An occasional series on Second Life. Subscribe to the series rss feed
Second Life goes through a major growth crisis and its promises often fall short of expectations. Irresponsive servers, crashing software clients, and a lack of communication tools might significantly slow its adoption by ordinary users. These are the tentative findings of an experiment conducted by the students enrolled in COM 435, Emerging Communication Technologies at Purdue University last semeste (Spring, 2007). While they are still sorting their reactions and conclusions to the medium, which I am listing below, the first results of the experiment, a soccer tournament in Second Life involving 8 teams of 15 players each, indicated that a lot more should be done in terms of organization and communication tools.
The first and most important conclusion is that the Second Life client is an abysmal failure. 16% of the students failed to install it on their home computers. And of those who installed it, 40% could not use it. Other issues involved severe bandwidth limitations. When we tried to play a soccer game with about 100 of people in attendance the interaction ground to a standstill. Avatars became incontrollable, animations froze, and people got kicked out of the game.
Communication within or to a large group is very difficult. The text messaging system is really made for one-to-one interaction. The orientation island is rather disorienting and the controls mistifying.
My conclusion is that Second Life will succeed, in its current format, only if it focuses on the hobbyist, afficionado crowd. This is not (or at least, not yet) and environment for “the rest of us.”
Evaluation Papers
Matt Campbell
Elizabeth Connor
Barbara Ault
Paul Dobrzynski
Genevieve Elliott
Jeremiah Julian
Stepahanie Colbert