Remember that painfully funny YouTube video of Second Life's first-time user experience? I was thinking about it recently while playing Scavengers, the fun new sandbox/multiplayer combat game with a senior designer who's a former Linden. This is what Scavenger's first-time user experience looks like — watch above. Because while it's in a very different genre from an open platform virtual world, there's some key learnings to draw from it:
- For one thing, it's fun — at least as much fun as a tutorial can be.
- It gradually introduces important elements of the user experience to the player by presenting them as little mini-games/quests.
- It's immersive: The voice acting, the music, even the heads-up display itself, create a mood, get you involved in and curious about the world, even as you're learning how to navigate the user experience.
And while Scavengers has one of the better game tutorials I've played in quite awhile, it's pretty typical to how AAA game developers introduce players into their world: With fun, mini-quests, and immersion.
Why?
Because game devs know that most players will decide within their first 5-10 minutes of gameplay whether they want to play further. (And that's for a free-to-play game; woe be the game developer of a premium title costing some $60 which has a bad first-time user experience — player outrage online will be volcanic!)
Second Life is hardly the only virtual world to fall far short by comparison, but it's a uniquely notorious case. While virtual worlds are a kind of game-type experience, there's too much of a cultural instinct among virtual world devs to just throw the whole platform at users from the start, without guardrails or well, much fun. And paradoxically, by trying to present as open a platform as possible to new users, they insure that most of those users will never return.
The good news for virtual world developers? If they're willing to treat their platform like a game — at least long enough to draw new users in — it's a solved problem with hundreds of examples to learn from.
Update, July 15: Ex-Linden Yoz makes some very good points on this point in Twitter (below) — my response below. I'd rather give the 80-90% of new users who sign up looking for a social game (at first) a much better first time experience than presenting a fully open neutral platform that only appeals to (quite literally, judging by retention rates) about .01% of them.
FFS JAMES, YOU KNOW WHY NOT.
Games:
* few, well-defined interaction & reward mechanics
* few controls
* most new players come in with a solid set of expectations
* rapid reward
* all of the above is brutally whittled down in advance— Yoz Grahame (@yoz) July 14, 2021
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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