Everyone loves user-created content in virtual worlds. It’s the flavor of the month and a key feature in several new and upcoming worlds. It’s arguably what has made Second Life so popular. Linden Labs has estimated that it has the equivalent of 5100 full-time content creators working for it on content, all for free! How can that be a bad thing?
Some friends and I were talking about this recently, and the question came to me: if everyone loves user-created content and SL is so popular, why do so many people complain of the place feeling so lonely?
The answer: it’s the content, stupid.
Here’s the deal: according to a recent Information Week article, Second Life has about 34 terabytes of user-created content in it – houses, clothes, hair, and tons of other stuff. That’s a huge number, but by current storage standards not really that big of a deal: if you spread that out over everyone who has ever signed up, it’s only 5.4Mb per user. Looking at SL’s recent 30/60 day login numbers, that’s still only 20-30Mb per active user. And looking at this a slightly different (and probably more relevant) way, if only 5% of everyone who’s ever signed up for SL has contributed content, that would average out to about 11Mb per person.
A more relevant number in considering the complaints of emptiness is SL’s concurrent usage. These numbers seem to vary between 25K-35K; call it 34K on the high side to make the math easy. This means that given the amount of user-created data, for every concurrent user there’s about a gigabyte of content available.
You can think of this as a sort of virtual population density. Simple ‘space’ in a virtual world doesn’t necessarily matter, but amount of data-per-user does. Too little data and people have nowhere to go and little to see; too much data per user and the world becomes too large for people to effectively find each other.
To put this in perspective, World of Warcraft has a max server population of around 3000 people, operating on about 10Gb of data – a density of about 1 person per 3.3Mb (0.0033Gb), or 300x the density in SL. SL has a concurrent population (“per server” equals 1, since SL is all in one world) of about 12x that of WoW – but the world size measured in data is about 3400x!
In other words, the average population density in SL is like playing in a world the size of WoW’s Azeroth – but containing only nine other people. Clearly, this raises all sorts of issues regarding finding others and building community.
Now here’s the twist: SL is growing fast, as they continue to highlight on their site and in their PR. More people are, presumably, creating new content all the time – that “virtual staff” of 5100 full-time content creators chugging away all the time. And it is fast exceeding, or has already exceeded, the number of people actually available to use the content as it’s created. More and more empty houses and castles and the like are lovingly constructed as monuments that few will ever see, and each becomes another wall between users, diluting their presence more and more.
It seems unlikely that the pace at which content is created by users will decrease. And, given that none of the old content goes away, this means that the content-per-user ratio progressively (and non-linearly) worsens. As this continues the world becomes larger and larger, and somewhat paradoxically, seemingly more and more empty. This is the “500 channels and nothing on” or “ten million blogs and nothing to read” problem writ ever larger as the new content flows in faster than there are people there to interact with it.
One final issue is that if your world relies on user-created content there’s no way to throttle that content for performance. In many virtual worlds its possible to get a hundred or more people together in the same place, which creates great dynamics for chatting, trading, fighting, etc. In SL, it’s all but impossible to get more than a dozen or so people together unless they start doing things like “taking off their hair” – that is, disabling their more intricate user-created content. What this means is that even if people do manage to find each other, the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.
The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population; and b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other. This is not a strong recipe for building effective, long-lasting community.
Okay, so let’s back off of SL in particular: this is an issue for anyone who hangs their success on user-created content, as many appear to be doing now. The question becomes, how do you give your users the ability to create whatever they want without those creations diluting and limiting the population density, thereby reducing the opportunity for the experience of community that brings people back? How do you prevent users’ self-expression from being the thing that turns your world into a socially empty and uninviting wasteland?
In Entropia Universe uploaded PC (participant content) is limited at this time to artwork.
A player can create artwork in their software program of choice and upload it to the game. Then they can display this artwork or sell it to others.
There are fees involved. A fee to upload. A special display panel must be purchased from a crafter so your artwork can be displayed. I would estimate the cost of adding your content and displaying it to be at least $20 U.S. dollars.
But the cost seems to slow down content that takes away from the universe. I've yet to see some of the trash that abounds in SL.
But PC isn't just uploaded content. It is also manageable content.
In SL land seems to be limitless. This allows for their world to expand endlessly. In EU, new land areas are added periodically and hopefully with thought as to the number of concurrent players. Like SL, in EU one can own and manage land. You can control the types of mobs on that land. You control the tax rate on the land. But the land is not limitless. This allows the designers to avoid the uninviting wasteland issue. There are also player owned shopping malls, shops, and of course a virtual night club.
The point of all this is that participant content is good. But too much of a good thing can be bad. In my opinion, EU is on the right track with allowing PC in a limited fashion.
Posted by: thoreau | May 14, 2007 at 14:50
The only way is to make content creation rewarding but hard.
This would produce some content produced by the truly devoted (and this less liable to exceed Sturgeon's Law) while at the same time, being too "tekkie" for whiny crap-makers like Prok.
A win all the way around!
Posted by: Rich Bryant | May 14, 2007 at 15:09
The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population
This problem is attacked with search, bookmarking and recommendations. As long as it's always as easy to find the good stuff, people will cluster there and ignore the vast swathes of sketched experiences. Unfortunately search in SL isn't doing a great job of keeping up with the fire hose of content at the moment.
b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other.
This is attacked with quotas and quality of service features. Prims per region in SL are limited effectively, but attached prims, scripts and other resources suffer from the tragedy of the commons when people get together and collectively suffer from the unbounded resource usage.
Posted by: Jim Purbrick | May 14, 2007 at 15:37
Jim Purbrick: As long as it's always as easy to find the good stuff, people will cluster there and ignore the vast swathes of sketched experiences.
This assumes of course that "the good stuff" is the same for everyone. This is a matter of opinion; the more fractured it becomes, the smaller the clusters of people, the greater the dilution, and the more difficult it is to find a critical mass of other people. This seems to be the case with SL right now; I don't think the primary problem is poor search capabilities (though there is that).
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 14, 2007 at 15:53
This is an interesting issue, although I don't think the parallel to blogs, etc. works quite the same. Despite the very virtual nature of these spaces, every piece of evidence so far suggests that our biological hardwiring comes into play. And so space and distance matter. Emptiness matters more when you can see it than when you are Googling through it. When you Google through cast chunks of TB space, you don't "feel" the volume, but when you run (or ride or fly) through landscapes, it inherently feels different. It's tough to kick aeons of evolution from the savannahs.
I also keenly remember doing my AC2 study and finding that people were lonely and having all of these drops in social capital. My explanation was exactly this one: it was a question of player/area density.
Posted by: Dmitri Williams | May 14, 2007 at 16:27
Nice a-ha moment for me today, Mike. Thanks. I hadn't put together the idea of large volumes of user-created content somehow keeping people apart. But it is gelling in my head on a couple levels.
Let me ask a question this way, and first make some assumptions. Let's assume that the people who want to make content have good, easy tools to do so. I reject Rich's idea about "rewarding but hard." Creating a blog isn't hard; good writing is. Technical barriers to creativity are bad. There is nothing rewarding at all about wrangling complicated, poorly designed software to make it do the thing in your head that is beautiful already.
Secondly, let's assume (for argument's sake), that all the content that's then created is, to some degree, useful and "good" for something. Whether it is only part of the learning process of the creator, a way to share/gift between friends, a way to differentiate incredibly insane degrees of taste... whatever. Let's not make a value judgment on what other people create and call it "bad" or "crap" or whatever. If someone makes it, it is OK.
But... even assuming those two things, does all good content accrue to the benefit of the creator and the system? Hmmmm... Neat, neat question. And does the benefit accrue in the ways we want, even when it does?
In SL, I learned enough about primming to craft some very, very rudimentary stuff. I then made copies for a few friends and gave the stuff to them just so they could have "Andy Havens' original jewelry." From an artistic standpoint, it was crap. But they wore them (at least when I was around), because they liked me and wanted to show off "handmade" stuff as opposed to "store-bought" stuff. I only ever, for example, wore tattoos that I'd designed myself.
But by doing those things for myself... did I forfeit chances for interaction? Interesting... Did I make the world in SL slightly more "empty" by spending time in RL making neat tattoos in Photoshop, rather than finding someone with great tatts and setting up a relationship?
To be blunt... in a world of relationships, how much of our content creation qualifies as public mast****tion?
Now I need to go think about this in terms of blogs, wikis, etc. Funky.
Posted by: Andy Havens | May 14, 2007 at 17:37
I had written up something related with regards to personal virtual worlds, which is what SL properties are:
http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/PersonalVirtualWorlds.htm
I mentioned a possible solution too.. make development of content more difficult (by making it more flexible) to reduce the amount of content created, while simultaneously improving its quality.
Posted by: Mike Rozak | May 14, 2007 at 17:55
Following up on what Dmitri is saying about Google making the empty spaces between the hits disappear. Forcing space to be consistent for everyone leads to lots of “low grade” space in a user content world. How about letting users choose who they share the world with, then sizing the world to be big enough to hold the stuff those people create?
I’m not sure how people would react to such a variable space, but it would address the emptiness problem. And of course you would need some way of introducing stuff not from your current chosen circle. But personally, I like the prospect of VWs as a place where we can modify our standard notions of space and time if it gives us new abilities. I think it is worth trying.
Posted by: Hellinar | May 14, 2007 at 19:16
Paradoxically, while persistence is a great feature in online worlds & particularly those with user generated content, too MUCH persistence can be a bad thing. Call it "promiscuous persistence". I lamented when some of my favorite areas in an old text MUCK were recycled and/or expired. But looking back on it, I can see that with the creator/maintainer long gone, and few people going to that "virtual arcade" any more anyway, it was better for the overall health of that world to be wiping old areas sometimes rather than keeping everything forever.
Furcadia doesn't have enough persistence yet, in my view, and we intend to add some "semi-permanence" to some parts of the game that don't have it now. (Duration will be earned through attention, so hopefully the players will be perpetuating the best-liked stuff the most.) But one thing we have NOT really had in our ten years+ is the "miles of empty places with nobody to talk to" problem you see in Second Life, or could see many years ago in places like Alpha World. Just requiring people to put in a little effort to keep their work available to people keeps our population density very nice.
Posted by: Dr. Cat | May 14, 2007 at 20:32
I think Dr. Cat's is insight is terribly important. We all need a little entropy to keep us from being overwhelmed by (digital) persistence for persistence's sake.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 14, 2007 at 21:19
Entropy may be a very good way to reduce the amount of unused "stuff" in the world. And as a bonus it could be a simple monetary cost, meaning additional revenue for the world operator.
But in SL's case, aren't they already collecting rent/taxes/something from those who have uploaded data? While LL retains the right to turn off anyone's creations, they risk a terrible backlash if they begin doing so.
In Ultima Online several years ago they started making player's houses decay, and there was an enormous outcry against this. I suspect that if you built this in from the beginning -- all items require maintenance, and the older (and/or less used) the higher the cost becomes -- most people would tolerate it pretty well.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 14, 2007 at 21:25
Interesting question, Mike. I'll offer an alternative view point, because in my experience I don't agree that too much content is the ultimate problem, and I don't think it's exactly like today's web either where static search engines will seemingly solve most everything for most people. Some thoughts:
I'm with Babbage on starting to solve this problem with search, bookmarking and recommendations. Dmitri makes a good point about flying over emptiness vs. hyperlinking right to content, but you can do that in SL with teleportation. It's not like WoW where you have to run everywhere or fly to certain stations, so it doesn't have to be a problem.
I'll also submit that search in virtual worlds, as Dmitri mentions too, is not quite like search on blogs or web pages, and one of the biggest reasons why is that since the people and the things people are doing *right now* are the content you want to find in so many cases. You need a way to find out what's going on in the world in realtime.
Take this example. Say you have a traditional Google-esque search engine for Second Life or whatever world that lets you search for "car" and get a list of all the cars in the world. You find a nice one and click to go to it. There's the car alright, and she's lovely, but no one's there to play with. This isn't a problem on the web right now because when you search for something you usually want the information about it (the article, the picture, the static thing, even if it's the latest static thing you want), not the live, shared experience of it.
Some of the solutions that I see emerging for open virtual world search, built on top of more traditional search engines and tagging and bookmarking schemes because you still need that information out there, are emerging on the web with realtime "what are you doing right now?" search and exposure engines like Twitter and Me.dium.
If you've never used Twitter, it's like massively multi-user instant messaging that asks you to say what you're doing right now, as often as you'd like, in less than 140 characters and shares it with all your contacts and also with a public timeline (which you can opt-out of). If you've never used Me.dium, it pops up a sidebar on your browser that visually shows you what site you're on, who else is on the site, what sites you're friends are on, and what similar sites people are on, allowing you to see what other Me.dium users are up to on the web and surf over to look at and talk about the same thing at the same time.
Imagine having a kind of Twittervision (all the world's twitters popping up on a Google Map) for virtual worlds that didn't just tell you what sim or server people were on, but also allowed them to say what they were up to right now, and allowed you to teleport directly to them. Imagine Facebook-like news feeds that could automatically be generated by events inside of a virtual world (Jerry has made an object called "Rupert Murdoch avatar", Jerry has teleported to the sim "Baseball", Jerry has become friends with Mike Sellers, Jerry has signed up for the group "Terra Novans for Metaverse Peace" or whatever). Imagine better visualizations of where people are right now, and who they are, not just green dots (notice also that by sharing where you are and what you're doing right now, over time you build up a shareable lifelog of what you've done which further helps to sketch out profiles, portfolios, reputations, and organizes people and content, and people as content).
There's so much happening in the Web 2.0 space here that I think will work *even better* in social virtual worlds that are full of many people simultaneously then on the web, which is still a very lonely place even when other people are looking at the same thing as you are, and which is not set up to interact with people beyond leaving asynchronous comments...like this one, even though you may be reading this page at the same time as me :).
So in this view I'd tweak "it's the content, stupid" to something like "it's the realtime transparency, stupid". We'll see, but when I look at things like Twitter and Facebook News Feeds and Me.dium I see virtual world search written all over them. Not just traditional search engines for content, but "exposure engines" for people that let you share what's happening right now, right when you, and others, need it most.
So let the flood of content happen. Remember that making it in the first place was the engaging content for people who made it, regardless of how many people will eventually see it or use it. Presumably they were happy doing so or they wouldn't have done it. The dark side they create (all the unused surplus content) is like the vast outer space that produces the smaller set of things that people will use where there is life going on.
> Everyone loves user-created content in virtual worlds. It’s the flavor of the month and a key feature in several new and upcoming worlds.
Well, it's been a little bit more than a month, and remember again we didn't get "The Year of The Blog" until way back in 2004 (the statute of limitations on me bringing this up is 2009 :). I love to search for articles by year before then that talk about how blogging and self-publishing online would never take off, partly because people were supposed to have been too lazy and partly because it would be forever unmanageable, like you say here, too much stuff, too big of a dark side. And remember that virtual worlds that allow for user-created content also allow professional content creators to build things in those worlds (which is why ownership and being able to make a real profit is so important).
It does require a new way of thinking.
Posted by: Jerry Paffendorf | May 14, 2007 at 21:40
These are great insights into how to link people, information and mobility, but they still don't help you feel like you're having a good time in an empty virtual room. I submit that if we are in 3D space, humans revert to evolutionary rules and roles of distance and social company.
Ironically, you could have an IM window ("placeless") open on the side, and also be in SL ("place"), but the former could have more of a feeling of presence and company than the latter. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
Posted by: Dmitri Williams | May 14, 2007 at 22:28
In virtual worlds like Second Life user-content creation is largely a solitary enterprise. Couple this with little cost of production and there is an explosion in oppressively bad content.
Communities and peer pressure are what make cool little neighborhoods cool. When users scar the landscape with their poor taste and rarely or never return, there is little that the community can do about it. Few operators are willing to let users destroy other user’s content, even when ugly. Yet peer judgment is a critical force in the creation of relevant or otherwise aesthetically pleasing content.
In other words, there has to be recourse to make user-generated content work.
One solution is to organize real estate spatially based on user defined relevance. That is, properties can move around relative to each other based on how users rank or otherwise show support for the content. This ranking should not to be a linear scale either; the map organization can and should be multidimensional.
Harkening back to Richard’s discussion of first principles, no one ever said a static map is required. Many would reject this idea as a changing map can cause confusion. Yet time would reduce volatility in the space. An article I read recently on mapping the blogosphere reminded me of this idea. Popular areas wouldn’t be quickly displaced just as blog hot spots aren’t. A spatial representative of popularity would make for interesting walking around. Additionally popularity of established content would motivate users to contribute to it rather than create content in isolation.
Additionally there is an inverse relationship between cost of content production and garbagidity. So to improve the caliber of the user content, as many have already stated, one can induce a burden on it. Seamlessly distributed virtual worlds can do this. If a user wants to invest in a chunk of real estate in the VW, then they would need to pony up some CPU, memory, and storage.
This can also solve the aforementioned problem of overpopulation of popular areas. Content owners faced with massive visitation would be forced to augment their hardware least the users in frustration demote them and relegate their creations to the boondocks literally (or virtually). Poor network connectivity to the distributed content would likewise be address by the same mechanism.
Posted by: Landon McDowell | May 14, 2007 at 23:12
I'm not sure this post really grasps the dynamics of SL yet.
"Simple ‘space’ in a virtual world doesn’t necessarily matter, but amount of data-per-user does."
That's like saying the amount of data on my hard drive is slowing down your Internet. A key thing to keep in mind is that a huge amount of data in these virtual worlds is stored within people's inventory and not out in world.
Population density is thin because of the technical limitations. If we would wave a wand and boost server and graphics card hardware performance, add some further software optimization, many of these problems would fade - even with the same amount of content.
Technology constraints: if you have more than 30 people on a simulator, chances are you are going to want to go someplace else (unless it's an intential gathering) because computing performance slows. Plus, you have the resource limitation of needing a lot of space in order to create things of a certain size or complexity (i.e. prim count limitations).
The space and loneliness is bothersome, as someone puts it above, because we can see the distances, not because it's there in the database. Otherwise, out of sight, out of mind no?
So... if the Second Life world (or any UGC VW) is spread out, why is this a problem? Along these same lines, why does it matter that there are a ton of photos rarely seen on flickr, profiles rarely viewed on myspace, blogs rarely read, and websites left around for years with nary a visitor? We use search tools, word of mouth, social filtering and other tools to make sense of the noise.
If Joe has virtual land out there in the SL universe, it really shouldn't matter to Jane unless she insists on going to visit. It's like letting the towels on the floor of your neighbor's bathroom bother you.
Personally, I'm excited by the explosion of the long tail, the addition of narrowcast to broadcast (note I didn't say replacement), and the increasing empowerment of the individual to express themselves and share with the world... I don't care if it's a blog, website, myspace page, wiki, Second Life land, youtube video, etc. If you've got a million views, good on ya. If you have 3, keep on expressing yourself.
I agree that there is a profliferation of crap, and I certainly don't hold UGC up as the salvation of the universe, but disagree with the premise that it is slowing everything else down. It doesn't worsen your experience unless you let it.
Posted by: Giff Constable | May 14, 2007 at 23:16
This is a very good article, and it puts into words something I've thought about virtual worlds since first screwing around with AlphaWorld a long time ago. You're right, these worlds are barren. People spend hours or even days creating their own little slice of land, while thousands of others toil away doing the exact same thing, but nobody ever goes to any of these user-created places.
The only places I found in Second Life that had a critical mass of people (i.e. you could count on them being occupied most of the time) were professional commercial endeavors - such as casinos, clubs with paid DJs, whorehouses, etc. - and then bizarre fetish community spaces, like the furries and goreans. The rest of the world was truly barren.
Posted by: Cyde Weys | May 14, 2007 at 23:23
Stuff that people don't want to experience is not content; it's just stuff.
What happened in Active worlds, as well as SL, is the mass creation of stuff.
SL is using the creation of stuff as a major ingredient for "what attracts players to SL", so they can't limit creation (or even "unfairly" hide less-used creations) because that will cause SL fizzle out. Conversely, the ever expanding SL universe will ultimately turn into a single player experience (as players are pushed futher and further from one another by all the stuff that's built), also causing SL to fail. (Richard Bartle mentioned this same thing happening to MOOs 20+ years ago, in Designing Virtual Worlds.)
One of the ways to make "stuff" into "content" is to turn it into a fun game, which causes people to want to play it.
As I stated in my article above, if you make a game in a low-density world, you need to first make it single-player so that when players enter the world and find it empty, they stick around for awhile. Only if players stick around will enough players gather at once for a multiplayer game to be possible.
Posted by: Mike Rozak | May 15, 2007 at 01:44
I suppose it's easy for a newbie to think that SL is empty and barren.
An alien landing randomly on Earth would draw the same conclusion about the humans: most areas are uninhabited. "It's just empty oceans, forests, and deserts, captain!"
To find people in SL, you should search the events listings and go to something that interests you. Chances are, there will be others there with similar interests. Maybe they've got a group you can join. You might make some friends. And you'll want to come back to see them again.
How do you count the gigabytes wrapped up in human relationships?
Posted by: Troy McLuhan | May 15, 2007 at 02:05
This is a good point for looking at the concept of interactivity. Interactive Entertainment is not based on Data, its based on the process which gain context from Data. I recommend checking out some of Chris Crawfords essays in the matter. Unless you are a content developer the "Crunch to Bit ratio" of Second Life stinks. http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_1/Process_Intensity.html (note the date of the essay, this stuff isnt exactly futuristic)
In a game like WoW you have several enjoyable interaction circuits to play with, they work and they respond in a sufficient manner to entertain the players who poke at them. From my personal experience with Second Life the interaction circuit ends where my game camera starts, thats fairly shallow and will not entertain people. SL might still attract people for other reasons than entertainment, but unless the content developers in Second Life learns how to develop entertaining interactive process it will never improve its conversion rates.
Posted by: Wolfe | May 15, 2007 at 04:39
I suppose in one sense, traffic might help. Old-school Google metrics but with a shark-tank at the bottom.
Suppose i built and decorate a house. Okay.
Suppose somebody else visits that house. That's okay, first visit can be accidental, however a database entry records that somebody visited it. If they come back, my house gets a weighting that makes it likely to survive. If they don't, it doesn't.
If lots of people visit my house, great. If they don't, it gets no weightings. After three months (a valid period of time for content-assessment, probably) a batch job runs which assesses the weightings of every house. It determines the mean ratings and nukes the bottom 20%. That stuff no longer exists.
People would whine about how "high-traffic" places will get higher and barriers to entry, but be honest - nobody's first attempt at anything is worth hanging on to, except in a private (and thus, paid-for) archive. You want to self-indulgently keep things nobody gives a damn about? Cough up.
Every implementation is likely to generate ways of gaming this system and of course, the aforementioned whiny crap-generators will just leave and stop paying, but it's one way out of the hole.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | May 15, 2007 at 05:17
Largely repeating comments above...
Infinite content is, generally speaking, a great thing.
See this by Dan for one example. The Web, blogs, etc. = case in point.
Infinite content is not a great thing without some means of ordering and controlling that content -- e.g. strong search, folksonomies. And probably a key point here -- infinite content is not a great thing when the optimal experience isn´t just a content experience, but a social/spatial/game/world experience that can be harmed by excessive UGC.
Remember the Game Neverending?
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/02/the_idea_for_fl.html
There`s a lesson there, I think.
One reason infinite UGC is SL is problematic is that SL is built upon the "metaversal" theory of continuous Newtownian space and a politics of decentralized emergence. The result is a spatial bazaar that might get bigger, but that will forever be a bazaar. People would like to have at least a few cathedrals.
To make cathedrals happen, Linden has to get involved in zoning, condemning land, financing content development, and content promotion. But even if Linden were willing to do that (which seem contra its philosophy), the question remains: what's the point? There are VWs (and Web 2.0 platforms) that do much better at the social aspects and SL has no "game" driver like your typical MMORPG.
I like wandering through the flotsam and jetsam of SL , but I probably enjoy Flickr more (and the numbers are probably with me).
SL is great, but I just don't see how it can win the quarter bet.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/03/the_future_of_v.html
Posted by: greglas | May 15, 2007 at 05:41
To make cathedrals happen, Linden has to get involved in zoning, condemning land, financing content development, and content promotion.
s/Linden/someone/g
Posted by: Jim Purbrick | May 15, 2007 at 07:27
In my opinion, the emptiness problem is partially a real estate supply/demand problem that is tied to Linden Lab's business model.
LL needs to keep revenue coming in, and keep land prices relatively stable for ordinary users and businesses who want to build there. Turning off the ability to create more land and islands might increase population density, but it would have several negative consequences: It would turn off what I believe to be one of LL's main sources of revenue. The resulting increase in the prices of existing land would also turn away individuals and businesses.
Posted by: Ian Lamont | May 15, 2007 at 08:00
You can spend your whole time (and some do) in SL only hanging out in smaller areas. The equation for people/stuff in those communities is a lot different than taking the whole of the world and applying it against a lot of people who aren't interested in it.
Not everyone in SL signed up because they wanted to swim in a giant ocean of random stuff. They signed up to be vampires, or jedi/siths or goreans or victorian aristocrats, and they're happy spending their whole time in a small corner of the world. Content creation is monitored and restricted by the local owners of the servers they inhabit. They dictate what is and is not good enough or appropriate to the theme of the place. In this way, a dozen-sim micro continent is exactly the kind of high-density themed, quality controlled "experience" some people may be looking for.
It doesn't matter how much junk is elsewhere, if you don't go elsewhere. If you split up the world into seperate zones that need different software downloads to access (could be done right now) you'd effectively get unique, smaller world experiences. I think you'd also find it even lonelier, unless there was a strongly themed, well established community in one of the "shards". Well, you know, those communities already exist, all you have to do is not go wandering in the desert.
Posted by: Ace Albion | May 15, 2007 at 09:16
@Jerry P: Using “what are my friends doing?” as a guide to what events I should be looking at seems quite effective on Facebook. My concern about taking it to Twitter like, realtime model is that may over-reward hardcore play. The people with the most hours /played will tend to dominate the communal decision on what’s hot.
I’d like to see the communal filtering have a strong asynchronous element, to give the more casual player a bigger voice. If your creations and opinions can stand in for you in the world, then the more casual player has potentially a louder voice. And I think that helps with diversity, which is a significant goal for me in VWs.
Posted by: Hellinar | May 15, 2007 at 10:14
Yes, VW's with user generated content can have the problem that the population density is too low to promote social interaction.
Most users aren't logged on all the time (except for the addicts...) so if every user creates a new location, the average density of logged-on users per location is going to be less than 1.
I've see MUDs/MUSHes that have definitely had this problem.
I'm not sure if SL has this problem or not. There are other things going wrong in SL: the popular places - the ones that ought to be good social spaces - are often so laggy they're unusable, or simply full so you can't get in. Away-from-keyboard "campers" make things worse, because they fill up the Sim without contributing to the social experience.
Posted by: Susan | May 15, 2007 at 10:33
I agree with Giff,Jerry, and others... content in SL is a classic long tail, and nobody would be troubled about it if the client took care of search and "real-time" transparency. We all benifit from other long tails, we just don't notice them because the search/aggregation technology is mature.
Its just a matter of time before the client and/or 3rd party services fill this niche.
Posted by: Sebastian Pedro | May 15, 2007 at 10:33
If you don't have user-generated content, then the designers can be careful about what they create, taking performance into account.
If you have user-generated content, then it's likely that at least some users won't be careful about what they create.
But you could have the program automatically enforce a limit on how resource-intensive the UGC is. For example, in a text-based MUD, you could be restricted to at most 5 lines of 80 character ASCII text for a location description.
It's harder to enforce limits in a graphical world (and SL doesn't manage it), but it should be possible in principle. (e.g. You can wear at most 50 prims worth of bling).
Posted by: Susan | May 15, 2007 at 10:45
Jerry, you may be right about new kinds of semantic search and presence (e.g. via things like Me.dium) reducing the loneliness factor in large sparse virtual worlds, or on the web. It rankles, I admit, that we had a product like that in 1998 where you could browse together, see who else was on a page, go to your friends, etc. So it goes.
You said, The dark side they create (all the unused surplus content) is like the vast outer space that produces the smaller set of things that people will use where there is life going on.
That’s sort of the theory, but what I’m pointing out here is that content is not a passive part of the virtual world experience. As it mounts up, content separates and spreads people out as much as it brings them together – or more. The Goreans, gamblers, and BDSM folks may be finding each other in SL (their content is part of the “smaller set of things that people will use”), but others find themselves in the “vast outer space” of content; for them it’s not a discardable “someplace else.”
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 15, 2007 at 11:59
Giff Constable: So... if the Second Life world (or any UGC VW) is spread out, why is this a problem?
Because community requires several things: among them, persistent identity and, notably, the chance to meet and the likelihood of meeting someone again. If the world is spread out, and especially if there are a lot of places where people might go, the probability of meeting someone is small, the probability of meeting someone whom I’m likely to meet again is smaller, and the likelihood that I’ll meet someone again who shares my interests is smaller yet. Making the world too large or too spread out reduces the chances of meeting or of forming social bonds, and thus increases feelings of solitary wandering and loneliness. Better search helps with this but isn't a panacea.
And, as I said above, as more people pour more content into the world, the world gets larger faster than the concurrent population grows, thus exacerbating the problem of finding others and creating community.
This is different from the number of web pages out there or the number of photos on Flickr because those are not (typically) the basis for forming social bonds. You don’t feel lonely when you do a Google search or watch a Youtube video because those aren’t vehicles for sociability. Virtual worlds are inherently, essentially different: Second Life is not the Web, and its usage and social characteristics are entirely different.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 15, 2007 at 12:02
Ace Albion said: Not everyone in SL signed up because they wanted to swim in a giant ocean of random stuff. They signed up to be vampires, or jedi/siths or goreans or victorian aristocrats, and they're happy spending their whole time in a small corner of the world.
This further illustrates the double-edged nature of user-created content. Many of the more popular areas in SL are heavily themed around gambling, sex (of many varieties), heavy-duty role-playing, etc. I have no idea what proportion of concurrent users go to these popular spots, but let’s say it’s about a third – say 10K people out of about 30K online at any time (very broad numbers) who frequent, say, 5% of the content. That leaves the other 95% percent of the world for the other 20K people – making the world, in effect, even more sparsely populated for people who aren’t Goreans or furries or into gambling or BDSM. This is great if you fall into one of those (deep, narrow) niches, but not so great if you are, in Apple’s terms, one of “the rest of us.” This is the other side of the Long Tail - it can be difficult to find your place, your community, if none of the local niches fit you. The metaverse experience that SL (and other open-content efforts) touts becomes more difficult from a social POV for the non-genre, non-niche masses wandering into it.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 15, 2007 at 12:05
Summarizing and editorializing a bit:
* Mediocre content shouldn't get in the way. Users will scream if content is nuked, even if it is mediocre.
* Online worlds have infinite space, effectively. Mediocre content can always be accommodated as long as it doesn't keep people from getting together and having higher density experiences.
* The problem then is to provide the mechanisms and the right incentives to create easily found parts of the space that generate high-density experience (though both the content and the other people there), and that generate positive feedback, pulling in more people and more cool content.
* People instinctively respond to spatial patterns, so high-density experience has to form reasonably large contiguous sub-spaces, otherwise it feels like isolated fragments in a mostly empty world.
* We can't predict what places or content will become and stay popular, so some kind of "movement" to create "enough" contiguity between the currently popular places is important.
* That kind of "movement" in some sense breaks "Newtonian" space. However possibly it could be managed with large gateways, etc. There are technical issues, world design issues, etc. This is an interesting problem -- and an important one, IMHO.
* Popular places raise questions of computing resources. Obviously computing resources should be dedicated to places in proportion to how popular they are, not in proportion to their physical extent.
* They also raise question of in-game economics. Popular real-estate will be more valuable. The game society has an interest in letting new places become more central as they become popular, while existing landowners have an interest in leveraging their position by charging for "hookups", retaining their position even as popularity wanes, etc. This is an interesting economic design problem, not easy but I think possible.
Posted by: Jed Harris | May 15, 2007 at 14:01
@Mike, not all virtual world time is meant to be social. Virtual worlds aren't just about fantasy and 24 hour party people. Sometimes people want to be in large groups, and sometimes they want to be with a small group of friends or by themselves. You would deny them that "space" in order to forcibly compress people into a smaller area?
Yes, the web and virtual worlds are quite different but parallels exist. Simply because a virtual world space exists, doesn't mean it needs to pass some level of utility or popularity to justify existence.
I still see this as a temporary problem related to scaling issues and search/social networking inefficiencies, not a problem inherant with the content itself. We need to make it easier to find the hotspots for those that WANT to find a hotspot, not enforce artificial constraints.
Posted by: Giff Constable | May 15, 2007 at 17:59
Ah, terranova, I've missed you...
To start from the top, consider space in Second Life. Second Life is unique in that it essentially has local geography, but not global geography. If you are in a space in SL, what is within the local geography of the region - or sim, is important to you. You need to figure out how to fly or walk to the other green dots on the mini map, or the clothes store. But where you are in relationship to the rest of the world, or where your next destination is in relationship to you is immaterial. Teleports go everywhere.
This is a huge difference from WoW or other virtual worlds where travel is a large portion of a user's virtual life. If I need to go somewhere in WoW, I need to know both the local and global geography. To get to Booty Bay from Orgrimmar, I have to find the Zeppelin tower (local) and find the Zeppelin to Grom'gol (global), then the flight path to Booty Bay (global).
So, space works differently. Most virtual worlds work like the real world, Second Life is working more like the web.
Now, what does this mean for content? First of all, I want to stop this nonsense of some "flat" content density, where content is spread across these entire worlds homogeneously. Also, I think you better stop talking about content using crude units of bytes. I think the Iron Realms guys might have an issue with you saying more memory = more content.
Furthermore, I don't think this entire discussion has anything to do with content. It has to do with community. The original complaint was that it feels lonely. Thats about people, silly. It's really about how fast can you find other people. Anyone who has used SL for a while knows it's really easy to find people. Look for the green dots on the map. Teleport there. Voila! There are tons of people. The density argument breaks apart because there is no global geography, you can only count local area. As I write this, there are 23 people in Durotar on my WoW server. That is a local space. It is really very easy to find a local space in Second Life with 23 people. In Orgrimaar there are only 38! A sim full in the biggest horde city!
So where is the issue? It's not in the content, its in how the space works. A new user to Second Life can grasp the world/land metaphor very easily, but they don't understand yet that the global geography is irrelevant because that metaphor is so strong. Once they do, and they realize that you can find an area as alive as any in WoW by teleporting to a popular location, or finding green dots on the map, Second Life no longer feels lonely - in fact, it starts feeling pretty crowded!
That is why you keep seeing the heavy SLer commenters say things like "search." They understand that the problem isn't that there is too much stuff, or too few people, but that for a new user, it's not instinctive to navigate without that global geography. They want to give that new user a better map, one that changes metaphors, and works like the web. "Click this link, and you will get to people."
So, to sum up. The lonely traveler problem is not because of some film-math idea of content density, but one of space and navigation. The question I think we should be thinking about is "How can we help a user navigate in a geographical space where geography is irrelevant?"
Posted by: Ben Batstone-Cunningham | May 15, 2007 at 21:05
Ooo, and another good question is: If global geography is irrelevant, is it still a virtual world?
Posted by: Ben Batstone-Cunningham | May 16, 2007 at 01:47
I've been in WoW more than SL for the past month, and it is very different to SL.
It felt like you can't find a single place anywhere without someone else being there, running around, possibly killing things a bit differently to the ones you are, ignoring you in either case- chinese farming bots or real people, they're all effectivly NPCs running around doing their own thing. At the same time, dabbling in the auction house (my dusky leather leggings are a bargain) in Stormwind, "full" of people between the auction house and the bank mail box, I got a real sense of loneliness. I don't know if it's because of how the messaging system works. General chat is full of morons, whispers out of the blue seem strange and intrusive, almost nobody at all is speaking in a genuinely local way to the people around them.
Plenty of bodies there, but very few interactions. Still the largest gathering of WoW players I've ever seen- a busy city, and yes, honestly it was less social than a random small time sl dance club. I guess the socialising in WoW all takes place on ventrillo doing raids. All these people seemed like real life city types, minding their own business, focused on their own small agendas.
I took up fishing at the canals, originally to wait for that boy who sells the cute white cat. It's impossible to fish in WoW without someone else stopping and fishing alongside you for a bit. I think it's funny how such a solitary pursuit can be the instigator of more genuine person to person communication. It seems that while there isn't all that much content in wow (change the textures, change the stats, call it a new town, a new monster) or that much real estate, the fact that it's a treadmill game keeps everyone distracted enough (or focused enough, because it's a game after all) that socialising is a side benefit, or annoyance.
Nobody logs into WoW and asks where the people are. That's not why people play the game. But you get people logging into SL, and saying "so entertain me, and bring me to the people I'll like, right now."
It really is all about search. If you want to meet up with sailing enthusiasts, it just takes one single, good, boating club to exist in the whole of the grid, and you have a focal point. Chaff is only a problem if people can't find the wheat. And unlike WoW, where you can expect to be surrounded by people who also like to pretend to mass murder colorful characters in fantastical settings, in unthemed social worlds you have all kinds of people with completely different interests. Like gambling, or virtually raping horses or whatever. People with nothing in common with you. That's a people problem, not a stuff problem.
Posted by: Ace Albion | May 16, 2007 at 05:23
Beb Batstone-Cunningham: So, space works differently. Most virtual worlds work like the real world, Second Life is working more like the web. ... Anyone who has used SL for a while knows it's really easy to find people. Look for the green dots on the map. Teleport there. Voila! There are tons of people.
This seems to be a common theme in some of the replies above: anyone who's not a complete noob knows to stop thinking of SL spatially and to think of it as the web. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people aren't using it that way. I wonder if the stumbling block is the overall spatiality -- it's a mis-applied affordance, leading people to interpret the world of SL (or, again, any world where spatial user-created content makes up the world) spatially when really they would be better off interpreting it via robust search, as with the web.
Ben says pretty much the same thing with: That is why you keep seeing the heavy SLer commenters say things like "search." They understand that the problem isn't that there is too much stuff, or too few people, but that for a new user, it's not instinctive to navigate without that global geography. They want to give that new user a better map, one that changes metaphors, and works like the web.
I wouldn't say there's no problem with too much stuff for too few people (which is a population density measure); if this wasn't an issue you wouldn't need much better search than exists now. Clearly, Google-level search or better is going to become a key component of any world in which users create the content and the space. And new users are going to need to understand this type of navigation in ways they don't now -- despite their use of the web.
Ace Albion raised a very good point about the lack of overt, casual community in WoW, which may be sort of the mirror problem to that in worlds depending on user-created content: Plenty of bodies there, but very few interactions. WoW's sociability seems to come in groups who know each other outside of WoW already, or in (somewhat less common) pick-up groups. It takes different forms than SL's dance clubs but (as the concurrent, 30/60, and overall) numbers show, it clearly works for (many more) people.
Ace: It really is all about search. If you want to meet up with sailing enthusiasts, it just takes one single, good, boating club to exist in the whole of the grid, and you have a focal point. Chaff is only a problem if people can't find the wheat. And unlike WoW, where you can expect to be surrounded by people who also like to pretend to mass murder colorful characters in fantastical settings, in unthemed social worlds you have all kinds of people with completely different interests.
Search is one solution; perhaps the best for worlds that depend on user-created content. WoW presents another way to separate "wheat from chaff" as you put it: differentiate areas by purpose, difficulty level, and the goals of those inside it. The Auction House is different from a battle ground, and a newbie area is different from a high-level dungeon.
Early on in the life of the Web, Yahoo hired "ontologists" to try to organize all the sites that were popping up on the web. Eventually this gave way to more robust (though still inadequate) search. WoW's approach (while with centralized content creation) is more ontological, organizing the world so search is much less necessary. I wonder if a hybrid approach in a world-based on user-generated content would be beneficial: all gambling goes in one area, all little-pony worlds in another. Or, better still, search that re-arranges the world around the user, so that it appears to an individual user to be organized based on their searches - or interests. This won't reduce the vast wastelands of un-visited content, and will likely start a web-style arms race of tags or whatever method is used for identifying content, but it would at least help with the perception -- the entirely valid perception from the user's POV -- of miles/gigabytes of uninteresting, uninhabited content.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 16, 2007 at 10:13
I think you're on the right track, Mike. Spatiality may be a mis-applied affordance in SL. But let's not forget that our imagined ideal search tool for SL (which would have to overcome the non-textual nature of most of the content, but let's leave that aside for a moment) might contribute strongly to balkanization. After all, that is the flip side of serving individuals' desires. If we recall the telehubs, the logic behind them was -- drawing on Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of American Cities -- that people need to be thrown into circumstances where they encounter content that they wouldn't seek out. This kind of contingent encounter is the warp to the woof of goal-oriented behavior in any vibrant community. We all know how the telehubs turned out, of course; technical issues played a big role in the disillusionment with them, but don't forget that users pushed and pushed and pushed for P2P. And why shouldn't they have? It matched their immediate and tactical interests. But public policy demands that sometimes decisions get made (or, in the case of New York, historical accidents get defended post hoc) that run counter to individual desires.
For this reason, even the interesting idea of a hybrid search, dynamically re-organizing world, doesn't solve the problem for SL, as I see it. In some ways, this is a collision between the spatial metaphor and the textual one, with the textual view matching the underlying architecture of the world (text-based code that fits a search-engine approach) and the spatial one more true to the breadth of user affordances that make SL so generative of content in the first place. Some notion of decay might help solve this, but only if it were dynamically related to use and proximity -- not by re-organizing the content around the individual, but somehow around the group of users as a whole. This would be a way to reintroduce the contingent encounter (through valuing proximity) and the notion of an implicit system that generates a rough sense of different value to different content.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 16, 2007 at 11:22
Very good points, Thomas. I see "contingent encounter" as one of those necessary building blocks for community, and you're right that as you narrow the search funnel you also reduce the probability of this happening. Something like Amazon's "if you bought this you might like this too" capability could help, assuming you can make user-created 3D spatial/functional content searchable at all.
Bonus points for bringing Jacobs into this too! If I'd been on my toes I might have called this item "the death and life of user-generated content." ;-)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 16, 2007 at 12:49
This shows a fundamental problem with taking the MOO/MUSH paradigm to a 3D metaphor: In a MOO/MUSH, "space" is a completely arbitrary concept, content you don't navigate to doesn't exist, it has no dimensionality. In 3D, content you have no interest in is as apparent as that you do, and it surrounds, permeates, and seperates that content.
The metaphor to the web is only partial, the problem is that in "good web design" I don't have to navigate many pages I'm not interested in to reach what I'm looking for, and search helps with that. But in SL, the "useless" wii-kitty page is right next to the "useful" residence of my close friend (from the POV of the person looking for the wii-kitty, my friend's residence is just clutter).
In fact, the system only works well where either the spatial metaphor breaks down completely, or it is rigidly adhered to. Mixtures don't suit anyone. So in SL, you have pockets where the content is all of a theme, seperated by seas of chaotic noise more mentally jarring than 70's Vegas.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | May 16, 2007 at 19:30
First of all, I'm surprised Jim Purbrick and others aren't questioning the original math here. I'm not aware that World of Warcraft runs on a "prim" kind of structure and economy. That is, does it take the same amount of bytes to hold the image of the tavern table on the instance in WoW while your avatar is there that it takes to hold the dinette set persistently in your SL home? I'm thinking surely the SL prims and content are simply way more bytes than what WoW has in density, so that in order to have that same kind of lavish world of taverns and trees and trolls that WoW has, you simply need more prims or files of bytes.
Second, there's issues like the Library. I've never understood why this library is pinned on us as most avatars never use but 10 percent of it only for a short time, but I'm told that it streams from the central asset server and doesn't really "take up space". Except...it does. The problem with all this copyable dreck is that multiple copies very rapidly build up in inventory and you can't always take time to delete them. In self-replicating object attacks, your object can be used, or in a notecard spam attack, you can experience getting thousands of items shovelled into your inventory and you'll never be able to take the time to delete it. Most people cannot manage inventory reasonably because it's clunky the way email is and won't let you fan out and open lots of windows or copy and store elsewhere easily except one by one.
Anyway, let's get to the point. Usually there are two kinds of people who complain about the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Flyer in Second Life flying around the empty soulless sims: 1) newbies and 2) people who never go there and think about it abstractly.
I, too, went through 2 weeks at first where I thought OMG there's all these big empty stores with no people tending them the world must be dying we are seeing it in its death throes (that was what me and my friends from TSO said 3 years ago). But...it's just that the store owners aren't online, are on different time zones or don't sit in a store which would be boring when vendors sell things automatically.
By making first the false problem of the "empty spaces of SL" and then false solution of "therefore we need search" you are layering two falsehoods over Second Life that are confusing and even destructive.
SL doesn't need search to be like Google, and it definitely doesn't need to be populated by scrapes such as ESC is doing by grabbing every single object in world and publishing everything for sale whether the owner got a chance to opt-in or not.
Rather, SL is a profoundly social place, that people navigate through *connection*. That's going to be slower. People form groups, friendship lists, proximities of neighbourhoods, landmark selections, etc. and they work with them. That huge array of mini-social-media within SL called "my landmarks" or "my notecards" or "my friends list" is not something that works with the lightening speed of Google, but then it is saved from the huge problem of Google whereby only those things clicked on the most always get clicked on the most.
The folksonomy of Second Life is more organic and slower and things like people's picks no the back of their avatars are browsed at meetings and social gatherings, and followed up on -- some times days later. I'm always interested to see the very long lag of people following up things I've featured to rent, visit, do in SL days and weeks later after a forums or blog post of classified. That's because not everyone can "do" SL 24/7 or even 4 hours a day, and they browse the content when they are ready.
If anything, SL offers a respite from "this twittering world" as T.S. Eliot called it 72 years ago. The problem is that the builders of SL want it to be so cutting-edge and revolutionary that they never seem to want it to slow down or grow organically so they keep overlaying these false interpretations and forced revolutions on it.
Oh, sure, we want to be able to find things. But if anything, all the great finding that people were doing and establishing on their own keeps getting whacked and whittled at by the company:
o Events List -- people tend to put very social kinds of actions like yard sales or cheap tacky advertising on this list because it's free, and that makes both net-nanny oldbies and Lindens furiously whittle at it to get rid of content they don't like and find culturally low-brow (Tringo) or "too commercial" (somebody's 24/7 poseball sale). The Internet doesn't whack at things like this, and lets you chose to browse, but not so LL -- they whack and whack at these "weeds" which in fact are two things happening: a) people finding each other b) people entering the economy which has as steep a curve as the build tools because oldbies hold the top spots in popular places or the purchased classifieds
o Search plus Traffic -- to fight "the gaming of the system" -- the camp-chairs which are just the way people find each other, even if they have to buy someone else's eyeballs for a time -- the Lindens are going to kill the messenger -- remove traffic as a function of search returns. They'll 'make it more like Google'. Except, in this small pond, that means those oldbies with WOM and Linden steering will fetch up first and keep fetching up most and the newbies and midbies who keep trying to gain access will be boxed out once again from the economy -- which is about finding each other -- and will find yet another way that will be dubbed "a gaming of the system" - but again, which is merely how people find each other.
o Failure to zone -- zoning is always something Lindens wave away with a huge ideological Internet stick as not scaleable, but even a simple suggestive sort of zoning like a label on a fresh sim at auction like "residential waterfront" or "flat grassland for clubs" would help people not only find each other, but get away from each other, too.
o Barring of billboards and permission of unregulated billboards -- by barring the sale or presence of billboards and space in the obvious place where people are looking to find each other -- orientation island, public island, help island, welcome areas, infohubs -- the Lindens bar it, put out their own boring content nobody clicks on, and leaves the billboard problem to extortionists and griefers who buy up 16 m and inflict spinning porn that turns everybody off. A simple sign system available for purchase or rotation in welcome areas and a simple requirement that any inworld billboards have to be on the roadside would help remove the noise-signal problem preventing people from finding content.
o Closing of the forums -- while this left a few things "land for sale" or "New products" that people had to fight like dogs to have LL keep (they were going to shut down this way for people to find each other), overall, it's reduced the options people have in this very constricted world for finding in the most obvious way: by going to an officially-sponsored bulletin board. The Linden blog with its morass of 100 replies to every Linden post isn't a solution for finding.
In short, to me, it's not about 40 or 100 limited to a sim. It's not about server capacity. It's about ideological hobbling of the available portals and channels people *do* have for finding.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 17, 2007 at 01:27
In short, what I'm trying to say about what's different about the world of SL: on the Internet, you type in "little black dress" and you want to find the cheapest black dress, or the one in your size, or the one in the store near your house, or the one for the lower price.
In Second Life, you want to find the one your friend is selling. You want to find her dress to buy because you want to help her business, as she is helping your business by renting your land. And you want to buy the black dress to go to a club and there, someone else will see it and buy it because they saw you in it at that favourite club of theirs -- not because Google rendered its machine-gathered features to you in lightning speed (price, proximity, size) but because a series of social happenings and navigations led you to that point.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 17, 2007 at 01:32
Imagine having a kind of Twittervision (all the world's twitters popping up on a Google Map) for virtual worlds that didn't just tell you what sim or server people were on, but also allowed them to say what they were up to right now, and allowed you to teleport directly to them. Imagine Facebook-like news feeds that could automatically be generated by events inside of a virtual world (Jerry has made an object called "Rupert Murdoch avatar", Jerry has teleported to the sim "Baseball", Jerry has become friends with Mike Sellers, Jerry has signed up for the group "Terra Novans for Metaverse Peace" or whatever).
This sounds fun for *you*, as a life-logger, as fitting with your model of SL as a kind of giant dorm room where you walk in and out.
But a lot of people would NOT enjoy constantly sending a feed up to be observed that would then lead to people TPing to them to consume their content. They most decidedly WOULD NOT want that.
I mean, when I watch Flickrvision, do I want that nudnick who keeps taking the picture of himself with his dog over and over at the lions by the Public Library on 42nd St. to come over to my HOUSE? No. Do I want to take a bus to him now that I've seen him on Flickrvision? No. I can sort of "appreciate him" and his dogness but...that's it. I want a layer -- hey, 23 layers -- between him and me.
Same with SL. If there is a community and a layer of people who want to flickr vision and twittervision it, fine. But why impose that ethos on the whole grid? Many people just want to cyber, or build or garden, and be left alone. There are people who actually like bowling alone on SL, and talking now and then to a fellow bowler in IMs.
>This is a very good article, and it puts into words something I've thought about virtual worlds since first screwing around with AlphaWorld a long time ago. You're right, these worlds are barren. People spend hours or even days creating their own little slice of land, while thousands of others toil away doing the exact same thing, but nobody ever goes to any of these user-created places.
>The only places I found in Second Life that had a critical mass of people (i.e. you could count on them being occupied most of the time) were professional commercial endeavors - such as casinos, clubs with paid DJs, whorehouses, etc. - and then bizarre fetish community spaces, like the furries and goreans. The rest of the world was truly barren.
Cyde, I think you're just finding the worlds are barren *for you* and projecting that on to a perception you think is valid for all world-dwellers. I find the world teaming and busy and full. Maybe that's because I made sure that i have something happening in it everywhere that I can affect it and that people come there and make things happen too.
The low-brow culture you find is a turn-off. But that is the teeming and rich world for those people. I can only say -- screw around, and make a teeming world for yourself -- or don't. You seem to be expecting someone else to come and lay it on for you.
I don't feel a sim has to be a Gorean RP or a freebie warehouse or a campchair establishment with 40 people to be defined as "happening". It could have 2 playing chess or 15 having a discussion or 5 learning something or 20 listening to live music. I think you just can't ask that it always be serving you up entertainment, any more than you can ask Life or the Internet to do that.
I remember very distinctly at Virtual Worlds 07 when Michael Wilson of There.com said "The dirty little secret of virtual worlds is that nothing is happening in them." By that he means the open-ended ones unlike a WoW with a quest need to have activities where people are taken by the hand, or offered content like spray-painting their cars in Pimp My Ride in There. and he's right, that most people do need to be told what to do.
I noticed a discussion on the Serious Games list also with people complaining of the too-open-ended problem of SL, that there was "nothing to do" or "they couldn't figure out to do".
I guess I just come at these places so differently, and always have, regardless of whether they are The Sims Online or Kaneva or whatever. They are a substrate, a set of tools, a palette and work better or worse to make a story with or make a life or a business or a something.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 17, 2007 at 04:28
"Where did you get those shoes?" is a question that probably gets asked more than most in SL.
It's quite nice that there isn't an immediate way to just see where the shoes are from (not a technical problem- some kind of hover-text could show you the creator if it was written in), but you lose that excuse to lightly flatter someone for their taste in accessories and start a conversation.
Does anyone in WoW ask for information, except "noobs", or does everyone alt-tab to allakazam or thotbot and silently, singly, acquire their knowledge without interaction. Does anyone play WoW *without* alt-tabbing to the database sites outwith the actual game? Did anyone find the leatherworking trainer tucked away in a remote corner of Ashenvale just by exploring after the first person to post it up on the wikis? Does WoW work for finding this stuff, without relying on people referencing lookup tables on the internet?
Has anyone here who might consider WoW to have good access to the "content" restricted themselves to only ever seeking and finding that content through in-game means? For finding things to hit, it's good- quests for various levels often seed other quests to go to other higher level areas in a kind of length of splitting string. But for people who enjoy professions, for example, how easy is it to find that blue glove pattern? Without asking someone who looked it up on the internet? Where's the local knowledge?
Posted by: Ace Albion | May 17, 2007 at 04:31
I've found that in SL, what goes around REALLY comes around, but you have to make it go. If I chat people up, I make friends fast. If I don't, almost no one is social at all. Density, hah! Go to a dense spot... say, Phat Cats. Stand at the landing, not saying a word. You'll encounter hundreds of people in relatively short order - including many that seem not with anyone, just lurking. If your experience matches mine, not one is likely to introduce themself - its like being in the city. Approaching someone is even viewed suspiciously... "what do you want??" Another player suggested that SL had moved from a frontier in which most players recognised and appreciated explorers like themselves, to a city in which people have to defend their personal space against inundation. Made sense. Can the environment be tuned to foster the former, or similar?
Regarding quality of content: the challenges of scaling virtual realities will increase costs; significant investments of real talent will deliver high quality content; increasing cost and competition will act as evolutionary pressures culling out garbage.
Posted by: David Cheney | May 20, 2007 at 19:34
Ace Albion says:
"Where did you get those shoes?" is a question that probably gets asked more than most in SL.
It's quite nice that there isn't an immediate way to just see where the shoes are from (not a technical problem- some kind of hover-text could show you the creator if it was written in)
Point at the shoes, right click and choose More, choose Inspect and the creator is shown, select the view creator button, and for any major creator the Picks page will likely lead you to a store :)
Posted by: David Cheney | May 20, 2007 at 19:45