In SL one place where interaction is ‘intense – as per the study’ is the role play games we have in SL. How does one get people into role play games? There is an ongoing irritation between experienced players and new players. I think that friction exists in all of SL, but I can’t find any studies on that factor.
Learning RP is an ongoing challenge just as learning the SL Viewer is. Most RP games in SL offer RP classes. But, the RP people have a problem too. One needs to be educated in role play before playing, otherwise they are just adding chaos and frustration. Before playing in RP one has no reason to learn RP. Catch-22. SL has the same problem.
The Inspiring Orientation experiment is endeavoring to provide a motivation for people to stay and learn how to use SL. It also tries to get them hooked up with groups having similar interests. I am hoping someone will explore additional fun ways of interesting people in SL. Somewhere in the process we have to add getting them talking to others.
Arrehn explains they hope/plan to have mentors and helpers participating in the introduction of SL to new players.
Numbers vs Studies
We know that the Lab does numbers. How many of the Lab’s people are analysis that understand statistics as a tool, rather than an answer, is unknown. We know the numbers tell us the mentors and helpers produced more short term users than long term users/residents. So, they closed the welcome areas down and dropped the mentors programs.
BUT, but, but… we have all these studies showing first experience and player interactions are the primary contributors to longevity. What we don’t have is the actual data Lab management used to make the decision. I think chances are good that players left the welcome and mentor regions without knowing what SL is about and how to connect with people of similar interest. Interaction with others stopped when they left welcome areas.
The Teng and Adamic study doesn’t include information on the quality of the interactions. I doubt there was any such information in the data set provide by the Lab. While assumptions are dangerous, I think it is pretty obvious positive experiences are more likely to produce longevity.
The problem the Lab’s management saw in Help Islands and with mentors may will have been the quality of the experience people were receiving. We just don’t know. We can guess and speculate. But, to find out and know we either study revealing data or we experiment. So, hats off to the -io- Team for experimenting.
The Lab has constantly experimented with promotions to get people into SL with some idea of what is inside. They have ridden the Vampire thing. They have tried a number of different styles of building the welcome and orientation areas/islands. What they have not done is find how to change a build so it works to retain players. Eventually it will occur to them that the key to player retention is not to be found in; how the regain is built, what is said there, how simple the viewer is or isn’t, or any number of things that typically occur to programmers and computer types.
The -io- Team is trying a more integrated approach using art to show off SL to create motivation and to use the What’s Hot and Destination Guide to channel new people to areas of SL they find interesting.
Still the welcome area and mentors are only parts of the answer. If people left the welcome islands and then shortly left SL, that departure could be seen to indicate something was wrong with the welcome area. But, again I think this tends to be too simplistic an idea and fall in the corporate data analysis blind spot.
Welcome islands and the Inspiring Orientation may both only be half the solution. The more effective solution may be in how we keep people interacting after they leave Orientation.
I would like to hear more thoughts on player retention and in particular how you think The Inspiring Orientation or any welcome area could be improved. I don’t want to pick on Orientation, so be constructive. But, what did they do wrong and right?
Did you try to explore the Brass Tube? Did you find the parts of the exhibit I show in some of the pictures?
What did you think of the ‘Sit’ lesson?
What do you think a new user would think of the out of scale furniture in the ‘Sit’ lesson?
How would you encourage more person to person interaction?
Of even more interest to me is how one keeps people interacting after they leave even the best Inspiring orientation.
We have some challenges in that area. As the Firestorm/Phoenix Team found, a significant portion of their users were bullies that badgered new users. A significant number of SL users are griefers intent on annoying other users. Hidden in among the griefers are players that hate the Lab and literally plot to create problems. Add in others that have decided to go vigilante and fight the bad guys. They are soon as much a problem as the the bad guys they hoped to eliminate. However, at least the problem people are a definite minority.
Next we have people ignorant of history contributing to the chaos, I mean both RL and SL history. Humans have been developing community for something like 7,000+ years. We should have figured out how to do this community thing by now. The Federalist Papers are probably the most enlightening documents on the planet in regard to how to control communities or in their case a country. But, they give us nothing on how to be part of a community. That was left to religion. In the twenty-first century many have seen the hypocrisy of organized religion and the problems with theocratic communities. But, we have yet to find a workable replacement for establishing a morality and set of ethics for community members.
Without knowing history people reinvent the wheel and repeat the mistakes learned by previous generations. To vote in RL we need to understand history. To build a Second Life community we need to understand history and human nature. Human nature never seems to change. History teaches us how humans behave in a given scenario. Once we understand, we can avoid mistakes and move forward at a much faster pace.
We are going to need knowledge to improve player retention. Once we have the knowledge, I think it becomes more obvious that player retention is all about who we are not what we build. When each of us works to improve community by improving ourselves and what we do, we will probably find the key to player retention in SL.
It may be as simple as saying ‘Hi’ to new people. But, surely that is too simple. So, what keeps you interacting with others? How would you change things to encourage more of the behavior that keeps you in SL?
Update: Another viewpoint is here: Full steam ahead for new horizons