Wagner James Au / New World Notes

"What if Linden Lab marketed Second Life as an ante-litteram Minecraft instead?", asks reader Pulsar, in a post about the wrong Metaverse lessons being learned from SL. By "ante-litteram", Pulsar means "ahead of one’s time", but that's a cooler way of saying that. Pulsar proceeds to explore a re-marketing of SL as a creative platform:

Sure, SL "prims" are more complex than Minecraft cubes, but also more powerful. However [Second Life's technical/UI problems] they were fun. Linden Lab, instead of improving it and making it more accessible, dropped the creative fun to Blender, making it even less accessible to many.

A prim-centric promotional campaign for Second Life could be linked to some kind of prim collection game mechanic, Pulsar goes on, but that's not necessary:

You don't even need game mechanics to get cubes, prims or pieces to be successful, Kerbal Space Program doesn't too: you can unlock the pieces, but you also have a sandbox mode if you prefer that. And despite being a single player game from 2011, people keep creating and even their subreddit is many times more active with all that creativity than the SL one.

If you remember, the "Glytches" catching game was fun and for a while it became somewhat popular. It was all over around the grid, you could play it in the assigned places, or ignore it and continue to do what you always did in SL. However, unlike creative games such as Minecraft, action games become repetitive quickly and Linden Lab didn't expand it well enough to keep it interesting and rewarding for long (not easy). Something more creative (and still easily accessible) would last longer, then you will have more variety etc (but also a different user-base).

I mean, dancing around a fire and coupling is pretty popular in the human species since forever and surely these things catch some attention; but Minecraft and Roblox didn't resort to that to become… vastly more successful than Second Life.

I didn't know just how huge Kerbal's community around user-generation is, but yes, its subreddit has 1.4 million subscribers!

Anyway, Pulsar's proposal sounds generally right. I might even go so far as launch a prim-only grid called, say, Prim World. Add some fun game mechanics where every week, users win L$ based on creating the highest/largest build, builds with the best ratings, and so on. Second Life could probably do this for a few million dollars. Launched properly, I bet it would get millions of users in the first year of launch. What do you think?

Pictured: User-made Minecraft mining in SL. See also: "Why Second Life's Prim-Based Era Was Its Golden Age Of Creation".