I remember when I first got into Linden Labs' popular virtual world Second Life. It was hard, but I had a meeting to join so I just kept going. But how does the newbie experience look now..?
I created a new avatar with my twitter name at Second Life. I
decided to write down my experiences and list how a first time user
may experience the first login and things after that. I might not
have noticed all the problems since I have used Second Life and
derivatives already for some years so I hardly count as a newbie.
Nevertheless, I have worked as a member of a user interface
research team and have experience how people act in many
situations.
sign up went without big problems, again it was hard to choose a
suitable last name from the list. Rumour tells that Linden Lab is
going to allow use of ones real name this year. Lets see if there
is any truth in that.
After login with my Second Life viewer, I got a tutorial window
showing basic keys and information how to start.The screen looks
like a mess with all the small windows around, which gets me a bit
stressed.
Last item in the mini tutorial helped me to start the avatar
appearance editor, which is quite a thingie to play with. I could
not change the hair color a bit. As I have previous experience I
could tell that my Avatar was not wearing standard hair and thus
the appearance tools did not work well. A problem identified.
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Now get ready to meet Snowcrashme Hawksby:I have to
admit, it was fun - again! The result.. maybe I need some expert
help.
I made the usual tweaks - turned up the cache size and network
bandwidth, graphics to highest quality and 4x antialiasing to make
things look smooth. My laptop started to whistle to keep itself
cool...
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While walking around, the walk style is odd, legs move really
fast which looks unnatural. Maybe I'd bore to death with a slower
pace? I clicked a poster at the starter island and got a teleport
link to Zebrasil Infohub. There I found out that I can almost sit
by pressing "C" on my keyboard, and start flying by pressing "E".
Did not know that before, honestly. I must have made an impression
to an avatar lady nearby - or not - she was editing her
appearance.
I ended up flying around pointlessly looking over seemingly
abandoned land with lots of buildings but no-one else around. After
a while I quit. Not a good experience.
However, the next day brought me a nice surprise on my email
box. I got an email from Second Life offering me many helpful links
and resources to help me modify my avatar. As a Newbie, that would
have got me back to Second Life to give it another go!
My opinion is that Second Life is too complex and hard to grasp
in a few moments. Today I received even another email explaining
about different entertaining destinations at Second Life. Good Work
Linden Labs!
In the next articles I am going to find out how the user
experience feels like when joining some popular Opensim based
grids. Count in at least ReactionGrid, OSGrid and OpenLife. I will tag the articles with
FirstExperience -tag so please find that tag at the end of
this post and click it after a while to find out more. You can also
follow
me at Twitter so you will be notified as soon as articles get
published at Maxping.
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