Metaplace is dead

Metaplace (which I tried once without great success in March) is about to shuffle off this mortal coil. It will soon be singing in the celestial choir.

Naturally this is big news across a lot of the blogs to which I subscribe and here's my tuppence worth too.

Way back at the start of the year I posted a piece about OpenSim and the magic that makes SL work, and in May another post about adult content being important in driving innovation in Second Life.

I think it's time to come clean and admit a mistake or two in the list and possibly rock the boat of a few at Linden Lab who are hell-bent on improving that first hour experience.

First up, as Gwyn points out in her much longer post, Second Life continues to work because it has a sound business model. Second Life may or may not require more premium members to flourish, although it's an obvious place for Linden Lab to make some more money and free homes for premium members (however much those of us with homes turn our noses up at it) might just be part of the way forward on that. Confidence that the place will be here next year and in five years time is important to a lot of people.

And the other thing is a first minute reaction I think. I was entranced with Second Life as soon as I arrived. I don't remember precisely what caught me at this remove (2,000 days in early 2010) but I was viscerally, instantly hooked. That's part of what kept me coming back to work out how to build, part of what made me learn to script, part of what made me engage in the social interactions that I did back then, and all of those things paved the way for keeping me in Second Life right now.

I rather suspect making that first hour easier, better, might help those who are less willing or able to invest time into new skills but still like what they see will help convert some of that newbie churn into new users. But, and herein lies the rub, looking for my Metaplace post and the pictures there reminded me of the disappointment I'd felt. That, in turn, reminded me today in a way it didn't then, of the wonder i'd felt in Second Life in those first seconds. Working on the first hour might be good, but working on the first second might be even better.

Posted by Eloise Pasteur in General
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#1 - Gwyneth Llewelyn 2010-01-05 00:09 - (Reply)

You're so right on the "first minute reaction" - even more so than the first hour experience, I guess! My own first reaction to Metaplace was... blargh. The second reaction was, "oh no, this is Raph Koster behind this, so it will be an immediate success, but we're just getting a travesty of a 'virtual world', which will however become the standard against which other virtual worlds will be measured!" so in a sense I was scared... I'd much rather preferred to have an astonishingly good, attractive, exciting, and enthralling Metaplace to encourage billions to finally join a virtual world. But instead... Metaplace sort of gave a "bad name" to VWs overall. They're not supposed to be even remotely so uninteresting as Metaplace was...

With Blue Mars I had a similar experience, actually. I forced myself to spend about an hour on my first day there (just like I did with Lively, which was even worse than Metaplace), and tried, very hard, to convince myself that this would be the future of VWs, and not Second Life. I engaged with the community (90% of which, as usual, are fellow SL residents); I participated on the forums and asked 'difficult' questions; I tried to log in as a developer (I was for some reason blackballed) and read some documentation. But mostly I tried it out. On subsequent days I managed to view all the initial available "trial" spaces, and spend as long as possible in them as I could.

And, well, besides pretty graphics (which are not that pretty anyway...) there was not much in it that immediately caught my attention. Granted, the lack of Mac support doesn't help either - it means that I have to borrow a PC to log in to BM. The same, in fact, happened with Lively and Metaplace too... so I guess those were huge barriers to make me "accept" those virtual worlds. In my mind, if a VW is so enthralling from the first minute, I ought to be willing to spend some money in getting some hardware that fully supports it to get a better experience (That certainly happened after a while with Second Life!) With Metaplace, Lively, and Blue Mars, all I can think is that it's so comfortable for me to say, "sorry, I have no PC so I can't join those VWs" as a polite excuse not to say much worse about them...

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