Month: February 2015

The opening of 53rd episode of The Drax Files Radio Hour may have the feeling of being a slightly rushed production; there’s not casual introduction by the featured guest or other notable mentioned later in the show. Instead we launch straight into the Draxtor Theme.

However, any feeling the recording’s opening may have in being pushed through quickly is understandable: this segment of the show comes right off the back of a gruelling week for Drax cutting and finalising the 26th instalment of his World Makers series, which I looked at following its release.

More to the point, it offers plenty of time for an extended interview with Second Life architect Kaya Angel, the man behind the stunning Angel Manor, and who has been responsible for a number of unique and beautiful builds across Second Life over the years, as well as running his own business selling high-quality prefab houses. And if that isn’t enough, Kaya is also a great patron of the arts, providing both the Rose Theatre Ballroom and the Rose Theatre Gallery for a wide range of events and art exhibitions.

The interview with Kaya kicks-off at 14:11, following the musical interlude, starting with mention of Kaya beautiful 6-minute video Second Life: A different perception, which I make no apologies for embedding here once again, even though I featured it in these pages just over a week ago.

The interview starts with Kaya relating his own initial involvement in Second Life. While acknowledging himself to have been a gamer with a specific interest in on-line games, he was actually drawn to SL from something of a philosophical bent, created as a result of a question Philip Rosedale asked back in the very early days of the platform’s public existence: if you were given the tools to re-create society and reality, what would you create?  Would you create something new, or repeat what we can see around us?

From here the discussions focuses on the issue of engagement in SL. All too often when this is discussed, the focus tends to immediately narrow to matters of technology – such as the “steep learning curve” inherent within the viewer. While the viewer is complex and does take time to master, I do tend to feel that it and the technology are looked to as being the bugaboos preventing SL’s wider adoption because they are far more tangible an issue than the more fundamental (and oft acknowledged by seldom addressed) reason that the sheer lack of any direction given to people in terms of what they “should” be doing or achieving or seeking or fighting or building or destroying (insert you own term here) leads to confusion and departure a lot quicker than any really deep-seated problems within the viewer.

As Kaya states, “How do you get people to stay in a virtual world when they are so use to having specific things that they told that they should do or can do?”

It’s a question that has long plagued user and the Lab themselves; we’re all familiar with how hard it is to define SL – although Kaya goes on to express a few ideas of his own. However, I would just not that in terms of the initial discussion and ideas put forward, I would disagree with Drax on the idea that directed experiences, when used as gateways into the platform might further reduce people’s ability to see the wider potential of the platform.

If anything, I’d suggest the reverse is true; providing such “gateway experiences” offer some form of informative portal to the broader potentials of SL / a UGC driven environment, they are more likely to engage with an audience (those interested in the experience) and bring them into it and encourage those among them who are so minded to explore SL further far more effectively than simply dropping them in-world in a manner that is almost entirely random in nature and lacking any structure at all.

As a content creator, it comes as no surprise that Kaya sees one of the major means of engagement with the platform as being the ability to build and create. In itself, this is not a new idea – we’ve all pointed to much the same when discussing getting people more involved in SL; however, this doesn’t make what Kaya says any less valid. Rather, his comments give pause for thought on just how much harder it is for people coming into SL today to discover the expressive power and joy of content creation for themselves.

This isn’t so much because emphasis has shifted over the last few years from the humble prim and in-world building to mesh and external tools (although this does get touched upon during the discussion). nor does it really have anything to do (to a great degree at least) with the provision of Linden Homes or the inclusion of starter avatars in the viewer, both of which are also referenced.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour: listening to the words of an Angel” →