Wagner James Au / New World Notes

One fun thing about writing about Second Life for The Atlantic was going through a rigorous fact-checking process. Take this passage:

The utopian paradox even extends into how Second Life was developed by employees at Linden Lab. Under the idealistic direction of Rosedale and his CTO Cory Ondrejka, the startup operated with a no-managers, "choose your own work" policy, cheekily dubbed the Tao of Linden. Their creativity thus unleashed, Linden developers wound up adding a farrago of persnickety features to the product with little unifying direction that might create a seamless, user-friendly experience. To this day, the Second Life application resembles an MMO game welded to a 3D graphics editor duct-taped to a social network crammed into an ancient television remote with infinite buttons.

But the program’s very complexity became a kind of initiation rite. Some 99 percent of new users would quit, overwhelmed and aggravated, usually within their first hour in the virtual world. Those who did stay long enough to learn how to use the software—usually guided by a patient “oldie” community member—found themselves welcomed into a rare, exclusive club.

The Atlantic's fact checker highlighted the passage in bold and asked me to demonstrate that the SL viewer really was that complicated. So I actually launched the program, and tallied up the default onscreen UI options:

"There's 17 onscreen buttons plus a browser bar, plus 7 pulldown menus, each with 11-19 options, many of which open up multiple sub-options and sub-sub-options," I reported back. "For instance, if you want to remove an article of clothing, you need to select the Avatar menu, pull it down to Take Off, then choose among four sub-options with a total of 30 sub-suboptions."

So the fact checker let the passage stand.

And that's not even getting into the fact that most oldbie Second Life users actually use a third party viewer, and tend to tell new users to stop using the official (and complex) software, and instead use an even more complex non-official program created on a non-profit basis by a community of volunteer devs. (But why make the fact checker's job even harder?) 

And yes, I dive deeper into this for the book. The "choose your own work" approach, as longtime Linden engineer Richard Nelson told me in it, "[L]ed us to adding all sorts of potentially interesting, yet incomplete features into the product, with not enough consideration for polishing the existing feature set or building what the users really needed first. I was certainly guilty of this.” (Richard, by the way, is now a senior engineer at Roblox.) 

All of this is why I'm hopeful the Second Life mobile viewer attempts to start things anew, and maintain as much simplicity as possible. It's fine for dedicated SLers to have the most complicated UI imaginable. The real challenge is to create an easy funnel for potential users (most coming through the mobile app in the future) to get a quick and easy taste of what's possible.

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