP, you cannot intuitively, easily do the things that even as a newbie of a few weeks in SL, which I could do even without any skills -- like rez out something, upload a texture, put the texture on it. I struggled and struggled with the menus. They have completely non-intutive names for the various functions, which is just some geeky affectation. There is some sort of "mask" which *might* be layers on an object, who the fuck knows. I finally managed to upload a texture, but then there was no way to drag it on to the prim, or get the prim in "edit" mode to select a texture. The "mask" bar kept giving me error messages demanding I "do something," but there were no tutorials and no little instructions on the little stupid cellphone icon which I had once clicked on to move through a set of annoying tutorials forcing me to build before the game would even give me a house.

And that's just it. These people are doing it ALL WRONG. Just like they did on SL and a dozen other words. The theory of their Metaverse is first to have all the geeks and tekki-wikinistas to come and open source-cult-it-up with their junks and their cultist culture, and then have "content" that the rest of us will come and "consume", presumably, for a price.

That the "content" is going to be stuff like these strange greasy leaden "bubbles" in a "bubble factory" that somebody means nothing. That the "content" consists of evil-looking California suburban cul-de-sac neighbourhoods with awkward houses on stilts means nothing. They aren't about making homes, they are about making sandboxes.

These developers ALWAYS do this wrong. They should first FINISH THE GODDAMN WORLD and MAKE IT EASY TO USE!  You know, they say Guild Wars did that -- took their time finishing the game -- and it came out better as a result.

Yeah, I get it that open-ended virtual worlds are "different". But...why? No reason except politics and ideology. They want the "developers" to come work for them for free in the alpha and the beta. Then comes gamma. Gamma is...what?  (I'm not surprised to see c3's charming grumpy face in a discussion about this sort of thing.) Delta is...what? Endless change. Endless. It never finishes. Software is never done. That's why it is hard to build a civil society with it. But still. They could finish it enough so that ordinary people can come into it comfortably.

You shouldn't be forced through a routine learning how to build just to get a house. You should get the house, immediately. You should be able to right click and buy any private island or perch or place where you can set up shop as easily as you buy something on amazon.com, with one click into your shopping basket attached to your PayPal or credit card.

The world should be for people, not geeks only. Having geeks means the entrance areas are filled with show-offs and goofs and lifers and griefers spewing particles and rezzing penises. Having geeks means DISCOMFORT for the rest of us -- and for a good long time, probably forever, because once you let this destructive hacker culture take root in a world, it's almost impossible to eradicate it.

In fact, as Ahab Qvetcher was noting the other day (and it's something I've said before), before you code the world, you really should get the people together who want a world, and ask them what they want in a world, and how they want it governed. When that is decided, democratically, then you make the world as a technical exercise, not a political science exercise starting with the political science decision to make an open source cult as prior, infecting the world. As Ann Otoole has put it, the coders should start with the *customer requirements* first, not their own.

Now, back to Maxwell's build. Well, it's pretty and all, but you can't interact with it. You can't click on things. You can't click and see the "edit" mode and who made it or anything about it. It has this feeling of static post-card life like you are trapped in an old-fashioned stereopticon, without real *life*. (Blue Mars had that problem). For a world to have life, it can't just be moving itself, like the water there moves after a fashion in Max's build. *You* have to experience the sense that you have mastery over the world even as just an ordinary person.

And you don't have that in CP. You have the helpless feeling of being trapped in a geek's stereopticon that you can't modify or make home. I hate that. That *they* can sandbox in it is no comfort to me -- I don't care. I don't care for their culture or art most of the time.

I DON'T CARE THAT IT IS IN BETA AND IT PLANS TO BE DIFFERENT. Der, we heard all that and again, from Hamlet who is a total suck-up to this sort of hacker culture.

What matters is that NOW, when it's "open to the public," it is uncomfortable, stupid, annoying, and depressing. You can't make it home. You can't even put up a picture. You can't go shopping. You can't find other people.

Avatar camera tools aren't as important (although the ability to cam is crucial to making a world feel like "home") as being able to easily use tools to set up your house. Why not even have furnished houses? Chairs you can actually SIT on? (You can't sit yet there). Houses that you don't have to FIGHT in order to enter and see (like these ridiculous houses). Stuff that rezzes out quickly and easily to look at.

And the ability to make simple cubes with textures VERY EASILY.

The bow-legged avatars borrowed from Toast Bard aren't especially fun, and while they are going to have more choices for the avatar's "look" they really need to think about THE HOME part. HOME. It's really important. Linden took six years to get to LINDEN HOMES and make it easier for newbies to land in a place of their own easily. Cloud Party should get to this way faster. Like now.

Anil Dash says you can't make the revolution from the country club. What I point out to him is that the revolution IS the country club and you have to stop making geek revolutions that are not hospitable for anyone else.

 
PS  I couldn't even find my own home I eventually painfully had worked my way up to through the forced march of the skills tutorials.

Now I'm back struggling to find it again. I stumbled on it last time through "last place visited".

I had to click through a bunch of named islands looking for "Catherine's Home".  There's no "teleport home".

Oh well, in Second Life I bought my first land and then couldn't find my way back to it. I actually bought a sim on the auction before I finally found the "my property" section on the wonky SL dashboard.

 

 

Comments

[Darianknight]

Excellent write up, and for the most part I agree with your sentiments.

I'm not really big on "Linden Homes" or anything of that nature in other systems because I've noticed over the years that it's like neglected slum housing.

There's a much better way into that, but that's a topic for an entire blog entry for me.

The postcard feeling is expected in Cloud Party, which is why I brushed it off when it debuted. It suffers from the same issue that all "web worlds" or "virtual world in a web browser" suffer from, in that in order to pull it off, the result will inevitably be a pale shadow of a full blown client tailored to the operating system and able to utilize far more resources and abilities.

I consider "web worlds" like a "Metaverse Lite". I use Metaverse very tongue in cheek because it's not really a Metaverse yet. But again, I digress.

Whenever I hear a company say that they're making a web browser virtual world I almost instinctively nod, smile and promptly stop listening. Whenever a company says they're making a non-dynamic system (Blue Mars, etc) I do the same.

I feel for you. It's a hell of a frustration to watch companies just do a 180 and shoot themselves in the foot - gladly.

[Prokofy Neva]

1. It is not "slum lands" to have Linden Homes. They're just not to your geeky aesthetic taste. They are suburban homes that suit tens of thousands of people. Good! I even kept a wizard one as part of the Land Preserve for a long time but then I needed the tier. Many people are made happy by this controlled experience.

Of course it competes with rental agents like me and therefore it's not the best solution, but given the Lindens' allergy to promoting commerce in general except for their own and their buddies, it makes sense for them, as a solution to newbie care and feeding. It would be better to have commercial offerings or even help groups with free homes -- competition from various models -- but they don't like that or feel they can't quality-control it or something... so they do what they do, and it's not the worst.

I don't even need the Cloud people to put me in a Linden home. I need them simply to make the ramp to my home much more intuitive and easy. I need not to be PUNISHED and FORCED to learn how to build in order to get a home (currently the plan). I need to just "be there" or "go there" with just one or two clicks. They can roll out land like toilet paper on these kind of platforms so they should just have little newbie landing perches at the very least.

Linden fails at this too by having the infohubs and welcome areas so filled with the same kind of nerd griefers.

The postcard world bothers me because I can't even do the most basic things like I could do in the Sims Online with company-made things like play pool, dance with another avatar, etc. It just rots.

If I want to look at pretty pictures, I'll go to Pinterest or go outside in real life with my camera phone and fool around.

As for the dynamic thing, I don't know, maybe that's at issue.

What I don't like most is the idea that:

o we can put out an unfinished crappy world and then act all hurt and disjointed if you say it's crappy

o we can do that and keep promising little upgrades on nerdy things like creator tools for things that don't make it more homey

o we can shit on other people coming in and not make them even a simple basic home with a simple nice ramp-up

o we can make it impossible to even do a simple thing like put up a painting in that home

etc.

It's an entire, deep, embedded culture. It is not fixed by changing this or that little routine.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm remember the web world Metaplace, and the whole vision of architecture that Raph had which was fascinating and which he once explained to me in a bar in San Diego.

In that world, there was a town square where I could do lots of things -- games, orientation, etc.

I could easily start my own little parcel with its name and easily plunk out the library furniture or upload a texture of my own for the worldlet's backdrop.

To be sure, it was wonky, it had Google Sketchup Warehouse stuff which I hate in worlds because they don't fit, but it also had a lot of other "user friendly thing".

Very early in the game Raph, I asked if we could change the genders and Raph put out a store where you could walk in and change the avatar's outfits and therefore gender. Very simple and customer friendly.

It just really matters whether you care about making the world home for people other than geeks or not.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Well, I'm technically too old to be still called a geek, but I guess that once a geek, always a geek.

Nevertheless, I find Cloud Party too hard for me. Yes, I know. It was supposed to be "the VW to end all VWs" in terms of ease of use, and address the whole issue that LL "never got right".

But it doesn't.

So, yes, CP works on a Web browser. Yes, you can quickly figure out that clicking on keys will do something. Figuring out exactly what you're supposed to do is another story (the tutorials are nice, at least they don't crash like LL's HUD-based system, but they're not as easy as they seem). I really had a lot of trouble walking up the stairs to enter my own home. Who cares if I was getting 30 FPS if I couldn't exactly aim at the entrance and would always get stuck on doors? (These days, I get easily 20 FPS on SL anyway, even with my 7-year-old iMac, so I don't feel CP to be *so* much better)

Then... building. Well. I have to say that except for very simple VWs where "building" consisted of dropping items on the ground and shuffling them around (like on MOOVE), I only have experience with SL. I was never a Blue Mars developer, so I have no idea how "building" worked; nor do I know how IMVU works. Taking that into account, I was expecting that at least rezzing an item on my own house would be... simple. Like, you know... search directory, drag, drop, rotate and move to the final place? I mean, how can that be made more simpler?

Apparently, it cannot. I ended up with bits of furniture all over the place — sometimes outside the windows of my home. And since there isn't a detachable camera yet, and you cannot fly, or even open the windows, that means going through the painful experience of walking down the stairs... trying to find the lost item... finding it... now entering the Build Mode of Hell again... trying *very carefully* to drag the item back into the home... walking all those stairs up again, crashing into the door... then finding the object... dragging it into the final position and *whoops* I made a mistake somewhere and the object ended back again outside the window! Oh NO!

This gets tiring after a while.

So I tried to upload a few meshes. I don't have many (I'm not a 3D modeller!), just a few from the mesh beta testing days in SL. I know how many people complained about how complex the mesh uploading feature of SL was, how it gave unpredictable results, and so forth — not even mentioning the complexity of doing clothes or avatar parts (which are beyond me). However, nothing compares to the complexity of the CP uploading tools. Blender seems a breeze compared to the incredible amount of steps that it takes to upload a mesh to CP... and the end result, well, is nothing special: I couldn't apply textures or anything fancy like that, and I'm sure I've missed a dozen steps somewhere.

Oh well. All I can say is that CP is way, way, way too complex to use for any simple building. I'm sure that professional 3D modellers are drooling over it, even though I continue not to see what is so special about it — except for running on a Web browser and not "needing" any special download.

Still, without a marketplace where "normal" users can buy content — since it's so hard to build it! — it will be hard to judge what future Cloud Party has... but I believe it will go the same way of all other VWs: good for geeks, but not for anyone else.

[Prokofy Neva]

Wow -- just wow, Gwyn! I'm shocked. If 8 years of developing in SL has made it that you can't even build a little table in Cloud Party, then thigns are really bad.

And while I'm not a geek or developer, I can at least texture a prim and do a few little things, make little stupid items that are simple. And I can't do that here.

The houses with the uncomfortable stairs, up on stilts, are a particular kind of torture that some geek is probably chortling at. They really are ridiculous. Why do you need a house on stilts? It's not like it's going to flood in there, you know? How about a nice open building that doesn't head bang with nice camera angles???

And did you figure out how to texture the prims? That was a real stumper for me.

[c3]

funny,

i wasnt making a strong software built as "beta" pun in that little g+ blurb.. it was more about the "klouting" and "segregating" of people by ranking such as in Huxleys brave new world...

anyhow- no surprises. CCC C3 , all tossed for slave building for the 1% .... again and again.

17+ years of web3d -- since the cult of VRML and its SF crooks--and it all loops again.

"does it get better"? remember asking grumpy me that in 2007-8?..

it's not what technology wants...;)

savage c3

[Ahab Qvetcher]

Prokofy touches on a number of interesting issues here.

1) In many ways the precise technology for the virtual world or virtual society doesn't matter so long as it is somehow useable (I accept that Cloud Party has a steeper learning curve than SL, which means I would be out of the running to begin with)--it may not be as well developed as it could be, but it has been functional for, what, nearly ten years now? So the virtual part is well in hand. Now it is time, and past time, to focus on the problem of 'society.' In SL there has been a spate of griefer attacks over the last month or so, which call into question a number of issues. The technology will never control it, so all that is left is a consistent ethic of law and order, and an idea of virtual property rights (the account holder or avatar as tenant.) Until we get the idea that the company is not merely a company, but stands in relation to the avatars/ account holders as would a government to its citizens, a lot of problems will remain. With it, you can begin to have a coherent discussion of protection of intellectual property in things like SL, or protection from griefers and other such petty criminals.

2)At one level you may argue that the company is selling a product, but at that point a question of what the product is arises--is it simply space on a server? Or is it somewhat more? The word I am about to use is an ideologically charged one, and I wish to step outside that for a second--at one level what is being sold is passage to a 'colony;' the company stands more or less as might the Lord Proprietor of Maryland in the 1640's--here is a tract of land, come settle it, make of it what you will, pay your quit rents to the Treasurer of the Eastern Shore, don't bother those who disagree with you. When you visualize that, you begin to visualize a new society being formed of disparate individuals. That begins to have an attraction, and it begins to have applications that can make serious money for a company. It also calls for some protection for the rights of the virtual citizenry. Otherwise, what you have is a cute toy or a very strange video game.

3) Without some such mentality you won't see businesses or educational institutions hanging around much. They demand protection from troublemakers, for a start, and are not too interested in having the citizenry parade around with whips, chains, an interesting prosthesis big enough to choke an elk, and a sign that says "VIP BDSM Fantasy World." The faux libertarianism that insists that everything might go anywhere anytime cuts no water in real life, and would have to be regulated here too.

4) Without such, much potential in SL or other similar would be wasted--an Australian group of college educators solved most of the technical problems of virtual delivery of classes on SL, just as the education craze was running its course. Their hope was to create education on demand cheaply for users in impoverished countries. Textbooks on line, tutorials in local languages wherever you can find a qualified instructor, at any time of the day or night, lectures recorded, and the cost of a sim is infinitesimal compared to that of a brick and mortar building--if you get enough students to lag a space, you simply hive off and create another space.

But to do that, you have to keep the technical infrastructure SIMPLE to keep the learning curve down and to keep the computing hardware feasible. That of course runs 180 degrees counter to every instinct which is to upgrade, complicate, and intensify.

Anyway, enough, time for decent avatars to go to bed and count electronic sheep, or prosthetics attachments, as the case may be.

[Dr Langway]

Prokofy has written a very good piece on CP and listed it's faults and flaws.

Based on Prokofy's blog review, which I am not saying is right or wrong BTW, and the comments of others here, CP seems a place no one should waste time going to.

It will be interesting to see if Prokofy goes back to CP and why.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New subject

Prokofy will you be sharing your views on Ecuador granting political asylum to Julian Assange, the British Government's reaction to Ecuador's decision and the reason there has been no reported comment from the USA on the issue?

[Prokofy Neva]

c3 -- I thought I'd be as incoherent and disconnected as you are at times with this one.

Ahab -- CP has a steep learning curve on creation, maybe to keep it the sacrosanct domain of geeks. But as a metaversal device, it's much easier than SL to get into and look around because it's web-based. That, to me, doesn't really mean that much. I think most people who bother are already exposed to WoW or some other MMORPG that downloads and requires acclimitization, so it's not really that big a deal. Developers think they are getting to be "like Facebook" when they make a virtual world be web-based. I think this is merely a technical feint and misjudgement of their audience.

Linden Lab refuses its world-bearing obligations and destinies. It just refuses. And that means until communities have the resources to buy their own servers and coders and make their own worlds, people will be at the mercy of such geek societies as appear on the Internet for their own reasons.

You can talk about history and political science and Lord this and that, and we all have, but as Spin Martin once put it, "We are customers of a software company. The end." And as a Linden once put it, he isn't interested in group governance, merely code. They don't see it our way and never will.

As I said, some day when these things become cheaper and more ubiquitous we will see communities making of it what they will without expecting it all to be decided by one proprietary company. Or there will be enough of a market that some companies will sell "world" as a product and "governance" as a product in a competitive market.

Some universities went to open sim, where if anything, they might expect more griefing, not less as there are less rules, less tools, less staff, less concern, etc. But ultimately, they solve the problem with locked down islands.

My views on Assange are on my other blog:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/08/196631.htm

The US made a lengthy reply at the State Dept, Google it. They say they aren't getting involved.
This is a story of victimology in search of elusive persecutors.

[Ahab Qvetcher]

Not to flog a dead horse, but the 'product' isn't really the software. If I was interested in just the software, I would be perfectly happy beating the begeebers out of the pixelated natives in Mount and Blade or some such. The product is the socialization. And while Linden Labs won't step up, sooner or later, someone will, I suspect.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, you're right Ahab. The Lindens, especially the current leadership, don't see it that way. Mark Kingdom, or M Linden, actually had an insight when he said "the killer app is each other". But, hell is other people. Governance has to be part of that app.

[elizabeth (16)]

prokofy wrote "the revolution IS the country club and you have to stop making geek revolutions"

^^that

[c3]

to be incoherent IS to be connected to the Social slavery media age.