The 24 by 5 Tech Comm Blog

Last night, partly inspired by Kate and Katicus Sparrow, I tried Second Life. If you don’t already know, Second Life is an on-line roll playing game without the game. It’s a visual, interactive environment that combines instant messaging with the ability to go “places” and “do” things.
I had read a lot of hype about Second Life so I was a bit skeptical. On the whole though, I was impressed. The ability to meet people, particularly people on the other side of the world, in such an open-ended setting, is quite charming.

Second Life has an interesting approach to documentation: There is none. Maybe that’s not exactly true — I’m sure there’s a lot of documentation in Linden Labs somewhere, and they made it very clear that F1 would take me to their help files — and there were times when I was frustrated. There were times when I couldn’t figure out what to do, or what I was supposed to do, or how to do it — but I never pushed F1. It was almost a matter of pride that I didn’t press F1, and in the end I didn’t need to.

Why not? What is it about Second Life that makes a manual unnecessary? I think it’s three things:

1. They start you off right away with an optional tutorial. Tutorials are nothing new, but the Second Life one is particularly clever because it’s not necessarily linear. It’s broken up into topics, and then modules within those topics — but I can go from one module to another in a any topic just by walking over there, or, if I get too frustrated I can skip them all and just look around. The key here is that they are presenting structured learning opportunities, but still alowing the user to pick and choose. Oddly, knowing that I didn’t have to finish the tutorial actually encouraged me to get to the end.

2. You get immediate feedback. Because of how visual Second Life is, success or failure is usually quite clear. If you fall from a twelve story building, then you did something wrong when you tried to fly. It reminded me of learning to drive. By imitating the rules of the real world (selectively) Second Life made me feel like the system wasn’t arbitrary, and that made practicing fun because I could apply real-world logic and get back immediate results.

3. There’s a community. You can actually see other “people” walking around, talking and doing stuff. Actually, this was a bit stressful for me. It’s a bit embarrassing, walking off bridges, when you know that the digital avatars standing near by are representatives of real people and that they can see how little you know. But the flip side to that is that most of the folks I met were pretty happy to explain things. What that means is that Second Life has created a situation where the community does a lot the training of new members. And of course, watching other people do things shows new members some of what they can look forward to.

As for me, I think I’m going to make a habit of dropping in to Second Life occasionally. I’m not terribly fond of the idea of spending even more time sitting in front of my computer, but I can’t shake the feeling that Second Life and Linden Labs are the tip of something that’s going to grow and evolve in weird and interesting ways — and I want to see that happen.

PS — I just ran across Sony’s Home for the Playstation 3. We’re just seeing the beginning of this. Just wait until we have direct brain interfaces…

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Nigel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.