Whether you’re operating an MMOG or a general-purpose virtual environment like Second Life, one of the issues that keeps coming up over and over again is ‘user experience’. The problem is that the more dependent any user’s experience is on other users, the fewer opportunities you have to provide a ‘good’ experience, let alone a predictable one.
Let me talk about the MMOG APB Reloaded for a couple minutes, then I’m going to talk about Second Life. I tried APBR out yesterday, as did many, many others – being that it is now free-to-play. The game is an MMOG action/shooter, and is focused pretty much exclusively on PvP (player-vs-player) conflict. When you’re ready, you’re assigned a mission, during which you might be arbitrarily grouped with other players of around your own skill level. An opposition team is formed with a counter-mission, and the two sides shoot it out over various objectives until there’s a winning team and a losing team.
Unless you’re already well-acquainted with the game, there’s not really that much to highlight exactly what’s going on until you’ve experienced it a few times. In my first half-hour or so, I was grouped up with a bunch of people who were … well, as bad at it as I was. We lost, and lost and lost, in fairly rapid succession. Then won one – mostly by accident, I think. Most of the players on both sides didn’t seem to be aware that they were even in a group with others on their missions, and overall unfamiliarity multiplied the problems.
Yes, we were brand new and pretty bad at it.
About 30 minutes in, I got automatically grouped with a player I’ll call Sam. Sam was presumably about as bad at the game as myself, because (after all) he got matched up with me.
Sam and I had a go at stopping the two players on the opposing team. We failed at the first objective, and the second, the third, and the fourth. Sam or I (or more commonly both of us) got waxed by the opposition. We got a few good take-downs in ourselves, but it wasn’t enough. When the fifth objective came up, I tackled it and managed to hold my own for five minutes or so, despite Sam not backing me up. He just hung back.
Clutching the whatsit I was supposed to protect, I scurried back towards Sam for assistance.
Sam promptly pulled out his low-damage pistol (instead of his assault-rifle) and shot my character in the face. Not a fatal shot, but two more of those and I’d be killed and have to respawn. “ur to dumb to play this game stupid!” he typed at me.
Then he shot me again.
And then a third time. Then, while I was respawning, the bad guys came and shot him and took the target object, and made off with it. When I respawned, Sam ran up to me in my new location and shot at me some more.
“ur to dumb to play this game stupid!” he typed at me, again.
“Okay!” I typed back. “I get it, alright? I’m completely new at this and haven’t had a chance to practice yet!”
I didn’t mention that the game apparently thought he was just as bad at it as I was, since it had grouped me with him.
Sam shot me dead again, and then again, while I was figuring out how to abort the mission or leave the group early. He said a few more insulting things that I wasn’t really paying attention to by that stage.
I eventually settled for telling the game to bring in an extra player to the group. When the unlucky sod arrived, I logged out, and deleted my character, then uninstalled the game.
Then I reflected that instead of Sam, I might have wound up with someone else – someone who was supportive and would have helped me along… and indeed helped me to be more contributory. There’s plenty of people like that online. That would have been a good experience, and if I’d had one, I might still be playing despite any number of subsequent bad experiences.
The same thing holds true with Second Life – only more so.
In Second Life, the users are also responsible for pretty much everything you see and hear. Only the tiniest fraction of content is first-party content made by Linden Lab. Less than a hundredth of a percent, I’d imagine. You could spend all of your time in Second Life and the odds of you running into first-party content is pretty much nil, unless you go to a finite number of places.
Second Life users are not, for the most part, skilled and experienced content creators. Some are, for sure, but it is a spectrum, ranging from the least skilled individuals, to highly creative teams. Many of those only really create for themselves or their friends. The number who create content for others is much smaller.
As such, the quality of content – most of which isn’t really necessarily intended for the entertainment or usage of third-parties (that’s you and me) – varies wildly.
And that doesn’t even count the personalities. You have just as much chance of meeting someone as irrational and objectionable as ‘Sam’ in Second Life, or at your company Christmas Party. In Second Life, however, it might be your first experience, and if it is a dud you are unlikely to continue.
This is not what you’d call ‘crowdsourcing’ the user-experience.
This is what I would call a ‘Secret Santa’ user-experience, only your ‘gift’ could wind up being the experiential equivalent of a handful of dung infested by biting insects instead of anything remotely nice. That’s because people are people, and people’s personalities don’t really change when they go online (well, not unless there’s something wrong with them, anyway – but that there is a subject for another day).
With Second Life, the only portions of the user-experience that Linden Lab has any influence over are: Billing, customer-service, communications, the official viewer, governance, stability, bugs and lag (check me, did I miss any?). When it comes to a user actually logging in for the first time, they can as readily wind up with the aforementioned handful of dung as they might get a rewarding and satisfying experience that brings them back.
The notion that Linden Lab actually has anything like what you might call ‘control’ over the Second Life user-experience (particularly for new users) is rather absurd. They could worsen it, but there’s little enough that they can do to actually make it substantively better, outside of working on the limited number of areas I mentioned above.
Yes, there’s more that the Lab could do to funnel new users to places where they are more likely to have positive experiences – and they’ve certainly attempted that in the past – but without dealing effectively with those other areas as well (particularly the viewer and governance), those efforts generally fall flat.
The solution, ultimately, is going to have to be a holistic solution, because the Lab’s past reductionist efforts to improve individual experiential elements provably hasn’t worked – or at least the Lab has told us that they haven’t worked. You can make your own judgments on that.
Linden Lab have made some very good decisions: (1) they allow free access to content creation tools, (2) they allow creation of extremely powerful content creation tools (no other virtual world dared push this to the limits LL have) and (3) they manage the Linden Dollar well and so have created a market for user-created content.
They have also made terrible decisions: (1) a business model based heavily on re-selling virtual land, (2) a ‘hands-off’ approach to managing SL as a platform, by which I mean that it is difficult for new users to discover content either thru social discovery (such as happens with FB and Twitter) or thru the efforts of LL to manage a directory of content such as an App Store kind of approach and (3) a rather ‘odd’ relationship with the viewer software at all levels: some examples of which are clinging on tightly to the philosophy of it being an ultra-thin client and all assets are downloaded live and almost giving it up to the user-base to manage with the third-party viewer program – a rather odd approach as the viewer is by far and away the main peice of technology through which Linden Lab have a relationship with the majority of their customers and another way in which they can control the user experience.
Right now the bad decisions slightly outweigh the good ones and we see steady decline in SL user-base. However, I do see LL making efforts to move away from the land-resale business model and to take a more hands-on approach to platform management.
Golden analysis, Tat.
I’m afraid so long as Linden Lab is indecisive about whether it’s an experience provider or platform provider, the new user experience is always going to be muddled and problematic.
Linden Lab has a problem content creators don’t, which is Linden Lab has to please everyone all the time whereas content creators only have to appease their small share of the entire grid.
Take the user registration improvements this year for example. It took months until the new avatar types were varied enough that most were sated. Actually, I’m not sure that everyone is content with all the avatar options now even though it ranges from bunny-people to airships.
The user registration and starter avatars improvements were great, but they were also opportunity costs. It was Linden Lab further choosing to be an experience provider rather than a platform provider. It would’ve been much better if Linden Lab spent those months revisiting the ideas and sentiment behind the Registration API, so that third parties could embed that new registration process into their own websites complete with starter avatars of their own creation and choosing.
For example, as a prospective new user, it’d have been better if I could go to TreetTV, click “sign up to Second Life”, choose an avatar with a Tonight Live fan t-shirt and start in a TreetTV studio my first login. Or maybe a pirate RP sim’s site with pirate avatars and pirate cove start location.
What we have instead though is Linden Lab being insistent upon providing Second Life’s first impressions via their website and first few hours of experience via their everchanging tutorial areas and welcome hubs.
We have to register new accounts on their website, choose from their list of avatars, and spend time wandering around their parcels until we learn better. It should matter that eventually we become users almost completely without need of ever visiting the main site or any Governor Linden parcels at all. It should matter that we spend the thousands of hours beyond our first few engaged in communities with their own land and own websites and own offered experiences.
Linden Lab improving the new user experience is a good thing, but I question whether its something they should be doing at all outside of improving and offering the platform to build those experiences ontop of. I don’t see them doing that though until they decide once and for all to be a platform only company and get out of providing experiences.
Even now the frontpage of the official site is plastered with “Linden Realm” stuff. Wasn’t that supposed to just be a test for platform improvements for content creators? Linden Lab is rather bipolar when it comes to things like that. They want in-world land barons and rental sims but they want to offer Linden Homes. They want in-world commerce and malls but they want Marketplace. They want a destination guide full of MadPea games but apparently now want Linden Realms front and center.
To make it worse, every avenue of experience they swoop in on, a lot of the functionality they build their experiences with they don’t offer to content creators. Linden Homes didn’t come with improvements to third-party rentals. Marketplace didn’t come with improvements to in-world vending. Linden Realms is -supposed- to result in platform improvements for folks like MadPea, but we’ll see.
Eventually though to get rid of this problem of not being able to please everyone all the time, or rather the first few short hours new users are on a Linden website or parcel before content creators salvage them, Linden Lab is going to have to realize they need to increasingly remove themselves from the new user experience and empower content creators to provide better than they currently can.
I would add that the Community Gateways program went a long way in working to make the new user’s experience more positive. So of course the Lab did away with it…*sigh*
@Ezra It’s a pity that I had to get shot in the face (so to speak) for it.
@Fogwoman That’s one of those things that the Lab said just wasn’t working – and that’s likely because it was a measure largely in isolation, rather than a component of a strategy, IMO.
In Wow of course the players form guilds and in SL people join groups, these are ways for people who wish to associate to hang together.
There was a time when Sl residents who were sociable were awarded points for that, I have blanked on what they were called, but people of good repute garnered them, these were abandoned and although there was of course some gaming I fail to understand why after all an unpopular players attempts at gaming popularity votes was unlikely to be that successful.
There is a lot to be said for associating with people better than yourself as the Chinese classics recommend.
it certainly wins out over associating with The Sams of SL.
In the distance, you hear the sound of a drill sergeant chastising a recruit, at the sort of volume which would make Spinal Tap jealous. Oddly, the language used is literate, even using words of more than one syllable, and the vituperation is fully in accord with the principles of classical oratory. It seems to be naturally falling into iambic pentameters, and expresses a barbed sympathy with the parents who have raised such a useless low-life as the recruit has revealed himself to be. Is it possible, the sergeant suggests, that the recruit’s mother’s true son has been stolen by the fairies?
Silence falls. The echoes fade and die. Sergeant Wolf Baginski, Army Union Landing Force, appears in the blog, the expression on his muzzle suggesting that he had just been served a pint of foxed beer. “That,” he opines, “is what you get if you don’t bother with training. ” He opens one of the capacious pouches on his belt, and takes out two bottles of Nootnoops Blue. “Here…” He offers you one. “There’s things you just have to learn in places like that. Fire and movement. Not standing in the open, mouth gaping like a startled fish, when the bullets start flying.”
He has a whistle and a bottle-opener on a lanyard around his neck. He is a very pragmatic bear. “Thing is, some things you can’t learn from books. A soldier has got to be thinking of a bit more than himself. If he doesn’t care about his mates, he’s a liability. At least if your training system is any good, getting a stranger in your squad isn’t going to wreck things. There’s a sort of minimum standard of how you can expect him to act.”
He sighs, and glugs down half his bottle. “Ya know the downside of that in-your-face Drill Sergeant routine. You end up tasting the bastard’s sweat. And he probably thinks women are only good for one thing, which means he hasn’t met my wife. You know the type. Ayn Rand, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!”
“No two ways about it, team combat means you got to be part of a team. And you don’t get that by random picks.” He sketches a vague salute and strolls off in a quite military manner, whitling Lili Marlene.
Would LL have enough money to hire people to pose as ordinary residents 24/7 (of course, each individual wouldn’t be online 24/7, but there would be enough of them to always have enough online so that no single one would get swamped by civilians), but focused on being nice; both to populate welcome areas as well as running outposts, like for example places in the spirit of the Shelter and NCI? (I don’t think they should be clearly identified as LL employees, nor be allowed to speak for the Lab; but it shouldn’t need to be a secret, they just shouldn’t volunteer the information to people that aren’t aware of their employment relationship yet. They shouldn’t be spies; but they are there to be role models of how residents (or really people in general) should be, showing direct connections with LL would distance them from the average resident, but the odds are some would eventually get outed, and the harder they try to hide it the stronger the backlash will be, but if there was no effort to hide, even if there was also no effort to show, people will take it more easily, and the biggest the challenge and the more people are taunted about them not being allowed to learn the truth the harder people will work to uncover it.)
I think with enough seeds of niceness it might reach a critical mass and produce a mostly self-sustaining phenomenon…
Besides the social aspect, this would provide LL with priceless insight into the habits and activities of residents, and much more direct experience with all the obstacles residents face.
@Simeon The reputation system was more badly gamed than you might suspect. Folks who played the system straight and used it as intended tended to have low (or no) ratings. People who gamed the system, well, they could have pretty much any positive or negative rating that they pleased – they didn’t have to behave in any particular way towards others. Large numbers generally indicated how determined people were to get a large rating, and not any other measure of reputation.
“skilled and experienced content creators” i both agree and disagree with that. there is lot of really crappy stuff out there and the best i can say for that is that at least someone tried . . . (but everyone poops too so . . .)
it’s easy to think of someone that makes shoes or a scripted dance floor as being creators but i also think that people who buy content and then set it up is a great way – like a fantastic club or a well-themed sim are also true creators as well. they are creating experiences and as such, there are many great creators in SL =)
enough of my tangent! i agree that a holistic solution is needed and that s a huge challenge!
@Tigro, you asked “Would LL have enough money to hire people to pose as ordinary residents 24/7″
The Bay Area is full of grad students. Hire some. They work for peanuts and free food, if they are still anything like me when I was in my PhD program. A few could do double-duty and conduct research for dissertations on socializing in virtual worlds. One need not be a technical maven to understand what users need or where problems crop up in the user experience.
The Lab has too many technologists and not enough gamers and socializers on the staff, in my opinion. And grad students work for cheap. Hire them, Rod! What beat the heck out of shelving books in the graduate stacks for a pittance.
Should be “WOULD beat the heck out of…”
/me needed a better proofreading class in grad school.
But the idea has merit. Get some outsiders who won’t have hobby-horses, as we residents do, give them nice avatars, and have them be helpers and reporters on problems. The defunct Mentors program might have done this, but it was staffed by existing residents.
New residents, however, would come to the platform with fresh eyes and could provide LL with a lot of “in world intel.” They’d learn to sort drama from the real needs in-world. Tigro, it’s a great idea.
One of the biggest cop-outs of the game industry is the legalize, “Game Experience May Change During Online Play.” It’s the ultimate, “We don’t give a shit about whether there’s griefers, racists, chavanists, or flat-out jerks in our game.”
Great post Tateru.
In talking to long time residents and from my own experience there are 2 newbie experiences that seem to make all the difference:
1-Fall in with a small group who grow the early stages of their SL together, sharing discoveries and experiences until they are comfortable moving out on their own.
2-Learn to be tolerant and flexible. More often than not ppl end up in unexpected places and life styles after they have been in SL for a while. So often newbies think they are going to make a million or become sex gods/goddesses only to settle into a SL community that is far from their original intent; sometimes in the very places that initially scared or offended them.
The newbie experience in SL takes time. Our and LL’s job is to facilitate that.
@Simeon Beresford “In Wow of course the players form guilds and in SL people join groups, these are ways for people who wish to associate to hang together.”
In WoW there are also pickup groups where random players get thrown together for a dungeon and you’ll find plenty of Sam’s in those, you’ll also find plenty of helpful people but the random nature is an issue that can lead to negative experiences.
As for the main issue, I can still recall being horrified about what I saw and heard at Ahern, which was a welcome area, I did mention this to a Linden back then but if that was the norm, it was a very bad norm.
However managing welcome areas is difficult, it will be interesting to see how the adult hubs get on now that they are effectively a third party area, rather than an official Linden Lab area.
@Tateru “People who gamed the system”
I recall, a few years ago, seeing an advert, perhaps on one on the old third party SL market website that advertised services.
These were along the lines of:
- Purchase x amount of ranking points for $x
- Purchase x traffic for a 1 week, 1 month, 5 month duration. etc.
[...] Nino in her article User experience is problematic points out her experience and reaction to a moron in APB Reloaded. I think hers is a natural [...]
I met a woman in Sl last week. She wasn’t new, but not experienced either. Her profile said: “Back in SL to give it another chance.” I asked her why she almost dropped out. She was bored as hell, she said. We had some RL-related chit chat. I learnt that she worked in a framing shop (paintings, prints, etc.). I asked her: “Have you ever tried to build anything in SL?” She hadn’t. Although, she said, she would love to make clothes but wouldn;t know where to start. She was wearing a nice but simple dress with a very simple flexi skirt, which took her a while to find. I asked her if I could show her something. I took her to a rather remote sandbox, made a quick platform at 2600 m alt and guided her through a series of steps that let from a plywood box, via textured hollow cylinders to an almost exact copy of the skirt she was wearing. I could sense, through her typing, that she was delighted. I sent her a link to the CMFF templates, and off she went. Another Second Life saved from suicide.
On another note: I used to frequent Moose Beach Infohub a lot. If it weren’t the bored trolls that verbally terrorized the hell out of freshly arriving newbies there, it wass the lack of user experience per default: rez disabled, scripts disabled to a point that your ao will still work but That’s About It. What’s there to do in SL? It’s just like IMVU, from an infohub dweller’s point of view. It was a popular Infohub though. A lot of newbies would get through,because most of the people there were helpful. Until, one day, a Linden Concierge was attacked by a griefer. This Linden disabled scripts 100%, which meant AOs would look funny. If there’s anything more annoying than griefers, trolls and No rez, it’s your avatar walking like a spazzo. The Helpful People stayed away and now the infohub’s practically deserted, except for some newbies who stay uninformed.
Great post, Tat. And I really like Shug’s ideas. I think the whole initial experience is key and yeah, getting people to the places they might enjoy is part of it.
Standing around in gateway netherworld where denizens come to prey on the unaware is still one of the problems with the online experience. There are a lot of areas that do welcome new residents, like one of my fav hangouts, Junkyard Blues where they have an NCI entrance. They added the NCI area this year and it opens new residents up to a 12 sim Gulf coast experience with a blues club at the heart of it. it’s a good model. I wish the JY was connected to the rest of the SL universe though, instead of an island in the vastness of the grid.
Meeting people like Arduenn, instead of “Sam”, is the key. This does not have to cost LL a bundle, there are many people out there who are willing to volunteer their time to help newcomers. Something like the old Mentors program is called for…but with better training, management, and in-world supervision by LL. They could even get out of the supervision business, and let responsible Resident groups self-police, as the Community Gateways program clearly showed.
All LL has to to is facilitate, and funnel the newcomers to us. We’ll take it from there. After all, the Residents know SL a lot better than Linden Lab does.
There is another thing that Linden Lab has control over: its transparency.
If LL wasn’t so darned *secretive* they might be seen less negatively. When they do communicate with users, there are usually important gaps in the communication, giving rise to considerable speculation on our part.
It wouldn’t be hard to short-circuit the negativity and speculation with information.
[...] Linden Lab are not without their share of problems when it comes to their relationship with the user community as a whole. I’ve banged on rather a lot over time about issues originating at their end. However, it is unfair to blame Linden Lab alone for the problem. As Tateru points out, it’s hard to carry on a dialogue when the user is part of the problem. [...]