Compare that with Twitter, Facebook, et al. If there’s any way that they interact, I’m not aware of it.

Now I realise that the best thing to do is to join groups which offer friendship and support to newbies, and enhance their experience. I joined the New Citizens Incorporated (NCI) group (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/New_Citizens_Incorporated) rather later than I should have, but am playing catch up with the great (free classes) and the group chat helps you find support and ask questions. I first realised that SL is utterly gobsmackingly wondrous when I joined the Not Possible in Real Life Group (just take a look at Bettina Tizzy’s blog http://npirl.blogspot.com/) and went on some of the “field trips”. The Second Life Things to Do group (http://www.slthingstodo.com/main/) also has plenty of activities and the blog links to some of the best places in SL.

Reading books about the history and culture of Second Life also made me appreciate my experiences more – I recommend James Wagner Au’s “The Making of Second Life” and Tim Guest’s “Second Lives”.

Now I have interesting friends from around the world, love exploring new sims, am passionate about virtual fashion, work on a SL magazine, am learning photography, and am planning to bring my real world creative writing class into SL. Really I’m having a blast.

If you (or any other lost soul reading this) needs a friend or a guide I’d be most happy to chat to you and lend a hand.

I’m also glad that despite your newly-found enthusiasm you have pin-pointed one of SL’s major problems, and criticised it as it deserved: objectively. I’m talking to the dreadful “first hour experience”. If all new users could get a grand tour like you did, they would immediately understand the benefits of Second Life. It completely changes the expectations — instead of struggling with the klunky, unfriendly interface, hitting at walls, and finding empty spaces all over the grid, and logging off in despair because they couldn’t find anything worth seeing, they might also give Second Life a second chance like you did. It’s incredible that every month close to half a million of new users register for Second Life. Almost none stay; I think that the retention rate is at its lowest right now, even though the number of new sign-ons has remained constant since 2006, and SL grows (even if not exponentially!) in all areas: economy, landmass, usage [stickiness], VoIP minutes, and so on. The users that remain are more active than ever before. But the new users… give up too quickly.

LL’s CEO is quite aware of these issues, as you said. He worries about it since the very first day in office. Ultimately the challenge for Second Life will be how to give everybody a great first-hour-experience so that its effective population grows again as it did back in 2006. If not, SL will continue to grow, of course, just immensely slowly, and it will attract new users by word-of-mouth and a lot of hand-holding.

In my not-so-humble opinion, I think that dealing with the first-hour-experience will come less from Linden Lab and much more from their partners and the thousands upon thousands of companies, organisations, and universities, who know how to bring their own clients/colleagues/partners/students/fellows into SL and give them a pleasant experience right from the start.

The good news is that this is already happening.

Chris, if you were my friend, that would have been your first half hour in SL. Might have been different, might not have.

Also, I intentionally wrote “All Growed Up” in homage to the movie Swingers, for those of you who fancy me ignorant! :)

Hmmfff….

Good to see you giving it a second chance. I’ll have to catch the replay interview!!

I really wish there was a way to sign up for a sort of Big Brothers/Big Sisters program or specifically put in a request for a mentor to contact you; currently, it’s kinda luck of the draw about whether the OI/HI where you appeared happened to have enough volunteer support for you when you arrived in-world. I’d prefer to do the one-on-one or small-group buddying style to help ‘em get up and running in a direction they’ll find fun, but that usually isn’t how it tends to work out. More commonly, I find myself alone and swamped w/ multi-lingual panicked requests for help figuring out the interface and how to change clothes, LOL.

After “Hi, do I really have to wear this or can I change my clothes?” the most frequent question I get is “OK, now what should I do?” which is always the most interesting question. SL really is so incredibly open-ended that I think it takes folks a bit to grasp that. I like to chat w/ them and find out what their interests and personal styles are to point ‘em in the best direction for cool places, hot designers, fun activities, and intriguing builds to explore. I also recommend they friend me to a) learn how to use that feature to build their own networks, b) have easy access to a mentor to help if they get stuck/lost/confused, and c) have a connection to someone when they enter the wide-open world of SL; psychologically, I think it just helps.

Admittedly as early as 2006 I entered Orientation Island during a lunch break on the office PC (at home I still had Win98SE), and there was absolutely nothing to offer someone new and disoriented. The noncompatible graphics card didn’t help, but if someone walked up to me to offer one-on-one help I may have participated sooner.

I think I joined last year when the time was right. I had not been involved in a virtual community for two years and was eager to learn building and return to creating things. I had many friends from VRML worlds who were well established in SL and eager to show me the ways of things, one even a mentor. I quickly became acquainted with the grid’s many subcultures, became involved in community and cultural activities, and explored islands and the mainland for the first month or two before buying my first property.

I think everybody should do the exploration thing. At first I used Places search and input corporate and geographical names. Then when I learned how to better read the world map I’d visit interesting island configurations, then navigate mainland. Next week marks living on my main parcel right beside a cultural community on the mainland I first happened on at random during those early times (It’s easy to remember the date because I arrived the day before adfarms came down, knowing I could potentially see the sunrise from my front lawn from October 1 onward).

I think an important factor is whether you want to do anything versus coming in and expecting it to be like TV. “Okay, now amuse me,” is not the mindset to have when entering an interactive environment. While much of Second Life is amusing and entertaining, you need to supply the incentive for these to reveal themselves.

I hope you and others can stop by Carmina to get an understanding of how immersive games can play a role in discovering the best that SL has to offer.

Let me say up front that SL will not be for everyone – I love it yet my wife tried it and thought “Meh” and left. The hardware needs and the steep, steep learning curve are more than enough to put off casual passers-by, but even so a surprising amount of them do stay so there must be something in it.

I don’t see the technical & learning curve issues getting better anytime soon, either – they were there when I started in Nov 06 and they were there when it was beta in 03 so I don’t see why they won’t be with us for some time to come. Having said that, it’s not rocket surgery either – yes the controls can be awkward, but they still work better than some FPS games I’ve played in the last year.

No, what I think puts people off is a combination of concept and something you put your finger on (and I’ve ranted about many times over the years and covered on my blog as recently as this week), loneliness.

Loneliness is easier than concept to explain so I’ll start there. SL is big, really big (I’ll avoid slipping into a Douglas Adams impression) but the number of people online at anyone time isn’t. Well it is – 70,000 people is not small change – but in terms of entering the world and expecting it to be as populated as a real world city, well it never happens. There are places where people congregate and it is to these places that newbies need to head, but not all such places are equal and some won’t help a confused newbie become an addicted oldbie. Still, there are dedicated centres that help, teach and develop newbies and give them their first taste of friendship and community in SL. I only wish I’d have known about them when I started as it would have save many weeks of wandering around, feeling lonely and simply ‘not getting it’.

Now, by concept I mean the age old question we SLers get asked (and have asked ourselves more than once) “What is SL for? What do I do there?” In some ways this is tied into loneliness. In real life, if you move to a strange, new city where you know no one then one of the ways you start building contacts by joining hobby groups to meet like minded folk. Second Life is no different. My advice to newbies is to go and grab SL with both hands – if you want to build something, join one of the hundreds of free classes and build. Whatever you want to do, there are people in SL doing it or wanting to do it with you.

A common comment I get as an SLer from non-SLers is that they have enough fun in their first life and therefore don’t need a second one. My simple answer to this is that my SL is not a replacement for my first one (I have a family, friends, job, mortgage, social life and hobbies) but rather just another aspect of it. SL to me is just another hobby – an amazing hobby that allows me tremendous creative freedom and has allowed me to make some brilliant friends, but a hobby nonetheless. It’s fun and that’s how I will always strive to enjoy it.

Oh, and before I go, I’d like to just mention the other aspect of SL that captures people attention and colours their perceptions: sex. Yes people come into SL to have sex with other people (although, technically it’s not sex is it. I’m fairly sure you two people in the same room at the same time for that). Why people are surprised is beyond me, people have been using every new technology to fornicate since the invention of cave paintings. But it would be wrong to think that a rampant ball of sex awaits around every corner waiting to pounce upon newbies and have its wicked way with them. I’ve had more propositions in RL over the last three years than I have in SL and in both the easiest way to avoid being ‘sexed’ is simply not do it (sigh, I know you’ll be heartbroken ladies, but I’m taken in RL).

So, there you go – my guide to SL. Give it a go, join a good newbie-helping group, find something you want to do and go for it. And don’t believe everything you read in the papers. That last one is good for non-SL stories too.

Yours,
HeadBurro Antfarm.
Currently having a great time in Steelhead, a steampunk style Oregon town set in the 1880s.
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People often think that SL is just a chatroom with no “point”, but it’s so much more. I went through a period of just wandering, then played games, then e-fell in love, discovered a community, worked in SL, explored building and scripts, became an SL fashionista, met IRL some of my SL friends, opened up a little SL business, created my own SL clothes on photoshop, explored gorgeous sims….so many things…so many memories.