Week 13 reflections
From CTIN482
At the most basic level, the problem with Second Life is that not enough people use it and the ones who do tend to use it for very few purposes. Because of this, it’s not a particularly exciting or varied world, and in fact doesn’t feel like a world so much as a collection of loosely related pockets of subculture. If a business or a college has a Second Life presence, it seems to be viewed more as a novelty than as a legitimate and useful space in which to accomplish things. In Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the main character Hiro Protagonist (yes, that's his name) is a down-on-his-luck delivery boy in real life, but a respected warrior/hacker/prince in the Metaverse, an online virtual world that Second Life, in part, seems to be modeled after. In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a ubiquitous tool for work and pleasure which is used by everyone. Not so in Second Life, which remains the province of the very few. The difference between the reality envisioned by Snow Crash and that emulated by Second Life is that nobody would care if Hiro Protagonist was a highly-skilled hacker in Second Life.
The reasons I can think of for the lack of popular adoption of Second Life are as follows:
-The UI is too complicated, especially for first-time users. If you aren’t familiar with 3d game controls and complex nested windows, you’ll be stopped in your tracks before you even begin at Second Life. And even if you are familiar with these things, like me, the interface is still incredibly cumbersome. It shares some problems with EVE: Online, in that it favors throwing a lot of windows at the user without helping you find which one you need when you need it. And movement, of course, is jerky and requires near constant course-correction to ensure you get where you want to.
-Along with the UI, the lack of graphical sophistication and the weird animations make Second Life an unpleasant place to be, since time spent in it only serves to remind you about how much more interesting real life is.
-There’s a big enough lack of computer literacy among most people that the building and new content creation in Second Life is being done by a small minority of the population, and consequently only that minority is being catered to in terms of new content.
If Linden Labs eventually fixes these niggling issues with Second Life, it might only be a matter of time before it becomes a latter-day Metaverse; a ubiquitous tool for both business and pleasure - and warrior-princes. -Akshai
