Second Life pleasures and frustrations

My Second Life experience has been very uneven so far.  Which is to say that some fine things have been mixed with very annoying frustrations.

Fine things: a rush of nostalia, as SL reminds me of the years I spent exploring, presenting, and teaching with Activeworlds.  SL also showcases some fine creative work.  For example, my friend Mia Wåhlström Bäcke showed me some superb work she's done. excellent buildings combining vivid imagination with sophisticated design.  There's also the goofy and pleasant surrealism of watching avatars type, as their owners do so offline.  And I stumbled across a very weird, fun thing, a TIE fighter stashed in someone's back yard.

Frustration1: the way SL has handled the recent security intrusion.  This has booted me out of my account.  There is an odd security question, but LindenLabs has neglected to provide support for people who can't get through that way - i.e., customer relations 101.  For two days I've been calling the number they deigned to offer, after a few days, but can only win through to information-free voicemail.  Needless to say, I've neither been called nor emailed.

Frustration2: I spent several hours staggering through SL with many avatar functions mysteriously turned off.  One help person thought it had to do with the island I was on, so restarted the island.  Eventually the functions came back, but random island malfunctions are not much of an excuse, especially as the problems were not identified in any way, besides what I wrung out of multiple help people.  And there was no way of knowing if that's what solved it, because another explanation appeared.  A friend thought I still needed to complete the welcome tutorial with this avatar.  Fine, I thought, that sounds good.  Scaffolding is a good learning principle - except

1. There is no way of telling that you have or have not completed that tutorial.  No icon, message, flag, reminder.
2. When you find a tutorial island, there's no sign of how far you've come through the multiple steps.  So, to be prudent, you can restart.  Linden Labs lets us play for free, but has apparently decided to levy a random tax... on users' time.

Overall, this experience suggests that SL is not about the casual or first-time user.  Instead it rewards patient learning and work in the form of built environments.  Such artifacts are what most users experience, after all, since the population density is so low. 

This structure, combined with the awful support I've experienced, helps explain the relatively low user base SL apparently has.

My enthusiasm for investing my personal and research time in SL is cooling.  So is my desire to teach the thing. 

Any thoughts from users? or from Linden Labs?

Comments

[Sara H.]

I have some frustrations with SL as well. The tutorial issue, is definitely one of mine as well. Secondly, and this is most likely a network error at Centenary, but any time I tried to play my character eventually would sink into the ground and my client would just stop working. Out of frustration, I just quit looking into it. Now I fear I'm way behind on something that's supposed to be terribly important to my studies. Perhaps I'll give it another shot eventually, but for now, I'm hands off on SL.

[Andy Havens]

I tried SL about... 2.5 years ago when it was quite new. And buggy. Gave it up as uncooked. Tried it again about a year ago and was a bit more impressed and spent some more time doing a bunch of building, learning, playing around, and, mostly, talking to people in-game to find out what they thought.

Was very interested in the economic model, as the idea of expressly sanctioned, player/user owned content with a tie to RL money was/is quite unique. Not a lot of other VWs/MMOs up to that yet.

I've had my account frozen by this current security mess, too. And can't get an answer to my email. But I did get a nice email asking me to complete a customer satisfaction survey! Oh dear...

The learning curve, if you want to really *do stuff* is quite high, yes. But we're talking about actual skills here, yes? Not just "gold farming" in an MMO which equates to clikcing on a yellow pixel. SL skills include 3D modeling, working in Photoshop, coding, animation and economics. Oh, and talking dirty. ; )

[Bryan Alexander]

It's amazing how buggy their performance and service is, isn't it, Sara? Your point about SL's perceived importance is a subtle way of explaining its appeal.

I also looked then, Andy, and had a similar experience. What's your take on the export of content issue (i.e., one generally can't)?

I'm going to post more about this in a few minutes -