Metareality Index Week 40

25:30 – Gianna tried to get Minecraft people to come on the show. Didn’t happen.

Gianna read blogs on Minecraft trying to get into their heads. She has some insight as to why they like Minecraft. But, can’t see why they don’t like SL.

29:00 – Hipness Factor – Reddit? – Gangnam Style (which has been mistakenly taken by some as Condom Style because of pronunciation.)

31:30 – SL is like being in the Audio Visual Club in middle and high school.

43:00 – Something like Minecraft tasks for SL. Drax relates his friends reaction in SL that destroys all Drax’s faith in humanity… falling Linden dollars. You have to hear it.

COW CLICKER to be combined with Gangnam Style for Disguntled Frogs… rip-off being the shortest path to success…

47:30 – Teen Grid

49:10 – Procedurally Created World from SL that could run from your own server ala OpenSim.

52:00 – What Disguntaled Frogs needs is art. Send Karl, Drax, or Gianna your drawings of Disgruntled Frogs or whatever creature you think will work.

52:40 – Patterns. Nothing you don’t already know, if you are following this blog.

54:20 – Drax plugs the new Flufee video and offers Flufee stuff. You saw the Flufee video last week. Be warned there is a knockoff of Flufee. So, be sure you reach the REAL Draxtor Flufee.

57:00 – Self Policing and Protests – the bad old days.

Commentary

Metareality provides good insights into what may be holding Second Life back and what may improve player retention in Second Life. I’ll point out these are the opinions of people experienced with SL. They build and create for SL. So, they do have valuable insights.

There is also the history of games and human nature. The Metareality discussions touch on these points. But, I don’t get the Metareality participants have dug into history of, studies of, and numerous interviews with game makers failed and successful game design.

Without gathering and studying the history of gaming and considering the demographics of players and the human nature of those groups I doubt it is possible to predict what will work in game design. I also doubt it is possible to get a complete holistic view of gamers and games. This means any particular developer will base their design on the parts of the whole they have and feel are important.

The result is lots of trial and error in the creation of games. This is how most things work best. Lots of people do different things to find what works best then society adopting what works best. We see this in the big game development companies. They, like movie makers, get a basic idea that works and they stick with it.

A game like Minecraft is made by an independent developer. I serious doubt that any of the large game making houses would have ever considered the idea. It is too far removed from what they had working.

The original idea with government in the USA was to allow the states to be experiments in how to do things. One state could try one type of healthcare and another type. People in other states could choose based on the results they saw and what they thought best for them. If an insurance company in Kentucky offered a great policy and California’s companies sucked then a Californian could by a policy from the Kentucky company. Federal law currently prohibits that. Currently in most countries the idea is to centralize things and force the entire country to do things the same way based on what politicians think best.

Relate those ideas to Second Life. A region owner is like a state. The Lab is like the central government. Some amount of central regulation and uniformity is needed so the states can cooperate and live together both in SL and RL. Driving standards are needed so we can drive from state to state. But, those standards have been worked out at the state levels. In Nevada there is no set speed limit, beyond safe and reasonable, on the remote and mostly deserted highways. High speed freeways where differences create surprises and accidents have been nationalized to the same standard to eliminate those problems. The state and national level control allows locals to have laws for local conditions and national stands were we have lots non-residents traveling.

At some point SL residents make a decision as to whether to have freedom or centrally imposed control. We either build our own welcome areas, which we have seen some of recently (Second Life Player Retention Week 32), or we leave it up to Linden Lab.

If we leave it up to the central authority we get one experiment at a time. We may never find the magic combination before time runs out. If we allow numerous people to build welcome areas for their reasons we will get numerous experiments running in parallel. To do this the Lab has to provide some minimum cooperation that we need to be able to effectively experiment within SL regions, states.

If the Lab then observes people by the initial landing welcome areas and begins to shift more new people to those regions that produce the most people logging in during the next couple of weeks, we may start to see what works best.

Long term observation may provide insight as to what works well for the short term and the long term. I think it is reasonable to expect some welcome areas could produce more short term users, those that log in often for a month or two and then disappear. Others might produce users that login less often in the first couple of months but continue logging in for months. Such data could start to reveal new insights to what keeps a player in SL. Obviously the combinations are endless when a large group is free to experiment.

If there is economic incentive, more people will want to participate. Landing a load of new users in a region has its rewards. I still look at GuRl6 hair as it was my first ‘do’ from a new user 30 day deal. Four or five times a year I check in to see what is new there. If the creators of these region know that they get more new users landing if those users stay in SL, their incentive is to build better welcome areas. The drama and problems from official greeters is removed too. As much as Drax feels self policing doesn’t work, in many cases I agree with him, there are feedback systems in a free market that work very well. I think we can take advantage of those forces by letting welcome area builders know what is going to get them more first visitors.

But, this process really comes down to those of us that think residents are responsible for doing things while the Lab is responsible for enabling us. We are pitted against those that think the Lab SHOULD do it all and impose strict controls and be fair.

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