SL Needs To Change Direction
The latest blog has amandalinden gushing about how wonderful it is to use SL for business, for virtual meetings or some nonsense. It’s really quite laughable. I spend a huge amount of time in SL and unlike most people I have very few complaints about stability or problems teleporting or all that stuff that people usually whine about. It’s probably because I have some pretty hard core equipment on my desk, 3GB of Ram, quad core 2.4GHz processor, 20Mb DSL connection. SL runs great for me and I spend a fucking ton of time in there but I still find it absurd that anyone would try to use it for business meetings or in any kind of serious business at all.
Take that cute little picture on the blog where some smart alec has recreated a RL conference room inside SL where avatars lounge around with their feet on the desks and their hands behind their heads. How exactly is that better than video conferencing? And don’t give me some crap about leaning backwards because people seem too close. At best meeting in SL is slightly better than talking to someone on the phone but when you take into account the ridiculous amount of technology required to “meet” in SL that meagre benefit withers away. Think about it. What is the point of it all? Surely the only reason you want to see the person you’re talking to is so you can see their expression, see which way they are pointing, what their gestures are when they talk. The sort of visual cues that help you understand what someone is saying. You get none of that in SL. It’s not possible for people in SL to smile when they make a subtle joke or to wave their hands around when they are feeling animated (pun totally intended!) so there’s nothing valuable to be gained from looking at the screen.
Further, there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever about SL that encourages cooperation or joint projects or whatever. Google Docs, now that is a great way to collaborate but you can’t do any of that in SL. What would you do? Pass notecards back and forth? Some might argue that you could do collaborative modelling (no, not the L$10/hour shoe store kind) in SL but realistically the modelling tools in Sl are embarrassingly primitive. I don’t know shit about modelling but I sure as fuck know no professional architecture firm is going to use SL to prototype their stuff. Unless, of course, it’s for PR purposes or cheap news cycles.
There is no hope whatsoever for SL to be a popular business tool. None.
Education is nearly as bad, I know SL loves to think of itself as some kind of amazing tool for educators but I really don’t see it. Sure it has some small possibilities, you can do some fun things and I concede here there may be uses for it in the classroom.
I 100% agree with Skye’s comment on the blog but for different reasons. And not just because we’re married. SL should refocus its efforts on attracting gamers. Things like improving physics, making scripts go faster, making scripts more complex, improving the building tools, improving the overall speed and stability of SL - these are all things that LL should be fucking doing anyway. Not screwing around with IBM trying to have virtual meetings. And if LL did those things then we’d have a gaming platform on our hands. Something like Neverwinter Nights is tantalisingly close to being possible in SL, but maybe not quite yet. Something like Crysis but perhaps with much much shittier graphics, it’s quite believable that someone could create that. We have semi intelligent bots, we have guns, we have scenery, we have gangs of griefers who love running around blowing shit up. Mix it all together, start throwing grenades at it and you’ve got yourself some fun. What’s more, gamers will take crap and give it a shake. You don’t have to do a 6 week business risk investigative study before you pick up a game and try it out. Especially in something like SL which is kinda free. If only things were slightly better everywhere you’d have players, sorry, residents creating proper games for you. And not just idling games like that crazy fishing game or Tiny Empires, both of which I think are totally awesome. BTW the main reason they’re so awesome is they work around the major technical failings of SL and deliver something that works with SL, not against it. No, not just those little toys but really serious kick ass games.
Games. It’s so much smarter than trying to get into business. There’s billions of gamers out there, there’s billions of wannabe game designers. Fix SL, mash those two groups together and you’re gonna see SL explode.