I can't see any point in having a second life that is less interesting than my first.
That's what everyone building a virtual world has to think about: how to make the new world more appealing than the world customers already know. Most new online worlds become appealing by being more inviting communities than the generality of each user's haphazard subset of real-world meatspace. I'm enjoying Facebook much better than I expected to, because it is, well, filled mostly with my friends. I was surprised to see that the author's comments in the submitted blog post were largely about the bandwidth limitations on Second Life's graphical representation of its virtual world shown to users, rather than about the community formed there. If people like a community well enough, they will put up with a pure text interface--as I have seen in my own experience.
So the blogger's noticing that Second Life's owners would rather make money with willing users who deal with the current interface than spend a lot of money to upgrade the interface makes sense. But I'm not sure that I can agree that that is a "failure," unless the purely technical exploit of worldwide, interactive, real-time virtual reality would build some new kind of more appealing community.
Yes, I admit that despite having read the article before commenting, I nonetheless decided to reply to what I thought the article should have been about rather than what it was about.
Because really, who wants to pay real money to allow a bunch of polygons to get a new hat and a lapdance from a robot?
That's what everyone building a virtual world has to think about: how to make the new world more appealing than the world customers already know. Most new online worlds become appealing by being more inviting communities than the generality of each user's haphazard subset of real-world meatspace. I'm enjoying Facebook much better than I expected to, because it is, well, filled mostly with my friends. I was surprised to see that the author's comments in the submitted blog post were largely about the bandwidth limitations on Second Life's graphical representation of its virtual world shown to users, rather than about the community formed there. If people like a community well enough, they will put up with a pure text interface--as I have seen in my own experience.
So the blogger's noticing that Second Life's owners would rather make money with willing users who deal with the current interface than spend a lot of money to upgrade the interface makes sense. But I'm not sure that I can agree that that is a "failure," unless the purely technical exploit of worldwide, interactive, real-time virtual reality would build some new kind of more appealing community.