My first thought: THIS is what passes for journalism now?

Joel Stein, of Time, is just a jackass, greeting someone he’s never met before with, “Dude, congratulations. You’re the biggest dork in Second Life.” That’s the kind of twit you eject and ban and forget about forever. Do I really care what such a twit has to say about … anything? I think not.

Dan Cairns of Time Online spends what appears to be one day in Second Life and interviews his daughter, who has apparently never been in SL at all. Again I ask: this is journalism? O.O

Tim Adams of the Guardian at least puts in a solid week, which makes him as knowledgeable as any casual user who’s been in SL for a whole week and seems to be a little socially clumsy (running off after accidentally jumping on someone’s head is a bit needless). As we all know, people who’ve been in SL for an entire week are experts on the subject.

But I guess I can give Mr. Adams a modicum of credit for at least having conducted the odd half-hearted interview … with more than just his own daughter.

As for the “game” aspect, at this point, the Lindens have more sign-ups from gaming types and “casual players” socializing and shopping than they have of the educational and business types.

The educational people constantly bitch about having to go through a WA where they get whacked with a giant penis. That sort of puts a crimp in their efforts to pitch their projects to supervisors and boards and funders.

I can only point everybody to the Russians. The Russians found that everything was hard, confusing, etc. like everybody else. So…they made their own welcome area in their own language in their own way — with no Lindens involved in the process. A company called TechInvest made up of some eager programmers just eventually figured out how to get through all the complexities of credit cards not working, etc. etc. bought a sim, and laid it out with the things they want. The furries, elves, and other communities had long since done it that way too. You have to make your own welcome area, customized to how you like it with your target audience in mind, write the cards in their own language, and spread the word that people should simple type that name into the SEARCH list when they land and tp there.

I find more and more people do that in Ross, they arrive and spend a few minutes figuring out the search or fixing their appearance, then they type something in and go there. Or they have someone waiting to TP them to where they are going.

The Lindens did release this third-party registration API thing, which is supposed to help you make direct sign-ups more easily (it may even have a function to tp you to a customized welcome area) — this was in beta, and it was given to the usual select few. Then it seems they made it possible for anyone to apply for it if they could show a good reason — but I hear it’s broke now on recent patches. Anyway, all in due time, I’m sure this is a big aim of the Lindens, to get communities functioning with their own customized sign-ups, they’ve spoken of it many times.

As for the “game” aspect — I think probably these learning types argue endlessly about whether you learn better with game-like features to your learning or whether that’s merely an annoyance. I guess it’s like learning a language. When you’re under 12, you tend to be able to learn a language merely by imitating, hearing, sounding out, and never needing to visualize the letters, or go back to your native language to contrast and compare. You just learn more holistically. After you get to be about 12-13, you start to lose that ability and you then more clunkily learn a language by learning letters, sounding them out, etc. Various techniques then try to sometimes recreate the childhood immersion experience and try to throw out the book-learning approach but that can only irritate some people who really require having a left-brain sort of letters/sounds experience. As a result, the older you are when you learn a language, the worse accent you might have unless you are born talented to mimic accents.

Making *anything* on a path in SL is confusing just because trying to walk, turn corners, follow something past your draw distance, etc. is hard. So that’s why we tried to make these “rooms” that would have something clickable instantly and gradually you would walk through them, but more in clusters, not stations.

Of course I’ve always played SL as a life-sim game. But everyone who declares it as such quickly gets bashed over the head with “it’s not a game, it’s a metaversal platform for venture capitalists!”

But the presentation of the new welcome areas sure seems to be aimed more towards gamers than potential entrepeneurs and business interests to me…

I’d make an alt like everyone else does, just to check them out, but I’m not keen on adding to the fake ‘rezident’ numbers.

Lewis