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Originally Posted by Isablan Neva  I get that  |
In that case - my bad, sorry.
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Originally Posted by Isablan Neva I still think it's a hollow argument that amounts to looking at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and saying that it could have been so much better if they had better brushes, higher quality paints and a more stable surface to work with. To be honest, having a native animation editor would be great, but at the expense of what? We can't even get a scalable database....
You make your art with the tools you have on hand. Just being able to use Maya is no guarantee that you are going to do something breathtaking with it. SL is more than just content creation, the content is just the window dressing to keep things interesting while people go about their second lives interacting with each other in every way imaginable. It can be entertaining when a guy in a pirate outfit zooms past you on a flying toilet, but isn't really hilarious unless you've got a couple of friends nearby to share the moment with and a forum full of friends who are dying to see the pictures. Content has no soul or warmth, it's just stuff. "Perfect" content isn't going to make anybody want to say in SL, the people they meet are what makes them want to stay. Greenies could drop off the map tomorrow and no one would notice or care as long their friends are still here. |
I love the line I bolded above.
I don't think any one thing "makes"
SL. I think its a combination of factors, and we all "weight" those factors differently. I take your point about the flying toilet not being anywhere near as much fun without the sharing with others. But I'd contend that you don't need
SL to have that sharing, if sharing is all that matters it could possibly be achieved in an old-style MUD. If you don't believe me, check out Charlemagne's signature from SecondSurvivor:
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Charlemagne Allen: /waves
Zorena Deckard plucks
Charlemagne Allen: eek
Charlemagne Allen: /hisses angrily and lands on rafter
Zorena Deckard shoots you down with a poodle
Charlemagne Allen: tragic string theme as beautiful thing of nature falls down and makes a quiet, wonderfully melodious hoot as it expires all over zorena's floor
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It makes me smile every time I see it, and its all text, not a single textured polygon in sight.
As to people staying in
SL, my suspicion is that content is at least as important as friendships. I'd contend that its the lack of things to *do* (as opposed to *look at* - see Amelia's post above) that leads to a significant fraction of
SL's horrendous retention figures. As evidence, I'd offer the success of WoW relative to
SL. That said, I don't really care if
SL retains people or not (beyond the need for LL to remain profitable enough to survive) - I'm a card-carrying marginal-misfit, and proud of it!
Analogies are always fraught with danger. What if Michelangelo had been denied the uses of brushes entirely in his work on the Sistine Chapel, and had to finger-paint instead?
No one will agree on what tools/features are/are-not vital for content creation for
SL. Some will argue that skeletal animation (taking just one example) is the equivalent of Michelangelo's brushes, others that it represents no more than higher-quality paints.