Our friends at Not Possible in Real Life have posted 2 brilliant overviews meant to guide newcomers to virtual worlds, Second Life in particular, and it’s a combination of almost tactical advice but also opens up the much larger question – what do you want to DO?

It’s my personality type – I just don’t LIKE being told what to do – to me, a well-designed GAME is one where there’s enough flexibility to chart your own path, which is why simulator games like SimCity and broader strategy games like Civilization always appealed to me. You have CHOICE, and those choices are guided by the code towards giving feedback and rewards based on those choices.

Virtual worlds are also governed by code, and while the code can inform choice, some of the more profound issues that are emerging in virtual worlds are at the level of policy: economic, governance, identity, trust, and intellectual property. Because many virtual worlds are being constructed as platforms on which their users can perform choice, the balance between avatar rights and the rights of the platform providers will increasingly be fraught with legal, political and social consequences. As more users migrate to virtual worlds, they will expect and deserve rights much as migrant to new countries do.

The Challenge for Designers
The challenge for designers of virtual worlds is multi-layered. Worlds can be constructed to offer a combination of advantages based on technical, social, economic, or personal rewards. Many 3D worlds bypass the technical challenges of being true 3D environments – you can move forward, back, up and down, but you can’t rotate around – 3D, but with a flat view plane. Instead, they focus on their economic model and creating bridges to Web services and Web sites – Twinity comes to mind. Others focus on the technical platform, building a virtue out of interoperability or open source architectures. Others are primarily social, and with the explosion of interest in “Web 2.0″ we can expect a lot of venture funding to flow into social worls that lift off the Facebook/mySpace phenomenon in the year ahead (in many cases simple for the sake of funding, to my mind – Kaneva, for example, leaves me cold and the novelty of chatting with people in a virtual club wears off quickly). VLES is a better example mainly because its driven by a solid stream of published content.

The challenge is to create the right balance of features to appeal to users and to keep them. Game platforms have history and academic study on their side. The four “gamer types” has become standard issue methodology for game design – combine activities, quests and rewards based on the needing to please the social gamer, explorer, etc. But games have the advantage of having a sense of progression – the challenge with open worlds such as Second Life is there’s no specific goal.

For the Second Life Newbie
I love this quote from NIPRL:

There is very little about Second Life that truly parallels Real Life. Just as a day in Second Life is only four hours long, so goes the speed, the immediacy with which things take place once you become an active participant. It is also so much easier to expose yourself to new information. Fact is, Second Life is a library, a school, a conversation… on steroids.

Speaking for myself, nearly every sentence I uttered in my first few weeks in the metaverse ended with a question mark. You aren’t alone in worrying that you don’t have enough time in your Real Life, let alone a Second Life. I also worried that it was unproductive and possibly not the wave of the future that the media kept reporting on. I was quite frustrated with the technical glitches I was experiencing, too.

The challenge with Second Life, and the reason that I believe a lot of the virtual world development in the coming year will be either highly focused or absurdly broad, is that the choices are daunting. The lack of structure is likely one of the top reasons for newbie attrition in the first 90 days (only 10% remain). People like to know where they’re going, to know what they SHOULD do. In my experience, those who stay in Second Life do so for one of two reasons: they’re either there for a very specific reason or with a specific motivation (for example, to hang around with a specific group of people or to perform a specific business task) OR, they’re like strangers to a new city who avoid guided tours like the kiss of death and prefer to just WANDER AROUND.

Imagine going to a large city – New York, say. Why is Second Life any different? You can take the quick tours and get a skimming sense of what the city’s really like, or you can get down in the street, talk to people, explore, and find the little places off the beaten track where you might meet people with diverse interests whose experience and insight can benefit you, illuminate, inspire, captivate, perplex.

But first, a few of my own top picks lifting off the NIPRL list:

1. Camera control rules! I really really didn’t understand this, and forget about the fact that it made building impossibly painful (trying to walk around to see if prims were aligned was terrible!), it also meant that whenever I landed in a new place I’d end up wandering and flying around trying to figure out what there was to see. Now – for newbies, have you ever noticed someone standing at the entrance to a store, mall, or area in SL? They are NOT newbies and they are NOT stuck. In fact, they’re using their cameras to roam every square inch of the store or sim, and they’re very likely even buying stuff from vendors way up there on the third floor. The combination of the CTRL ALT and scroll button on the mouse is the secret to effective building and exploration.

2. Manage your inventory! PLEASE! There are dozens of tips on this, Torley has a good video on the topic. Think of it like organizing your folders in your Documents folder on your computer – keep it organized, it is VERY easy to lose track of stuff in the depths of inventory hell. Most people run around with thousands of items in their inventory – I have 14,000 items, including dozens of homes, 100s of pieces of furniture, and countless clothing – and I don’t know about you, but my mind can’t keep track of that many items let alone if they’re all poorly named and dumped in the wrong folders. AND MISSING HINT #11 – organizing your inventory means moving objects OUT of your OBJECTS folder to somewhere more meaningful. When you buy an item in a store it is often boxed – when you open the box it moves the contents into a folder. But the box will often remain as a copy in your object folder – GET IT OUT OF THERE!

3 Take a tour before you log on NPIRL is one of the greatest sources if one of your real interests is to just wander – check out the places they highlight. Talk to some people there – a quick comment “nice build”, a question or two “I love the clothes you dont know where I can get some like that”…whatever. But also, I highly recommend checking out FLICKR – pictures tell 1,000 words and there’s thousands of photos from SL on Flickr. I can plan an evening in SL just by checking out a few of the more appealing shots on FLICKR and tracking down the locations.

The Deeper Question – What do you like to do?
In my first week in SL I wasn’t shy about asking lots of questions, but many of my questions ended with a question back: what do you like to do?

That’s the biggest puzzler of them all. Because for most of us, the range of things we like to do becomes constrained by time, resources, and access. I LIKE to travel to Paris and visit the Louvre, but I can’t do that every day. So instead, I’ll say “I like to read and travel”. When confronted with the very open-ended question of what I like to do, when every option imaginable is open, I was actually dumb-struck.

NPIRL commented in their follow-up post that there are two ways to explore SL – immersion and augmentation.

Augment your Life
If you want to build off of a real world interests, profession, or hobby then you may be looking for an augmentation experience. Ask yourself:
- What do I like to read about?
- What are my hobbies? What hobbies do I wish I had?
- If I could take a course on anything what would it be on?
- If a bunch of people met in my neighbourhood over coffee to talk about a topic of interest to me, what would they talk about?
- If I could make something, craft something, paint or build something – what would I build?

Use the search function – key in weather, space, Paris, books, design, basket weaving – and don’t just check the locations that pop up, also check the groups. There’s likely a group you can join on whatever topic you’re interested in. Then, don’t be shy – post a quick IM to the group or find the Owner in the group listing and send them a quick and brief message – “Sorry to bother, new here, where’s the best place to go for basketweavers?”

Immerse Yourself
Immersion is often the main reason people come to SL. Some come for a pure business purposes or for a specific event or activity, and there’s a parallel universe of companies and groups who rarely leave a specific area of SL – they’re there for a specific reason, with a specific group of people. The line blurs however – because in my experience, some people can arrive in SL and immerse themselves in a specific world or role, only to find that later their real world interests and persona starts to play a more dominant part in their SL experience (thus all the cautions about choosing a good name…you may THINK you will always want to be known as “BigDaddyJohn” but chances are who you “play” in SL will become more nuanced over time.

Same rules apply, however to Immersion as Augmentation, except in this case social settings often play a bigger role. Clubs, hangout areas, social settings within specific themes are designed to let people meet each other and interact within specific immersion worlds. Immersion also includes games and roleplaying – entire chains of islands can be devoted to Gor, Star Wars or furrydom.

As NPIRL pointed out, however – don’t be thrown off by what often seems like less social interaction than you’d expect. It’s NOT like going to a party where there’s a hubub of chatter…even at live events or seminars, some of the most interesting stuff is happening in private chat. There may be 20 people in a club and no one says anything for 40 minutes – more than likely, they’re chatting with people all over SL, with each other, or in many cases are actually running SL in the background while they do “RL stuff”.

I Didn’t KNOW I’d Like to Do That
But one of the strangest and jarring things about SL is the powerful effect of discovering things that you had NO idea you were interested in exploring. SL makes things not possible in real life possible – but where it gets tricky and often disconcerting to people, is that while doing the impossible the emotional impact can be very real. As virtual worlds grow, cater to different tastes and offer different combinations of features, more and more people will migrate to them, or at least spend more and more time there – and as they do, they’ll discover through the exploration of the impossible that the perceived limitations to the real are often just that – perceived.

By pushing the boundaries of how we think and perceive through the act of creating and exploring the virtual, we can open up new emotional, spiritual, creative and personal vistas and a new awareness that “what I like to do” may have been limited by that little nagging voice that said “you can’t do that”……

You can.