Comment by extension | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extension | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a Second Life consultancy for a while (yes, they exist) and I naturally felt obliged to "get into" the game. I spent hours exploring and building and chatting but never found any joy in it. It is an ugly, hollow and seedy world.

The Minecraft comparison is a good one. There is a world with purpose: to survive and ultimately control nature. It perfectly indulges our most primal instincts.

In contrast, everyone is a god in Second Life and the world is empty. For some reason, this ultimate power is used to recreate the most mundane and tasteless aspects of reality:

- Consumerism -- SL citizens love buying clothes, furniture and other useless junk even when they can create anything themselves.

- Lame commercial "theme parks" like McDonalds Island etc. Even the ones that should be interesting, like NASA, fail to either educate or entertain since the medium of static 3D models is generally terrible at both.

- And of course, vice: kinky sex, gambling, pyramid schemes, and spam. These things made up most of the metaverse, last time I was in it.

By far, the most interesting thing about SL was the elaborate and imaginative attacks on the world e.g. self-replicating objects, and the equally elaborate countermeasures used to fight back.

I guess the lesson is that a virtual world needs to find a balance between innate meaning and open ended creativity. SL is one extreme, the other being MMOs that involve too much carrot-chasing to interest most people.

There is (was? I haven't been to SL for a couple of years) a thriving live music community.

Have you played in front of the crowd ? I did - and even if the crowd is virtual, it's a pretty cool feeling.

My employer did rather successful seminars/meetings in SL.

There was also a research that the virtual worlds are a sort of therapy for the autistic folks (http://goo.gl/iaOH7)

Finally, a small story I heard from someone.

A couple walks into the "club" in secondlife. They ask the DJ to put on a particular song and start dancing. When the music finishes, they thank the DJ and the woman explains - "It's the first time in 20 years that we're dancing. My husband can only move in the wheelchair".

That story alone is a sign that SL has served and is serving its purpose. And that everyone can find the different things.

As for your points: - "...even when they can create anything themselves." - Much the same way as everyone can make a painting, or a poem, or a song. They can, but to be good you need to devote the time to it.

- "Lame commercial "theme parks"..." - these are companies that did not get the potential of the secondlife, and treated it like a video game - hired the consultants to build what they thought would look good - which they did. But they did not put a life behind those constructs. Ergo, lame theme parks.

- "vice". Participating in the pyramid scheme in SL and learning about it in a painful way by losing a few hunderd dollars is way better than putting all your life savings into the banking scam in real life. And if a kinky sex with a virtual stranger averts even one occasion of the aggression in real life - that'd be great, isn't it ?

As for attacks - lots of it is the same /b/chan crowd that plays the pranks in real life - it's all for lulz of disturbing others. So I do not see a whole lot of interesting there.

As for the "interesting" technical part - opensim (opensimulator.org) was (is?) a pretty fun project, it recreated to a larger extent the server side of the second life.

So, to summarize - I think there's more to it than it seems. :)

Actually, Minecraft model and appeal is different, because it's a game which is mostly geared towards your inner will to create, assemble, like a kid (or, you know, grown up kids) with Lego bricks.

SL has two sides, the creator side is one, but most people, like you describe, are here mostly to "be" in a different world, and chat, not to create or shape it.

Creating something in Minecraft takes a few minutes, you hit blocks to gather them, you reassemble them somewhere else. In SL, to create, you have to be in a place which allows you to create (most likely one you rent, or a sandbox). You have to know how to create, and the learning step is quite high. You have to pay actual money to upload any texture or mesh to the game.

So the "god" possibilities are high, but not accessible to most of people. Minecraft is the opposite on this point.

I have spent some time in IMVU, and my impression of the culture is, ah, poor.

- Utter consumerism (this is how the company makes their money) - people shop for clothes. Typically the styles are not very creative, mostly variants on a couple motifs.

- Massive vice, mostly directed towards sex.

Unfortunately, IMVU has no ability to direct team action. No creation, no group games, no monsters. That makes me kind of sad. I'd like to grow my world, instead of simply living in a theme park. It's fairly empty experience when you're just idling in a 3d level.

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