BreakThink Tank:What's holding SL back? (Second Life)

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I was doing some needed goofing off earlier and I noticed that ol’ Hamlet Au has a couple of back-to-back entries contemplating a pair of related stories which go some way to explain why Second Life hasn’t taken off as much as it could have, and instead having a fairly static uptake.

One article is the observation by an educator that most of his students seemed put off by the “sandbox” environment and/or the lack of immediately relevant social networks. The other hypothesises that Windlight — the tech that creates far more beautiful, realistic water and skies — may be driving off people whose otherwise adequate machines simply cannot handle it. (Pavig Lok suggests that the problem may also be that the system is at its limits.)

1: Poor Interface Design
The interface and focus of the current client is made for Linden Lab employees, and doesn’t focus on nor adequately address the needs of the typical user, who’s generally too impatient to read the manual. A major rark-up is required to do this. And yes, that includes making the “Windlight on/off” switch more obvious.

2. Crude Search Tools
Search for “clothes”, or “money”... you know the score. The in-engine search tools are almost useless, overwhelmed by those who game the system. Increasingly it’s getting to the point where you’re best to ignore the first ten or so results. And if users can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they give up.

3. Lack of Imposed Goals
By “imposed”, I mean, “inherent in the world design”. The typical game feeds you a series of goals, ranging from “go there from here” to “kill X with Y”. Also, the game is over once the goals are met. SL has none of these, and once again the poor newbie is bewildered and gives up. Personally, I had goals (misguided, misinformed, but goals) when I first signed up, and they kept me going through the crucial first hour.

4. The Swaddled Generation
The youth of today are used to being ordered around in a controlled environment and protected from bad things and people by repeated indoctrination and outright legislation. To make things more fun, modern society lives in a permanent state of fear of just about everything. If you’re afraid of anything different or unusual, you don’t explore. And SL is all about exploration.

5. That One Lousy Hour
It’s been mooted that the current designs of Orientation Island are inferior to what existed a year ago, and may even be obsolete. Personally, I prefer the old linear “garden path” to the current cross thingy.

6. System Failures
I’ve noticed along with heaps of other people that SL has been having problems. The asset servers have been troublesome; teleportation doesn’t work; land info is curiously absent; and so it goes. Evidently the back end systems desperately need an enema.

Most of the points are technology related. Some tools are too crude and others to sophisticated. One is more a social matter that can’t be easily fixed, but then again SL is somewhat safer for exploration than reality.

But my argument is that most factors can be rectified if, and only if, the Lab starts thinking like a user — especially a new user — instead of making users think like the Lab.

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