One's decreased involvement in something after heavy experimentation with that something does not diminish the validity of that individual's opinions. In fact, such experience would lend credence to such opinions inasmuch as other activities proved to have higher priority for such individuals than continued heavy involvement in SL. Further, an expression of an opinion as to why some might not take SL as seriously as facebook/Zynga/FarmVille does not necessarily equate to "pooh pooh"ing SL or reflect any belief on the individual's part that SL is not worthwhile. Neither does that individual's decreased involvement constitute a denouncement of the value of SL generally, perhaps not even personally.
In point of fact, I maintain my paid member status in Second Life and enjoy occasional dabbling back in-world. I applaud SL's existence and admire those who have created rich content and/or use SL to supplement and enrich their real world existence, having myself owned land, experimented with construction, object creation, and scripting, and experienced environments and events at the NASA CoLab and a host of other virtual locations. I even created my own local sims using open-source server software compatible with SL viewers so that I could experiment on larger scales without having to pay enormous sums of money to acquire the same space in SL proper. But I shifted my virtual world time to World of Warcraft, which, while it does not provide even a fraction of the creative power that SL provides since almost all content is provided by Blizzard, does provide ample opportunity to interact with a wide variety of individuals as they present themselves through their characters, often supplemented with voice chat. Plus, when I let loose with my Boomkin's Hurricane, Starfall, and Nature's Grace to lay waste to hordes of enemies, the fireworks and empowerment are awesome! Eric's points about the barriers to rich SL experience are fully applicable to my shift. To do what I wanted to do in SL required a huge amount of learning - new programming languages, three or four entire modeling platforms for making and animating avatars and other objects in SL, etc. - that was daunting, and even the results of people far more experienced than me were not really up to what I hoped to create. Maybe part of that was my graphics card, but the real limits of SL, plus the steep learning curve, were discouraging to my pursuit of creation of ... well, lots of types of things in SL. There are, as you say, other VRs, and some actually offer much that SL offers. BlueMars is one that I can think of off the top of my head, but I know there are others. And then there are the gaming VRs, like Lord of the Rings Online, D&D Online, the Star Trek games, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, XBox Live game VRs, PlayStation game VRs, and more. WoW's learning curves are vastly different and far less daunting than SL's - create characters, learn how to nurture, train, and equip them to become powerful forces in-world, explore the world, learn how to work in groups of 5, 10, 25, 40, and more, and defeat the enemies. There really is a lot of learning, but if you develop your character yourself, much of the learning is simply through experience. For hard-core WoW enthusiasts, there are formulae and spreadsheets ad nauseum to help calculate the best possible gear and talents, plus videos of all the boss fights that one can study to have an edge during raids. There is also a macro language (mostly a convenience feature) and a programming language that allows users to add functionality to the game. Kudos to those who have learned what they needed to learn to be truly creative and/or productive and/or interactive in SL. I'm still intimidated by it, but I enjoy exploring and experiencing what others have done there from time to time. David On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 16:52 -0400, Sal Armoniac wrote: > I notice that the pooh poohers are two people who got in for a while > and lost interest. ;) And the two avid residents are spending money > to create their 3 dimensional art. More in response to Dana...but > this is it in essence: LL is going to sell to a web developer. Where > it goes from there I don't know. There are alternate VRs springing > up, but none with the huge capacities of SL which admittedly engages > or repels those who try it out. Maybe Dana and I find in it a canvas > for expressing something we couldn't do in any other set of media. > > Sarah > > > On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hey, Eric, great cross-post! Wanna dance? > > > > On 10/29/2010 9:52 AM, Eric Scoles wrote: > > > I'm increasingly thinking that SL-style virtual worlds may > > never be mainstream in the way that web-based social > > networking is. I'm thinking most people will bypass that > > adoption phase and go straight to augmented reality. > > > > > > > > I also think the successful future path for Second Life / > > Linden Labs is in interfacing somehow with Augmented > > Reality. (And the real path to absolute dominance for > > Facebook is to project into Augmented Reality, not retail. > > But that's another thought for another time.) > > > > > > I realize both of these ideas arguably miss at least part of > > the point of Second Life in that the SL avatar is an avatar > > -- you can hide behind it, and certainly some (prob. a lot > > of) people do that with their SL (or WoW) avatars. But what > > Facebook has taught me is the degree to which people are > > willing to expose themselves. Too, Augmented Reality is sort > > of dimensionally contextual (tessar-contextual?) in that > > people and places may look different depending on the > > network-identity of the person looking at them. So you can > > be different things to different people, depending on how > > they're connected to you. And if there's a gateway to VR > > from AR, you can be in virtual places that are connected to > > or overlayed onto LR [Literal Reality]. (I was going to call > > it 'RR' for 'Real Reality', but I don't want to pick a > > fight.) > > > > > > Up until recently I would have thought this level of > > augmented reality was years away, but I gather it's pretty > > much just not very well distributed yet, to paraphrase the > > Chairman. You can already be AugReal with an iPhone or > > Android phone; the Apps For That are as far away as people's > > imaginations, at this point. > > -- > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the > Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature > Association" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to r-spec > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" > group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to r-spec > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
