Second Life's Rod Humble on accessibility, new tech, and the future

More adult sims. Er for adults only of course.

This is actually a very interesting news. I think Second Life killed the potential of sandbox, user generated, multi-purposes metaverses for years : horrible navigation, ugly models despite reasonable polygon numbers, unnecessary steep learning curve, etc.

I always thought "what if" a game studio like Blizzard or Valve had designed SL navigation, UI, etc?

I don't know Rod Humble but I wish him the best. I just don't know if at this point it's possible to significantly improve the user experience without rewriting entirely SL.

It is going to be very hard to undo the damage done to the game by Mark Kingdon. He took what was a booming world and put the brakes on hard with a large number of stupid policies, including the homestead price gouge, terrible hire decisions and a metric tonne of wrong turns like annoying content creators with weak and ineffective protection.

Just too many final straws for even the most dedicated player to put up with. The camels back was not only broken it was well and truly shattered.

Kingon was a death knell for this game and I pity anyone who decides to let him make any descision in their business.

Well the original vision of SL was inspired by The Avenue in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. We still haven't anything that comes close to that because SL has never been marketed in such a way that companies and visionaries might jump on board to create a virtual world where you could do real shopping etc... and there have never been officially set standards that could help create the atmosphere of The Avenue.

The technology is there and can only improve so that you could log into SL and wander The Avenue and shop at your favorite clothing store, see items on your avatar before you buy them, buy furniture for your house by seeing how they look in your house before you purchase, read your news and blogs with embedded videos etcetc...

... the potential for a virtual world gateway to the internet is there it just isnt being used.

We already saw the future. Simplified services that covered the socialization part with minor customization like IMVU or Habbo. People cared mostly about the socialization, not so much the world building, and those that focused mostly on making the former easy endured.