Second Life: The first hour and beyond

Second Life has a certain notoriety for the first six-to-ten hours of the user-experience being an uphill battle. We wonder, in fact, if virtual environments like Second Life can even make do with a conventional tutorial at all. In an MMOG, at least, all you have to do is teach the user how to play the game.

Second Life, on the other hand, is more like being dropped off in a remote, busy community. You're not trying to level up – there's no experience-points and no levels; no game-trappings at all. You're trying to meet compatible people, go shopping, explore, see the sights, make money, start up a business, find educational opportunities, or learn the language.

Trying to cram that into a tutorial is like trying to produce a short accessible tutorial for Osaka, or Budapest.

And that's really the problem here. You can polish up the first hour, on basic movement, communication and mechanics until it gleams with a lustrous sheen, at which point your users are still strangers in a strange land, and run smack up against the harsh realities of the second hour. Then the third.

It's trendy to talk about the grammar of user-interaction in terms of verbs and nouns. That works for Web-sites and for most MMOGs, but we're way beyond that here. New users dealing in sentences. It's not just "shop", "explore", "play", "work", "learn" – those verbs don't work once you get past the Web-site.

As soon as users finish dealing with the very basics (and often before they have), they have far more complex interests than that. How does the economy work? How does land work? How do I make money? How do I get a job? Where do people like to hang out? What does [company] do in Second Life? How do I start my own business? What's the difference between buying and renting? Why is my system performance poor? What sorts of things can I make? What sort of government does Second Life have?

And the complexity goes up from there. Those are fairly typical first and second hour questions. If you're a Second Life user, you've come across far more complex and involved questions than these from new users, many of the answers to which engender many, many more questions.

The odds of the average new user getting the answers to these questions is fairly low, largely hinging on how likely they are to bump into the right person at the right time. How the heck do you, as a virtual environment operator, even begin to address this in any kind of hands-off or automated way? We don't really think you can.

That's not to say that the problem is insoluble. The Web flopped in the mainstream for years for similar reasons (some say it's still a mainstream flop). The Web took a long time just getting to the verb-and-noun stages of user-interaction. Second Life is streets beyond that, and to crack this nut is going to require that rarest of business commodities: genuine innovation.