Group items tagged

benchmark

this post is her detailed look at keeping new male residents engaged in SL

Right, where was I? Oh yeah, the learning curve. I’m supposed to be telling you about “The lack of encouragement for new male residents to stay in Second Life”, but since I’m, err, female — does a quick check, right, okay, definitely female — I decided to conduct an Extremely Unscientific Survey among male residents to see what they had to say. 16 male residents responded, and the general consensus is that… [drum roll] … friends are generally the greatest form of encouragement for new male residents to stay in SL. “I came and went my first year. I hung around when I finally started making some friends and started going places and doing things with them,” says Dyami Jameson.

“I think men in Second Life are more motivated by ‘goals’ and scoring systems, which makes SL less attractive to them than women, who are more attracted to the social aspect of the metaverse,” comments Prad Prathivi. “Guys are naturally competitive and aim to lead the pack, which is harder and less obvious to achieve in SL.”

Second Life continues to expand each and every day. New Residents are joining, artists are creating amazing content, new businesses are springing up, big companies are entering for the first time, educational institutions are building virtual universities… and the list goes on. Everyday I learn of something new, something bold, something you’ve created.

Second Life offers something no ones else does - an astoundingly rich array of user-created content and a large, diverse and ever-expanding virtual economy.

The content and economy reflect the diversity of the Resident population. Your creativity covers 1.5 billion meters of space that’s taken more than 500 million hours over the past five years to assemble. It’s a mammoth undertaking.

"The virtual world provides the body," said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente.

"We have a pretty fully functioning animal brain right now and we are hooking it up to the different virtual worlds,"

On the research side, said Dr Goertzel, virtual worlds also solved the problem of giving an AI a relatively unsophisticated environment in which it could live and learn.

we think 60% of our business in the next year will be in the collaboration space

we learned that there’s a 90% dropout rate at the welcome island

One of my challenges with talking about SL to colleagues is in explaining its value in terms of the traditional work environment - it seems like most of the online meetings and conferences I attend in SL are “about SL” - do you know what I mean - it can be elusive. smoke and mirror stuff. One interesting thing about people’s conceptions of what is possible in sl - is that sl can be used as some magic pill that will transform the structure of community/learning/teaching…. I think that’s interesting as my experience of SL so far is that it can accentuate RL experiences and emotions. Most students I kow are stressed about school - so why add more stress in a virtual environ! This is our challenge - how to make the experiences new…