The Alphaville Herald

Disoriented

by prokofy on 30/12/06 at 5:14 pm

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of New Residents Experience Evaluation and Manager, Alt Depot

Get ready for the big SL backlash. It’s not just Clay Shirky stirring up a shit-storm at the eggheads’ Terra Nova, prompting a new rigorous discussion of “metrics of use“. It’s not just the leftoid Guardian but now the more conservative London Times describing their “blow me” experiences — perhaps not the image LL wished to project. It’s not just liberal Time correspondents being hijacked to sex palaces or skeptical marketers like Churbuck ranting that there’s little reason to approve projects in SL by people who don’t even bother to find a way to log into SL. Even the most faithful Blingsider is questioning the numbers and experience; Hamlet nee Linden Au feels compelled to weigh in and Reuben nee Linden Steiger has taken on not only Churbuck but the lovely Danah Boyd who has gotten “irritated” with SL.

The only thing LL’s one-person media department has to fight back with now is the sheer growth in numbers even behind the fake numbers — but to make these numbers stick, they have to make avatars stick better on their servers. Right now, the 90-day churn burn-out rate could be as high as 90 percent even by Philip’s own reckoning – people fall off for all kinds of reasons — too hard, too confusing, too expensive, too nasty, too demanding graphics card, too dull. How to keep them coming back for more and generating the kind of real statistics that MMORPG analysts want — return, daily, log-ins (the MySpace guy, for example, gloats that he has 60 percent of such returnees daily after sign-ups; Robin Linden’s answer is to say that 10 percent of residents spend 84 hours or more in SL per week).

Hence, the 50-odd new orientation areas being built with More, Better orientation. Except…what message are the Lindens trying to send with these cut-off voodoo heads with creepy eyes that follow you?!

I wasn’t going to burn an alt on checking out the new builds first advertised by Frans Charming in SLOG, I happened to have an old alt I’d forgotten and found he was in fact still twiddling his thumbs in his white t-shirt and farm-boy Philip Linden newbie head on the landing spot as you rez the first time. I noticed that this OI was now like “no. 4″ and was one of many in the sea, but nothing different — still the paths going to odd places, the signboards with incomprehensive stuff. I flew over to Help Island, which seemed to be the same-old stuff — exhibits feting the volunteers’ own builds (um, I guess that’s an incentive for them to keep helping), the wierd picture of somebody shooting another avatar and the warning REPORT ABUSE, though most of the people were trying to figure out where they *could* get a gun and shoot it somewhere *at* avatars as part of the *game* dammit — isn’t that why they clicked on the picture of the cool dude in armour on the website in the first place?!

But if you keep flying around and poking on the map, you’ll come to the new orientation islands which are at least 50 in number, judging by the numeration. These are laid out more differently, and one hopes, more helpfully. They’ve divided the areas into basic concepts like “Moving” and “Communication” and made a path for people to follow with incentives — trying to make it a little game, I guess.

The entrance to Communication is creepy — and one suspects, politically-incorrect. The loopy lopped-off primitive heads have eyes that follow you around (is it Snowcrash or Apocalypse Now or Saturday morning cartoons that created this meme of the tribes cannibalizing people and putting their heads on a stake?!).

I decided to take it as a sign that “communicating” would not involve posting anything too critical on the forums or you might get your head chopped off and you could be permabanned *cough*. AND you turn over ALL you data — bar none — to be tracked not only by Linden Lab, but their favourite third-party site pets. But hey, that’s just me. Onward…

The first Polynesian (African?) fellow replete with a politically-incorrect nose-ring and stand-up hair in the hand-eye symbol told me something barely memorable and incomprehensible with many syllables, and told me to move on up the path and meet his brother. That was part of the game. If I advanced and reached the next squat tribal elder, he would say, now, what did my brother ask you? If I were the tekkie type or had a Xerox memory, I’d render the multi-syllable thing immediately. Or, if I were an oldbie returning on an alt, I’d know to go to the lower-left-hand corner of my game screen (um, my monetarizing-online-screen…erm…my massive-multiple-orgasm panel screen as the Times calls it)…and just get the history and paste it into chat. So job one completed — but of course, most newbies spend days figuring out where to find chat history.

I ambled on and found a completely different architectural style (I discovered, like Frans, that frustratingly, the edit is turned off to prevent griefing, so you can’t see who the architects are but they are either Lindens copying Barnesworth or Barnesworth himself). In a faux medieval setting, I was suddenly given a $1 by Governor Linden (this was my prize for answering the tribal brothers’ tricky questions) and thereby enabled to spend a Linden on some armour. Woot! I peered into something called “The Library” and saw little figures all decked out in the costumes, many created by Nylon, now in the library for newbies. That was a nice touch and a good idea, since you can’t *see* these costumes such as to pick them unless you put them on yourself (of course, they could have copybot deployed for this but…).

In the back of my mind, I had to wonder if the Lindens had seen and copied any of the ideas that we developed for Memory Bazaar, an interactive tutorial I conceived and Jessica Ornitz built in the Moroccan style in Ross.

We had the “explorer” concept illustrated by the notion of a 19th-century gentleman explorer’s quarters near the ancient bazaar. His donkey was stocked with a book and surveyors’ equipment — you click to get information about SEARCH. Of course, we can lead the donkey to water but not make him drink : )

Still, by creating various scenes and rooms with various jokes and pranks and interesting stuff, we thought it might work — and it’s main value is in having it not so much as a landing point but as a return point — people come back when they need to recall something, remembering where they saw the information.

The map room has information about how to buy and sell and group land, and tips on how to obtain privacy and deal with griefing.

The original LL orientation stations had this dumb parrot that repeated people’s names (they still have that in the Orientation 2.0) but used the talk script for little else. They also focused mainly on those beloved Linden concepts of “build or die” and “script of die”. We tried to push this further by having every single possible object talk as if it were asking a natural question you’d have, like “what is a sim” or “where are all the people” or “where are the best clubs” or “how do I lose my SL virginity”, and have the ready answer by spitting out a notecard, sometimes with landmarks. Not the best solution, but getting multiple many-lined talk scripts talking is tricky and animating every single thing would also likely get laggy.

The Lindens definitely did the right thing by creating a stand called SEARCH in bold, art-noveau style Chrysler building graphics. Of course, having something that would TELL you WHERE the search button is would help as well. I like to tell people it’s up top their game screen. Yes, game screen, because, well, game is what I call something that works about half the time for most people — game of chance.

Still, kudos to the Lindens for *finally* created a large, visible, interactive display that explains about how to buy land. Woot! I’ve been lobbying for this for a year. I had them laid out myself in Memory Bazaar, and constantly send people there for tutorials. It’s very hard to understand the difference between tier and land and groups and premiums — and here it all is. Only problem: no first land out inworld for people to buy. Honestly, I really wish they’d have the display say “tp here to buy your first land” and have the newbies land right in a new sim to buy land. Is that so hard? Of course, as we’ve discussed ad nauseum, that would mean having to burn servers on free land instead of $1695 islands…

Another stand explains things like movies, machinima, rock shows, etc. and has various avatars flashing by (does anybody really still dress up like Billy Idol in SL?!). Nothing was clickable but it is likely still under construction.

All good — despite some decided mixed messages — but then, without that dark side and ambiguity they wouldn’t be our beloved Lindens.

The real proof of this pudding will be the retention numbers. I really wish they’d track the numbers on every single welcome area, info hub, orientation island, etc. They should see wheher the new or old versions have accounts who keep logging in later. I’m curious whether anything we do in Ross helps or hurts retention — the traffic is among the highest, but for all I know, that’s because it looks like a Middle Eastern arms bazaar and attracks the shooters — and also seems to be among the newbie pick-up joints judging from the chat. Some people actually go through the tutorials and thank me, but I think most newbies in the 17-21 cohort are arriving looking for sex or shooting or sex *with* shooting because they read Time magazine.

A key thing that has been messed up for months is the load balancing. When the avatars leave Orientation Island, they are able to press on a device that spits out a landmark randomly to one of dozens of welcome areas or infohubs or Linden sites, and it ports them there and sets that place to home This alone causes confusion which is why the first notecard we have is “you are here because they set you to home, but this isn’t your own personal home, just a public place”. I had a number of occasions when very young newbies would hiss and push me because I was ‘in their home” which they said Lindens had “set” for them and I should “get the !@!#$ out”.

The “random” script, being random, generates, say, 10 in a row of Lewis Nerd’s Nerditorium, a lovely Sunday band-in-the-park sort of experience, then 1 of the Governor Linden Mansion (confusing because there isn’t much orientation in it unless you like playing checkers with our premiere Absentee Landlady), and then like 50 of Kim Anubis’ Hyles Infohub. You would think I wouldn’t complain about this as I have a business next to Hyles that gets the traffic, but I do. I think there’s a simple thing to be done: fix this script so that it generates SEQUENTIALLY the list of landmarks instead of RANDOMLY. Surely that’s possible!