I would love to point you towards other virtual worlds to explore, but the others I can find are not Mac-friendly. I know There and Kaneva will not play nice at all. I'm interested to see if other people have any suggestions as I have had no luck with that myself.
Not that I would want to give up on SL though. You know I love my virtual life. (But I'm a hot redhead with nice pants. So there you have it.)
Jim Long
· 2 years ago
Funny, when you first introduced me to Twitter, I thought "who the hell wants to see what I'm doing?!?". Now, like you, I'm hooked. I'm with you on Second Life. Not sure I'm ready to jump in on that. I'll wait and see if you become an evangalist, then I'll get on board. ;-)
Jay Moonah
· 2 years ago
The big thing for me is that, yes, it's a lot like a chat room but the fact that you can see people there, that they have a distinct personality to their look as well as their words, that's what makes it different from pure chat. As a music performer, I get the same exact thrill and _physical_ response -- heart beats a little faster, mouth gets a little drier, etc. -- when I do an SL show. Same thing when I do a talk, like the one I did at PodCamp Second Life.
Agreed Chris that the controls are quite clumsy compared to any halfway-decent video game. I equate SL today to being a bit like myspace -- sure it's an annoying interface, but that's where the action is, at least for now. Linden will either have to improve their interface and other aspects of their system, or they will loose out to something better coming along, like myspace is starting to with sites like Facebook nipping at their heels.
I think the real interest is in the concept of virtual worlds. It's like the web was in the mid-90s, there's lots of stuff we'd like to do but the technologies are not there yet. It's also a walled garden at this point, and again Linden needs to open things up or ultimately get killed. But it's the start of something, and I think something very interesting.
My two-cents -- well about two-and-a-half Canadian. ;-)
The Diva
· 2 years ago
Chris, As an Image Consultant for Purple Stripe Productions - I will help you get your Avatar up to par. It'll run you about $15 USD for skin, hair and a decent wardrobe. We might even be able to get you some toys. ;)
Anyway- It's all just 3D social networking...but I think it helps to have a tour guide who is passionate about the game and who knows how to have fun.
call me.
Kosso
· 2 years ago
Why not have a look through posts on BlogHUD.com, my Second Life blogging system. It's interesting to see what people get up to. ;)
I actually make money! Cool!
When blogHUD started, it only had 'title' posts - ie: no body copy.
Posts back then were very much like Twitter posts! :)
Chris Hambly
· 2 years ago
Chris
I've been in SL for over a year now, essentially I went in to research for my Phd, seeking answers to questions regarding educational technology.
I run a distance learning school http://www.audiocourses.com. That school has operated for over 6 years, completely virtually, using synchronous chat. So the the concept of "virtualness" is not new for me by a long way. We've built a virtual community with other mechanisms very well. Forums, blogs, phone-blogs, ftp, synchronous chat rooms etc etc...
Secondlife though ads one more dynamic, it ads the dynamic of 3D social presence and space, physics visualisations and experiences, for my students, they can actually see a gigantic mock-up of a microphone, they can see and walk around the moving parts in order to see how it operates. I held a virtual conference last month with Oxford Uni presented, we talked about building a replica of the human body and having people walk around inside a vien in order to understand disease and human conditions. (http://audiocourses.pbwiki.com/medic_150307)
That is powerful....
I've just rolled out a podcast regarding Educators working in Secondlife which you can find here:
I was creating a second account in SL in one window while I was reading your post in another. I joined last year and stumbled around a bit. I attended a cool conference, but never got the hang of the controls. I created a work friendly account today to see how other colleges and universities are using it.
Becky McCray
· 2 years ago
Jay has nailed much of how I think about Second Life, the interface, etc. I signed up months ago, but didn't visit much at first. It reminded me of the early PC games, clunky and slow.
I've visited more lately, because people I already knew were available to interact with. And now I am meeting people from your extended network. So the interaction is good. Is that better than any old chat room? I think so. The visual dimension is quite different to me.
I've also found that I really like playing with the "stuff". I started with clothes so I have dozens of outfits from Victorian to hula to a cat. It's like a costume party. I can find fun in that! Of course you need a telescope, a couple of motorcycles and a dancing cow. Now if I only had a use for them...
And that's the third thing. I like exploring the worlds that are built out in SL. Probably for the same reasons that I like miniatures, etc. Grab an info-fez and join me in virtual Morocco!
Jim Kirks
· 2 years ago
I remember the day Second Life came online. One of my super geeky friends was so excited about this game where you could construct your house, toilet, car and wheelbarrow they were ready to give their life for it. I had been playing around in There.com and The Sims, so I understood the excitement, I was just not as geeky, at the time. Overall the concept sounded cool, so I thought I should check it out.
I also play or have played a number of games over th short spam of my life. So when I first saw SL, I was less than impressed. I remember flying around why chatting with friends in those early days thinking, "this game will be dead in a couple of months". WoW was I wrong.
Granted it took a few years for it to reach critical mass. I still like to believe it has a bit of the myspace effect going for it. "Everyone is there and so I must be there to be cool". The graphics are still sub-par. The game play, if that is what you want to call it, is not that exciting. But there it is chugging along making millions of dollars?!? (calm down fans, I am not knocking the game. we are just talking)
I have played recently (6 months ago), and I can see how this big instant message fun land can be addictive. I am not going to say I am above it, because I am not. I fear, just like that WOW player does, that i will get sucked in and lose 7 months of my life.
I guess what I am saying is, I will see you "in game" soon. Maybe this time with a guide to help me understand what I am missing. You know like the gambling, drinking, rioting, looting and these sex clubs CNN keeps talking about. You know, the fun stuff.
aliza
· 2 years ago
I'm with Chris on the bumbling around. I'm STILL on Orientation Island or whatever that purgatory is called - and I swear I've passed all the tutorials at least twice (including the one where you pay $1 Linden dollar for a chain mail shirt that I'm now wearing but they keep trying to get me to pay again but aren't giving me the free buck).
At the moment, I'm flying up but can't figure out how to fly back down. That was after sitting in a vehicle for a day trying to figure out how to get it to move forward. And yes, I'm on a Mac so maybe that is part of the problem.
My dream is to design clothes in SL - something I did as a young girl and in my first 2 years of college. But at the moment, I just want to be able to not bump into walls. And find some nice people who wouldn't mind showing me around. Damn, I'm a tourist in my virtual life.
Christian Scholz / Tao Takashi
· 2 years ago
Well, for me Second Life is not just a chat room because it feels so much more real. Also for me in the first place it was a tool to be creative. The first thing I wanted to do is build stuff. And that's what I did. While doing that I got to know lots of cool people and it indeed is a nice community. From a marketing perspective it's another social networking place and (as maybe Crayon shows) it's best used in conjunction with other social media tools such as blogs, podcasts and the like. Another channel to get the conversation (maybe with a different audience) going. Of course that's not only interesting for marketing but also for being in a community itself.
The most great thing is just the openness. People who are creative can build and sell things, people who like communicating can do that as well and so on.
I think it may come down to a neurology thing. Either you're good at placing your whole self there as your avatar mentally, or not. I am not a big fan, because i think the learning curve is too steep, and I don't feel like I have the extra time to get good at it- and I thought the controls were clunky and non-intuitive. I also feel like very smart people I respect have not yet found an explanation for it that makes me "get it", the same way i could really "get" podcasting and other aspects of social media, much more readily.
Irene
· 2 years ago
I'm on the " I don't get it side." Despite all the hype its received, whenever I attended a much publicized concert or opening in SNL, there'd be max. 40 people there. Most often there'd be less than 10, and attending a concert or event that way was, to my mind, pretty boring. Just a bunch of avatars sitting and staring at another avatar.
I explored a fair bit last summer. For the most part, all I found was empty shopping malls and clubs. And since I was another hot-redhead with nice pants, most of my interactions with avatars ended up sexual. That was bizarro-funny at first, but then that got tiresome pretty quickly. And all the emphasis on consumerism just saddened me.
So, I don't get it. I had read what the smart people said last summer, but found little evidence of it. What are they saying now? And how could one find it?
Dan York
· 2 years ago
Chris, Nice post... I think that, like you, many of us are trying to figure out what exactly Second Life means "in the big picture" of online communication.
To me the interesting aspect is that the combination of increasingly faster CPUs and increasingly ubiquitous broadband access has brought us to a space where we can actually interact with people in a "3-D" virtual world in something close to real time - and so Second Life represents to me an attempt at a newer interface for online communication and collaboration.
If you go back to the late 1980s, the dominant interface on computer networks was text "terminal window" (vt100, telnet, whatever) and all the interfaces were entirely text-based. Going into the early 1990s probably the leading interface at the time was the menu-based (and text) gopher. I still remember one of the first versions of my "Introduction to the Internet" courseware I wrote then that had a final chapter on new and upcoming technologies which talked about this thing called "World Wide Web" which was access by telnetting to info.cern.ch and logging in as "www". To follow a hypertext link you pressed the number on your keyboard that was after each link.
Then came 1993 and the introduction of NCSA's Mosaic browser which fundamentally changed the user interface paradigm. Suddenly you could use your mouse! (Gasp!) And.... you could have *images* on the same page as text! Of course network connections (and PCs) were far slower then, so image-laden pages sometimes took forever to load, but it was a huge improvement over the text-only world. (Which, folks from that era may recall, was why Netscape was such a huge immediate hit - it introduced the progressive loading of images.)
While the browsers we use have evolved substantially and brought in all sorts of added functionality, the reality is that we're still using the same basic user interface we had 14 years ago. And so the hunger and hunt is for what is the *next* evolution of the ubiquitous online interface. Enter Second Life as the latest poster child for what *might* be the next interface.
We've been experimenting with virtual worlds since the early days of the Net... we've had MUDs and MOOs and all sorts of things. We've been trying "3-D" for ages, too. (Anyone remember VRML?) What I think is happening now is that the intersection of increased computing power and increased network speed, along with an incredibly massive number of people online (out of which to draw more early adopters and experimenters), has brought us to the point where we can actually think realistically about a richer collaboration/commmunication user interface than that of the web browser.
Will the end result be the interface of Second Life? Will it be one of the other contenders being introduced on almost a daily basis these days? Will it evolve out of one of the games like World of Warcraft? Will it be some combination of all of the above?
I think those are the questions... and the reasons why I, too, put up with the clumsy controls, technical issues, annoying avatar name restrictions and other, um, "challenges" of Second Life. I think of it as "Internet 3-D interface version 0.4" (or 0.04? or 0.004?) and am intrigued to see how it evolves.
P.S. Maybe one of these weeks I'll catch you at Coffee with Crayon. I went for a number of weeks but haven't been able to attend recently.
All Comments
Not that I would want to give up on SL though. You know I love my virtual life. (But I'm a hot redhead with nice pants. So there you have it.)
Agreed Chris that the controls are quite clumsy compared to any halfway-decent video game. I equate SL today to being a bit like myspace -- sure it's an annoying interface, but that's where the action is, at least for now. Linden will either have to improve their interface and other aspects of their system, or they will loose out to something better coming along, like myspace is starting to with sites like Facebook nipping at their heels.
I think the real interest is in the concept of virtual worlds. It's like the web was in the mid-90s, there's lots of stuff we'd like to do but the technologies are not there yet. It's also a walled garden at this point, and again Linden needs to open things up or ultimately get killed. But it's the start of something, and I think something very interesting.
My two-cents -- well about two-and-a-half Canadian. ;-)
As an Image Consultant for Purple Stripe Productions - I will help you get your Avatar up to par. It'll run you about $15 USD for skin, hair and a decent wardrobe. We might even be able to get you some toys. ;)
Anyway- It's all just 3D social networking...but I think it helps to have a tour guide who is passionate about the game and who knows how to have fun.
call me.
I actually make money! Cool!
When blogHUD started, it only had 'title' posts - ie: no body copy.
Posts back then were very much like Twitter posts! :)
I've been in SL for over a year now, essentially I went in to research for my Phd, seeking answers to questions regarding educational technology.
I run a distance learning school http://www.audiocourses.com. That school has operated for over 6 years, completely virtually, using synchronous chat. So the the concept of "virtualness" is not new for me by a long way. We've built a virtual community with other mechanisms very well. Forums, blogs, phone-blogs, ftp, synchronous chat rooms etc etc...
Secondlife though ads one more dynamic, it ads the dynamic of 3D social presence and space, physics visualisations and experiences, for my students, they can actually see a gigantic mock-up of a microphone, they can see and walk around the moving parts in order to see how it operates. I held a virtual conference last month with Oxford Uni presented, we talked about building a replica of the human body and having people walk around inside a vien in order to understand disease and human conditions. (http://audiocourses.pbwiki.com/medic_150307)
That is powerful....
I've just rolled out a podcast regarding Educators working in Secondlife which you can find here:
http://www.SLEDucating.com
Cheers, see ya in NYC.
Chris
I've visited more lately, because people I already knew were available to interact with. And now I am meeting people from your extended network. So the interaction is good. Is that better than any old chat room? I think so. The visual dimension is quite different to me.
I've also found that I really like playing with the "stuff". I started with clothes so I have dozens of outfits from Victorian to hula to a cat. It's like a costume party. I can find fun in that! Of course you need a telescope, a couple of motorcycles and a dancing cow. Now if I only had a use for them...
And that's the third thing. I like exploring the worlds that are built out in SL. Probably for the same reasons that I like miniatures, etc. Grab an info-fez and join me in virtual Morocco!
I also play or have played a number of games over th short spam of my life. So when I first saw SL, I was less than impressed. I remember flying around why chatting with friends in those early days thinking, "this game will be dead in a couple of months". WoW was I wrong.
Granted it took a few years for it to reach critical mass. I still like to believe it has a bit of the myspace effect going for it. "Everyone is there and so I must be there to be cool". The graphics are still sub-par. The game play, if that is what you want to call it, is not that exciting. But there it is chugging along making millions of dollars?!? (calm down fans, I am not knocking the game. we are just talking)
I have played recently (6 months ago), and I can see how this big instant message fun land can be addictive. I am not going to say I am above it, because I am not. I fear, just like that WOW player does, that i will get sucked in and lose 7 months of my life.
I guess what I am saying is, I will see you "in game" soon. Maybe this time with a guide to help me understand what I am missing. You know like the gambling, drinking, rioting, looting and these sex clubs CNN keeps talking about. You know, the fun stuff.
At the moment, I'm flying up but can't figure out how to fly back down. That was after sitting in a vehicle for a day trying to figure out how to get it to move forward. And yes, I'm on a Mac so maybe that is part of the problem.
My dream is to design clothes in SL - something I did as a young girl and in my first 2 years of college. But at the moment, I just want to be able to not bump into walls. And find some nice people who wouldn't mind showing me around. Damn, I'm a tourist in my virtual life.
From a marketing perspective it's another social networking place and (as maybe Crayon shows) it's best used in conjunction with other social media tools such as blogs, podcasts and the like. Another channel to get the conversation (maybe with a different audience) going. Of course that's not only interesting for marketing but also for being in a community itself.
The most great thing is just the openness. People who are creative can build and sell things, people who like communicating can do that as well and so on.
If you want, feel free to check out my SL video blog at http://taotakashi.blip.tv/ and my SL blog at http://taotakashi.wordpress.com
Hope to see you at Podcast Europe! :-)
-- MrTopf
I also feel like very smart people I respect have not yet found an explanation for it that makes me "get it", the same way i could really "get" podcasting and other aspects of social media, much more readily.
I explored a fair bit last summer. For the most part, all I found was empty shopping malls and clubs. And since I was another hot-redhead with nice pants, most of my interactions with avatars ended up sexual. That was bizarro-funny at first, but then that got tiresome pretty quickly. And all the emphasis on consumerism just saddened me.
So, I don't get it. I had read what the smart people said last summer, but found little evidence of it. What are they saying now? And how could one find it?
Nice post... I think that, like you, many of us are trying to figure out what exactly Second Life means "in the big picture" of online communication.
To me the interesting aspect is that the combination of increasingly faster CPUs and increasingly ubiquitous broadband access has brought us to a space where we can actually interact with people in a "3-D" virtual world in something close to real time - and so Second Life represents to me an attempt at a newer interface for online communication and collaboration.
If you go back to the late 1980s, the dominant interface on computer networks was text "terminal window" (vt100, telnet, whatever) and all the interfaces were entirely text-based. Going into the early 1990s probably the leading interface at the time was the menu-based (and text) gopher. I still remember one of the first versions of my "Introduction to the Internet" courseware I wrote then that had a final chapter on new and upcoming technologies which talked about this thing called "World Wide Web" which was access by telnetting to info.cern.ch and logging in as "www". To follow a hypertext link you pressed the number on your keyboard that was after each link.
Then came 1993 and the introduction of NCSA's Mosaic browser which fundamentally changed the user interface paradigm. Suddenly you could use your mouse! (Gasp!) And.... you could have *images* on the same page as text! Of course network connections (and PCs) were far slower then, so image-laden pages sometimes took forever to load, but it was a huge improvement over the text-only world. (Which, folks from that era may recall, was why Netscape was such a huge immediate hit - it introduced the progressive loading of images.)
While the browsers we use have evolved substantially and brought in all sorts of added functionality, the reality is that we're still using the same basic user interface we had 14 years ago. And so the hunger and hunt is for what is the *next* evolution of the ubiquitous online interface. Enter Second Life as the latest poster child for what *might* be the next interface.
We've been experimenting with virtual worlds since the early days of the Net... we've had MUDs and MOOs and all sorts of things. We've been trying "3-D" for ages, too. (Anyone remember VRML?) What I think is happening now is that the intersection of increased computing power and increased network speed, along with an incredibly massive number of people online (out of which to draw more early adopters and experimenters), has brought us to the point where we can actually think realistically about a richer collaboration/commmunication user interface than that of the web browser.
Will the end result be the interface of Second Life? Will it be one of the other contenders being introduced on almost a daily basis these days? Will it evolve out of one of the games like World of Warcraft? Will it be some combination of all of the above?
I think those are the questions... and the reasons why I, too, put up with the clumsy controls, technical issues, annoying avatar name restrictions and other, um, "challenges" of Second Life. I think of it as "Internet 3-D interface version 0.4" (or 0.04? or 0.004?) and am intrigued to see how it evolves.
P.S. Maybe one of these weeks I'll catch you at Coffee with Crayon. I went for a number of weeks but haven't been able to attend recently.