Nick Wilson at Metaversed:
Virtual worlds are complicated. Prohibitively complicated. The initial learning curve is so great in Second Life for example, that most people don't stay. It's just too hard.
I don't want to sound like an elitist here, but the story of learning process too hard and long is plain wrong. I was wondering why I hear that over and over again before I became a mentor. Then, when I got back to the orientation and help islands I was amazed by the state of mind of some noobs.
I am not talking about just a couple of them, it's a large percent of them. And it's not about building, scripting and other "advanced" skills. We are talking about basics of use of the virtual environment. And let's have in mind that each of newcomers have basic skills of (non-SL) use of computer and internet. They had to find secondlife.com in their browsers and fill in the (not quite short) registration form.
So… do you know how many people have problems to get out of help island? For those of you who forgot those moments… help island is the one where you teleport from orientation island (where you do the tutorial). That means you already teleported once. You spend some time there, get used to the world, pick some freebies, make some appearance. It has a panel which teleports you to the infohub on the mainland. And that panel has big green rotating EXIT sign. It screams so one can see it from almost any point of the island. When clicked, panel gives you a notecard and a landmark. So what's the problem?
Or take the other from the list of most popular noob questions: "How do I find [insert something here]?" When one starts new piece of software for the first time, the common thing to do is to check the interface. Just take a glimpse through the menus and buttons. Or am I freaking software usage genius because of doing that? Especially if there is a row of always-on-the-screen blue buttons. If they are so accessible, they might be useful. And the fifth of them says search. What could that be? Search is not something introduced with second life, it is a regular part of both the internet and your desktop.
I know that we all have our moments of not seeing the obvious, but these are not the rare cases. Spend one hour mentoring and you will have at least one of each questions. So many times I was tempted not to answer those. If they are so stupid they better not go to the mainland. Let's live in a smaller but happier community. But, on the other hand, I tend not to be a fascist and answer silently sighing behind my monitor.
It is not about simplicity. Most of the time, people are lazy to read and even more lazy to think. They want othersto answer questions they should find answers themselves. They want to be taken by the hand and guided. They want to enjoy their idiocy. And sometimes we help them. We answer their wishes. We partner them in their crime against themselves.
I am not saying that initiation process cannot be better. There is a lot of space for improvements, but doing that with the main idea of making things simpler will probably be a bad favour for both the community and the platform.
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