Second Life: Bad Content or UI?

Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 7:15 am

Lately, I have grown disillusioned with Clay Shirky’s and other’s posts about Second Life on Valleywag. The tone of these seems to have shifted largely from objective criticism to an obsessive pursuit that demeans Second Life’s accomplishments by attempting to make it synonymous with “sex.” For those who regularly use Second Life for purposes other than sex, these rants sound too absurd for rational consideration. But, I suspect this should be expected from a publication that calls itself “Silicon Valley’s Gossip Blog.”

Clay bucked this trend with his recent, syndicated post entitled, “Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds.” Taking a more academic approach, he illustrates the important differences between “social” virtual worlds (Second Life) and “gaming” virtual worlds (World of Warcraft), and argues that the former should not be able to piggy-back on the success of the latter. In fact, he seems to believe that the former (namely Second Life) has failed or is doomed to fail.

Considering population numbers alone for this argument is a weak case, one Clay has already made and which was widely rejected. Although the population numbers for Second Life are much smaller than previously believed (and perhaps reported), they are still large enough to be compelling and certainly suggest that something interesting is happening. This time around, Clay instead focuses on the abandonment rate of Second Life, which he reports to be about 85%.

I will not bother exploring whether or not this statistic is an accurate one. Many would agree that Second Life has a rather poor user experience, especially when compared to what is the “state of the art” today. It’s graphical rendering is several generations old and its user interface leaves much to be desired. Compared to any of the “gaming” virtual worlds, it has the look and feel of a great ancestor. Clay argues that this look and feel is not by itself a valid barrier to entry, because many games become compelling and successful despite having comparably poor interfaces. He argues that the high abandonment rate therefore should be attributed to Second Life’s lack of compelling content.

No game would succeed that has a user interface as badly designed, complicated and unintuitive as Second Life’s. Doom may have been “cartoonish,” but its interface (combining mouse and keyboard) was seamless and ground-breaking; furthermore, “cartoonish” by today’s standards was cutting-edge for its time. World of Warcraft presents both a seamless interface and astounding graphics capabilities (by today’s standards, and considering the relatively modest hardware it requires).

Although having both a good interface and design is not required for games, they must have at least one of the two. Second Life currently has neither of these, and for this primary reason has poor adoption rates. Visitors do not even reach the content if they cannot get past these hurdles, so arguing that its poor content causes abandonment makes no sense.

Instead, I believe there is a strong case for the inverse: that the content (social interactions in 3d spaces) is extremely compelling. Many visitors do get past the poor hurdles of interface and design, and once past them become strong advocates. Alternately, typical games that exhibit these problems would immediately be discarded, regardless of how compelling their content was. And now that Linden Labs has opened-up Second Life’s source code, it is only a matter of time before these problems are solved.

Clay also talked a bit about hardware technology. While I agree that a direct neural interface would be ideal and have the most promise, I disagree that screens are a barrier for at least partial realization of the “metaverse” concept. How is a screen any different from looking through a window? Does the fact that a “wall” separates you from the rest of the world make it any less compelling? Consider also how fluid good user interfaces with virtual worlds can be (i.e. World of Warcraft). Anyone who has achieved a “flow” state in WoW can understand how complete immersion within virtual world environments has already been achieved. Second Life does not yet “flow” — at least for me — but this I consider to be just one of its current interface barriers.

We do still lack many visual aspects of “real” interactions, such as facial expressions. However, anyone who has watched the progress of the computer graphics industry over the past ten years will understand that this barrier will soon fall away. Just consider a computer rendered movie from ten years ago, and realize that now our desktops render that quality real-time. Next, take a look at a recently rendered movie. That is what our virtual worlds will look like in the next 5-10 years.

There have been many advances in VR hardware, but the markets for this technology are still very limited. As more and more virtual world environments become mainstream, there will be more people looking for hardware solutions to better integrate with them, hence more money available and more innovations in the market. Innovation requires both demand and money, and Second Life is helping to fuel both of these.