New Article: "SL's loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections"

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And (emphatically, in a very insistent shouty voice) NOT ME!!!!

Methinks the lady doth protest too much!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Methinks the lady doth protest too much!

Trust me. I'd have done a better job of it.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 hours ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

I understand your point and the writer's (I think?), I just don't see how SL would lose it's 'limitless potential for producing experiences that can be had nowhere else, and that offer new perspectives on virtual worlds, RL, and ourselves' if it were easier to use.

Sure, as the writer mentioned, LL could simplify the mechanics quite a lot by not letting us move the camera independently of our avi, but they do not have to make the game less flexible to improve the experience. Me, I would just be happy if I could make the camera stay in position relative to the room instead of some random position when I Sit on something or am trying to work on my avi. Another would be to offer mouse-priority (I think it is called?) over window-priority (have no idea what this is called) so that I do not have to click outside whatever window I have to use to get something done (usually several windows in combination) to have the arrow keys move my avi.

FWIW ofc, others probably see things differently...

As someone pointed out above, this isn't a "game review." It's not saying "SL is bad because of the following things."

What it IS saying is that many of the things that don't work well in SL have created within this platform an inventive and creative community that has learned, not merely how to manage those problems, but how to adapt and exploit them to make a new kind of experience that is unavailable on other platforms where a properly function interface design works in effect to limit what players and users can do.

So, it's not saying there's something "wrong" with the ability to unlock camera constraints, and it's certainly not advocating that that be restricted. It's saying that the ability to cam places independently of the embodied presence of your avatar is characteristic of the kinds of freedoms that SL's slightly wonky and unusual (and glitchy, and out of date) code permits.

The author doesn't really voice an opinion about whether SL should be "fixed" or not. She's simply describing the culture that has developed around the existing system. I suspect, however, that she'd see it as a loss to the platform if changes "locked us in" to particular ways of doing things by producing a better functioning, but therefore more restrictive, interface.

(Again I'll say, though, that I think she's missed the ways in which the consumer culture of SL has actually sort of already done that.)

Edited May 14 by Scylla Rhiadra
Typo

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 hours ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

I am sure I am missing your point, I can even see how, but given all the customization we can do to the current mesh heads and bodies, I consider that mostly free play, too. I am not sure anyone could look at my head and pick out which LeLutka head it is. I have not really seen bodies shaped like mine, either. Then again, I may be vastly overestimating myself lol.

I think that's somewhat true. But I think most of us would agree that Catwa, LeLutka, Genus, and maybe some others all have very distinctive "looks." I might not be able to guess that you're using Avalon (which about 90% of LeLutka users do use), but I bet I could tell you that it WAS LeLutka.

A glance at the garments for both men and women on sale at events, or weekend sales, will reveal an apparent variety that masks an awful lot of sameness. If I had a L$ for every LBD on sale over the weekend, or hoodie for men, I'd . . . well, I'd not be rich, but I'd have some L$s!

It's also about other kinds of trends. You don't have to look far here on the forums to find people complaining about skirts or dresses that are "too short," or cutaways in garments, or "Juicy" this or that. I am continually hearing (and actually experiencing) the complaint that, among all that apparent variety, there is an awful lot of "same old same old," or just repetition of the styles, features, colours, etc.

Just like in RL, really.

Edited May 14 by Scylla Rhiadra
Typo (sigh)

[Istelathis]

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Trust me. I'd have done a better job of it.

Or that is just what you want us to think! 😋🪿

I think the article was fun, Alice seems like an interesting person, that simply enjoys sharing on the web with no ulterior motives as has been suggested in this thread.  A low profile person, that has a rare perspective on things, which I have enjoyed.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

Or that is just what you want us to think! 😋🪿

I think the article was fun, Alice seems like an interesting person, that simply enjoys sharing on the web with no ulterior motives as has been suggested in this thread.  A low profile person, that has a rare perspective on things, which I have enjoyed.

Yeah. I'll say again that I think there are some serious issues with this article, but on the whole it's interesting, thought-provoking, and different.

And the "different" thing may be a problem, because this article was not written for us. It was written for a much more select audience of people with backgrounds in the kind of discourse, and the approach, that she is taking. To point again to her use of the term "heteronormative," it's not a shot fired in a culture war: it's a specifically academic term that has a very deep history and set of meanings associated with it. It directly evokes, and calls up as part of its meanings, the theoretical work of people like Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Lauren Berlant. In fact, there are literally 1000s of articles and books whose ideas underlie the use of this term in this article.

Which is why, I think, so many people seem to think that this article is attacking Second Life. It isn't: it's suggesting, on the contrary, that SL has survived because it is a place where we, the "users," have been able to exert our own independence over an interface that frequently fails to "control" and limit us in the ways that it's supposed to.

I think there are lots of legit criticisms of this article to be made. But a "hit piece" against SL it is not.

Edited May 14 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yeah. I'll say again that I think there are some serious issues with this article, but on the whole it's interesting, thought-provoking, and different.

And the "different" thing may be a problem, because this article was not written for us.

Did it occur to you that the article may actually be trolling?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Did it occur to you that the article may actually be trolling?

No, 99% certain it is not.

I've read scores of pieces like this. I don't mean specifically about SL or even about games (although I've read some of that sort of thing as well), but in terms of its approach and theoretical allegiances. Frankly, I wasn't through the first paragraph before I had a pretty good idea of where it was going, and more or less how it was going to get there.

I don't mean to suggest that this is merely formulaic (although a lot of academic and sub-academic writing frankly is), but rather that I found it immediately recognizable and familiar. Almost comfortable, in fact!

If you want to read more stringently academic pieces (by which I mean, peer-reviewed, employing proper citation, etc.) that employ a somewhat similar approach, check out the Journal of Virtual Worlds online. Or any number of articles, either in academic journals or elsewhere, that apply Queer Theory, Cultural Materialism, and related theoretical approaches.

I am sure that as a coder, you can sometimes look at a snippet and recognize the approach to its task that it's taking? This is the same thing.

[CaerolleClaudel]

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think that's somewhat true. But I think most of us would agree that Catwa, LeLutka, Genus, and maybe some others all have very distinctive "looks." I might not be able to guess that you're using Avalon (which about 90% of LeLutka users do use), but I bet I could tell you that it WAS LeLutka.

A glance at the garments for both men and women on sale at events, or weekend sales, will reveal an apparent variety that masks an awful lot of sameness. If I had a L$ for every LBD one sale over the weekend, or hoodie for men, I'd . . . well, I'd not be rich, but I'd have some L$s!

It's also about other kinds of trends. You don't have to look far here on the forums to find people complaining about skirts or dresses that are "too short," or cutaways in garments, or "Juicy" this or that. I am continually hearing (and actually experiencing) the complaint that, among all that apparent variety, there is an awful lot of "same old same old," or just repetition of the styles, features, colours, etc.

Just like in RL, really.

I agree 100% wrt clothes. I spend quite a lot of time shopping just to *maybe* find one piece that I like. Or that is very different from the clothes I already have. 

I agree on the head, too. I probably give myself too much credit there. Esp since I had no idea that 90% of the LeL heads in use are the Avalon. And even more esp since you guessed that is what I have lol. 

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

27 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Did it occur to you that the article may actually be trolling?

No, 99% certain it is not.

 

Just throwing it out there! 👍🏾

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, CaerolleClaudel said:

I agree on the head, too. I probably give myself too much credit there. Esp since I had no idea that 90% of the LeL heads in use are the Avalon. And even more esp since you guessed that is what I have lol. 

lol, sorry. Avalon is probably the most popular because it's the easiest to use. I went through about 4 different LeLutka heads trying to find one I liked for my alt, Laskya, and eventually I just broke down and bought Avalon (which I'd been resisting precisely because it is so popular). And voila! I almost immediately found a look for her I liked.

Mesh bodies are much the same of course. At the moment, there are basically two main flavours: the "slim athletic" look you can get with Maitreya or Legacy (or Reborn if you use a LOT of deformers), or the "curvy" look which was, for a time, dominated by Hourglass and then Kupra, but which is now very much the property of Reborn. There's also a sizable, but still much smaller, market for the smaller-breasted body (Maitreya Lara Petite, and Legacy Perky). There are other bodies, of course, but basically there are three main ones that now totally dominate the market. And that inevitably breeds some conformity.

[CaerolleClaudel]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

lol, sorry. Avalon is probably the most popular because it's the easiest to use. I went through about 4 different LeLutka heads trying to find one I liked for my alt, Laskya, and eventually I just broke down and bought Avalon (which I'd been resisting precisely because it is so popular). And voila! I almost immediately found a look for her I liked.

Mesh bodies are much the same of course. At the moment, there are basically two main flavours: the "slim athletic" look you can get with Maitreya or Legacy (or Reborn if you use a LOT of deformers), or the "curvy" look which was, for a time, dominated by Hourglass and then Kupra, but which is now very much the property of Reborn. There's also a sizable, but still much smaller, market for the smaller-breasted body (Maitreya Lara Petite, and Legacy Perky). There are other bodies, of course, but basically there are three main ones that now totally dominate the market. And that inevitably breeds some conformity.

I did the same; I demo’d 3 or 4 LeL heads and quickly found that the only one that I would be able to make into something I liked was the Avalon. 

Wrt bodies, yep, I have the Lara. I started with that body and have never changed to anything else, just kept getting the updates. However, I made a lot of adjustments over the years, and spent yet more time making adjustments on the body when I got my new head. Likely my body is really not as different from other people’s take on Lara as I think though. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

Likely my body is really not as different from other people’s take on Lara as I think though.

I am sure it's individual in lots of ways, actually. But there are limits to how "different" you can be with a standard Maitreya Lara, simply because of the restrictions built into the mesh on how it responds to sliders.

For instance, it's still pretty hard to reduce the size of the Maitreya butt. And reducing breast size much below 45 or so on the slider produces distortions.

The limitations are built in: we're all somewhat prisoners of the code.

(And that is, to a very large degree, the point that this article is making about the failure of code in SL: that it doesn't limit us as much as it might if it were "better.")

Edited May 14 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

No, 99% certain it is not.

I've read scores of pieces like this. I don't mean specifically about SL or even about games (although I've read some of that sort of thing as well), but in terms of its approach and theoretical allegiances. Frankly, I wasn't through the first paragraph before I had a pretty good idea of where it was going, and more or less how it was going to get there.

I don't mean to suggest that this is merely formulaic (although a lot of academic and sub-academic writing frankly is), but rather that I found it immediately recognizable and familiar. Almost comfortable, in fact!

If you want to read more stringently academic pieces (by which I mean, peer-reviewed, employing proper citation, etc.) that employ a somewhat similar approach, check out the Journal of Virtual Worlds online. Or any number of articles, either in academic journals or elsewhere, that apply Queer Theory, Cultural Materialism, and related theoretical approaches.

I am sure that as a coder, you can sometimes look at a snippet and recognize the approach to its task that it's taking? This is the same thing.

Interesting analogy! (As a professional programmer, if I'm a "coder", I suppose that makes you a "scribe", to use words which carry similar levels of respect!)

As a professional, sometimes I am handed someone's undocumented, poorly organized code to "fix", or "support".  For this to be possible, over the years I've developed a skill to figure out the other programmer's "intent".

Sure, I can recognize patterns, but often when something is poorly written, the challenge becomes understanding at both a macro- and micro-level, what the "point" was; what they were trying to accomplish. The worse the writing (or "coding" as a non-programmer may say), the greater a challenge - and the more important it can be - to determine that intent.

The article is a great example of this! Sure, you can read all the words. Yes, you can follow the narrative. But why, oh why, would someone do this?

Sometimes with a "questionably written program", the answer is, "because nobody told them not to, they don't care what anyone else thinks, and so are empowered to do it however they please." I literally deal with this scenario, which is why I can explain it with very little effort.

I hope by analogy, my earlier points are more clear, not less.

Thanks!

Edited May 14 by Love Zhaoying
"Article", not "story"

[Raspberry Crystal]

I am not that used to reading this style of article, though of course I have seen many 'my journo impressions after a quick dip in sl' pieces. I do think she has some valid points though.

The complexity and frustration of joining sl as a new user is a deterrent to many. Residents here persist for a reason, presumably many because they find a community of like-minded people, who find themselves here for similar reasons.

Finding freedom to be in the uncontrolled spaces is an interesting concept.

The thing that most writers miss, is the number of people who join sl and spend most of the time by themselves. How do you write about that, where do you meet this cohort?

There is a definite sense of freedom for me, in logging on at the quietest times of day, and having lag free space to roam while the USA sleeps.

I understand that the writer think that the glitches in coding are significant, but maybe they aren't that much once you adapt around them. They simply function as a kind of inititation, and the experience of dealing with them can be a bonding thing, or give a sense of achievement, when overcome?

SL alters every year for me, as I learn more, and things change around me. You can't get that kind of insight by attempting to do  vox pop tv style interviews in spaces which happen to be populated when you log on.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

41 minutes ago, Raspberry Crystal said:

I understand that the writer think that the glitches in coding are significant, but maybe they aren't that much once you adapt around them. They simply function as a kind of inititation, and the experience of dealing with them can be a bonding thing, or give a sense of achievement, when overcome?

I think that this is a really good point, and one that the article doesn't really touch on.

We've developed a kind of shared language which is the result, not merely of our shared experience of the platform, but also of its glitches and failures. "It's just SL being SL again . . ." That kind of thing. And I agree that, to a degree, that's strengthened the bonds within communities.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

14 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

A new article about Second Life dropped a few days ago. It's worth a quick read.

There will be lots of (justified) quibbles about this piece; there are a few things it gets wrong, or that it mischaracterizes. It's also written in a rather thick and occasionally annoying Postmodern dialect that will be familiar perhaps to some who do media studies, Queer Theory, and the like. Were I vetting this as an article for publication, I'd want to see the argument tightened up a lot.

tl;dr basic thesis: the things that seem broken, out-of-date, or difficult about SL are, paradoxically,. the things that make it most worthwhile as a site for "queer spaces" -- meaning not necessarily LGBTQ+ oriented, but rather more generally transgressive and even a bit revolutionary. As the platform ages, it's "brokenness" creates more opportunities for imagining a place in which we can carve out for ourselves a virtual existence that is free of the top-down insistence upon conformity that we experience both on other MMO platforms, and in RL.

https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/05/second-life-virtual-world-gamer-furry-identity-world/

I could not even get through it.  A blinking animation costs $49!?! 

[Jaylinbridges]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

ts player-made worlds—once preserved on thousands of proprietary whirring servers scattered across the Earth and now hovering dematerialized in Amazon’s cloud—exist forever, waiting for you to log back on.

The author has no idea what she is talking about.  Another philosopher that failed algebra and biology in 7th grade.

No techno wizard, just a wizard, like the old alchemists that fooled their royal funders with smoke and mirrors.  Did I say mirrors?  

[ValKalAstra]

Alright, Nina reporting for duty. I've finally had my sleep. Four hours is enough, thank you very much. So while eating breakfast, I did read through the article and yah, I can see what happened. It's written in the kind of authorative voice you get in academic papers but with none of the scientific rigor to earn that with.

It gets so much fundamentally wrong that it casts doubt on the things it gets right, leading to knee-jerk reactions by people that feel misrepresented. However, I'll echo the sentiment that it does seem to convey a positive message overall and is very much sincere in its intent. So, diving into it. I'll put down a basic rebutal or perhaps a nerdy "actually...".

While the nature of jank or imperfect systems leads to new forms of community, communication and socialisation, that is not in itself special to Second Life. Every game I've ever played has had jank and uh...

<--- Take it from me. I know. Whenever there's interaction between players, they will find ways to communicate and to build communities around that. For example, I've been playing Rabbit & Steel with a friend. A cute game about bunnies taking on increasingly more difficult bosses while the game simulates typical MMO raid mechanics.
Our entire communication was to bounce and wobble using the bunny sprites and so after each victory, we did our little silly dance. We never talked about doing that. We just kind of naturally did.

An imperfect system has created a wholly new expression. It's my experience that this is universal. First Person Shooters had the infamous tea-bagging thing, where they used repeated crouching to simulate a certain act as a taunt. Dark Souls had entire legends surrounding the use of certain emotes and Minecraft has crouching as a courtesy bow.

The reason I'm writing all of this is a simple question: How the hell is Second Life special, then? Transgressive, revolutionary spaces? While Second Life can be that, it's certainly not unique to it.

Case in point, have a gander at this picture (source: https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-xiv-community-spotlight-hgxiv-interview-housing-community-designers-glitch/)

What you're seeing is players breaking the spaces and confines of the game (the ability to place premade objects inside of player houses) to create new and unseen items. For example, the light source above the stove is the bum of a snowman. Stool tops double as cooking plates. In some places, the houses have gone through twelve years of constant revolution, of constantly being broken and intentionally glitched to create something new. This has led to communities whose entire expertise it is to know how to break the game. There's an element of subversion in there, of taking a predefined space, breaking it and making it your own and I kind of see that same energy in Second Life.

Like, the whole thing of mesh is frankly ludicrous the way it is implemented. First, we more or less hide our system avatar, then attach body parts on top of it and then layer further parts over that while again hiding parts of the meshbody on top of the already hidden system body which funny enough, technically already IS a meshbody. So we're wearing two bodies but hiding one of them and half of the second one. That's breaking the system to create something new. I posit that it's not that different however from glitching a snowman into a cupboard to fake a lamp with it.

Now then, what other qualities does Second Life have that are mentioned in the article. The historical aspect of abandoned builds and history. Okay, maybe? While I do think that some of the houses in Ultima Online are older than Second Life itself, I'll give SL that it probably has got a lot more of that and with more creative expression. There's a certain eerie feel to driving around and seeing houses that still look like they were last updated 15 years ago. It does allow the mind to wander and as a person that adores industrial ruins, I enjoy that aspect. However and this is obviously personal opinion, I am not seeing decay and rot, I'm seeing regrowth and reclamation. I don't see a world forgotten by time, I see a world ready to be reshaped, remade and reborn. Potential, versus the sensation of loss.

As for the closing statement then, that the disjointed chaotic janky mess of Second Life can serve as an ironic retreat from an ever more gamified real life - well to that I've got this to say: Hello, heya. Welcome to virtual worlds, games and otherwise! We've been here since the days of MUDs and it's a beautiful communal escapism that you're very welcome to join. New and revolutionary, however, it is not.

[Marianne Little]

12 minutes ago, SpiritSparrow Skydancer said:

I could not even get through it.  A blinking animation costs $49!?! 

Maybe the writer, or the AI she used to assist her writing, mixed up US dollars and Linden Dollars.

[Conifer Dada]

I read the article and the writer made one assumption that I think is incorrect. 

This is that users of Second Life in some way enjoy its bad performance (the lag and slow rezzing), as it adds to the dystopian, broken world atmosphere. I imagine that 99% of residents wish that SL would have better performance and the remaining 1% are those who are lucky enough to experience good performance already! 

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, ValKalAstra said:

While the nature of jank or imperfect systems leads to new forms of community, communication and socialisation, that is not in itself special to Second Life. Every game I've ever played has had jank and uh...

This is by far the best and most relevant critique of the argument the article makes that I've seen yet. It's also one that I'm not very qualified to make myself, because I simply don't have enough experience of other MMOs.

The whole piece is premised on the idea that SL's imperfections and glitchiness make it "special" because it frees users from the constraints of design in a way that is not possible of other, better-designed games. If you're correct -- and I have absolutely no reason to doubt you -- then the subversive elements that it sees at play in SL culture are common to MMOs in general, even if not necessarily to the same extent.

The basic thesis -- that the struggle with poor interface design, broken code, etc. paradoxically empowers the user and their communities -- might, if this is the case, be better applied to MMOs in general, rather than setting up a contrast between more controlled and less controlled environments. Maybe the real point is that all users are always to some degree engaged in what I suppose one might dramatically call "resistance" to the machine, working to find "cheats" and adapting the best laid plans of games designers to their own nefarious purposes.

So, yes, excellent points.

1 hour ago, ValKalAstra said:

However and this is obviously personal opinion, I am not seeing decay and rot, I'm seeing regrowth and reclamation. I don't see a world forgotten by time, I see a world ready to be reshaped, remade and reborn. Potential, versus the sensation of loss.

Also a good point, although on this one YMMV, so to speak, as there are also endless laments here, and in-world, about SL's ancient code base, its apparent inability to keep up with the graphic quality of other "games," etc.The debate over PBR is maybe a case in point: there are those celebrating its advent as a step forward, and those who think that SL is in this regard unreclaimable.

I also really liked your description of SL's older, legacy sites. And I've never read a better and more apt description of the ridiculousness that is our mesh body system!

Edited May 14 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Dorientje Woller]

26 minutes ago, Conifer Dada said:

I read the article and the writer made one assumption that I think is incorrect. 

This is that users of Second Life in some way enjoy its bad performance (the lag and slow rezzing), as it adds to the dystopian, broken world atmosphere. I imagine that 99% of residents wish that SL would have better performance and the remaining 1% are those who are lucky enough to experience good performance already! 

 

Point to me one game that hasn't been sold currently at full price in an alpha or beta stage without game breaking bugs?

[Kathlen Onyx]

TL;DR all the responses so I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding this or not.  I'm also terrible at math but....wouldn't that make the daily user headcount at over 2 million a day?  I question this but if there are over 2 million users on the grid on a daily basis I need to go out and find them!

And the numbers don’t lie: although it boasts 70 million registered users, Second Life’s daily user headcount in 2023 clocked in at less than 0.3 percent of that figure.  

[QuietEventide]

25 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Point to me one game that hasn't been sold currently at full price in an alpha or beta stage without game breaking bugs?

Stardew Valley

-----------------------------
SL is different things to different people.
It can be a game, but doesn't have to be.

I think of SL as the Holodeck in Star Trek:
1) You program your own experience
2) Then you can pretend to live within your experience

I don't interact in-world anymore, I just use SL as a virtual photo studio – much thanks to the free roaming camera (10/10 for that) and the possibility to move props & actors/avatars around. With SL you can create any "actor" and background you want.

Create a 1920's flapper? No problem.
1850's Wild West people? No problem.
Sci-fi astronauts? No problem.
Street scene? No problem (except not having enough crowds but that can be done other ways)
Landscapes, forests, beaches, waterfalls, bus stops, airports... no problem.
Name a scene and it can probably be created within SL

I have not found any other "game/tool" that was able to provide anything even remotely close.
Well, Blender could, I think...
But my life isn't long enough for Blender, so this will have to do.
-----------------------------

I quite enjoyed the article.
Yes, it is written by someone with limited experience of SL and obviously written for others who have little or no experience of SL. But we were all beginners once.

Edited May 14 by QuietEventide