A Glorf by any Other Name

Revisiting the topic addressed in this post in the light of Rodvik Linden's very disappointing response on the subject.  (Bad Rodvik!  No plaudits-from-obscure-SL-blogger-nobody's-ever-heard-of!)

There has been a lot of heat already shed on the question of names, and I doubt I shall be able to shed any more light, but here goes.  It seems to me that the problem is reducible to a couple of bullet points:-

• New users want to be able to have a user name that looks like a real human name.
• Right now, they can't do that.

There has been much shouting about the (frankly dubious) merits of both the new Display Names and the old pick-a-last-name-from-the-list system, and really, one could address the central issue without either.  I'm sure nobody wants to get rid of Display Names (although, as I said last time, they really are a hopeless compromise that pleases nobody much), and as for the list system, it just takes time and effort from someone at Linden Lab who could probably be more usefully employed fixing the damn bugs already.

Rodvik's last pronouncements on the matter contained, to my mind, a germ of common sense, in that he suggested being able to use some special characters, like dashes and underscores, in a new user name.  Being able to be jack-bloggs instead of jackbloggs12345 would, at least, be a tiny step forward.  Presumably, some client-side validation is going to be needed to make sure people don't call themselves "--------" or something.  Or maybe not, what do I know?

The more-or-less obvious solution, it seems to me, would be to allow periods in the name - remember, when the Great Change In Naming occurred, all existing avatar names were converted to the unitary format, only with a period to indicate where the first name left off and the last name began.  I am "Glorf" to some and "Miss Bulmer" to others, but to the servers I am simply "glorf.bulmer".  A bit of software finagling allows that to appear as "Glorf Bulmer", on my nametag and where scripts call for two-part names.

I don't pretend to be privy to the internal workings of the SL software, but I don't see any reason why, in principle, if "glorf.bulmer" is a workable name, I shouldn't be allowed to sign up as "glorftwo.electricboogaloo" tomorrow.  (I mean, apart from obvious ones involving good taste.)  I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this - in fact, I'm told the whole idea has been explicitly disallowed already, and why, I cannot for the life of me imagine.

But, then, I don't understand the reasoning behind the single-part names in the first place - the back-end changes must have been a chore to do, and I can't think of anybody on the user side of things who actually wanted this change.  It would make sense if, as with (say) Dungeons and Dragons Online, you had a login identifier you came in with, and then picked which character/identity you wanted to appear with inworld.  But SL doesn't work like this, and there are no signs that it ever will.

It is always a bad idea to impute motives to people you don't know, but I wonder if the whole Display Names thing isn't somebody's pet idea, and they are plugging it, and shooting down any suggestions of viable alternatives, in the hope that eventually the user base will get tired and give up and go along with it.  If so, bad idea.  As I pointed out last time, the reason why Display Names haven't taken the world by storm is not because SL users are reactionary and afraid of change; it's because Display Names are an inadequate compromise attempt to meet two different demands.  Ploughing on down the "get everyone to use Display Names" path, therefore, is a Bad Move.  The Lab has reversed itself and backed away from Bad Moves before now, and I hope they will have the wisdom to do so again.

Why the Unwonted Silence?

Not much in the way of posting, yesterday, because I was being interviewed by webspelunker Ghostraven - the results can be found on his blog here , if you're interested.  Webspelunker is one of those people who actively go out into SL and seek out new experiences, and so his blog is a source of much interest to more stay-at-home types like me - honestly, there are days when I never venture out of Caledon.  (To those who say, "But why would you want to venture out of Caledon?" .... umm, I'll get back to you on that one.)

On the catwalk

It's London Fashion Week or something - or maybe it was last week, I forget.

Anyway, that spurred me to revisit an old project and make some progress on it:-

I know, it's just too sexy for words, isn't it?

Not quite finished yet - I want to script that flashlamp along the left arm so it actually lights up, and some particle bubbles for the air tanks wouldn't go amiss, and I think I need to tidy up the alpha layer around the feet a bit.  But I progress.  Oh yes.

(I tried it in an off-the-peg male shape, too - seemed to work OK, though I don't know how well it might fit the muscly man-mountain avis that are so common.  Oh, well, it'll all be copy-mod if I sell it, so that's not really a problem, is it?)

All very unmilitary

An idea or two is revolving inside what passes for my brain, and part of it involves making a bunch of quasi-military uniforms.

Now, I may have mentioned previously that clothing design is not really my thing... so, to make my life simpler, I have been off trawling inworld stores and Marketplace for some appropriate template images.

And, after some hours doing that, I have reached some conclusions:-

• I am going to have to do the damn things myself from scratch.
• It is one whole heck of a lot easier to find skimpy crop-tops than it is to find complete coverage jackets or tunics.  Either the military is under-represented in SL, or it is under-dressed.
• I will never understand product pricing in SL as long as I live.  There is no discernible link between price and quality... and, presumably, someone must be out there buying the expensive tat.  Who are these people, and how can I persuade them to visit my shop?

The Name Game Blame Game

The naming of avs is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you an av must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES...

To wit, your User Name, Display Name, Full Name and possibly Legacy Name.  Wait, that's four.  I'm confused already, and so are a lot of other people.  And it may be about to get worse.  Let's recap....

Prior to the late-middle of  2010, avatar names were actually quite simple.  You signed up for SL, and you picked yourself a first name, which could be any sequence of ordinary letters, and you then chose from a list of allowable last names supplied by Linden Lab.  This was not popular with everybody, but it worked OK, it created a weird sense of community among people with the same last name (I have wandered over with a cheery "Hello cousin!" to the odd other Bulmer I have encountered, and some of them are very odd, let me tell you), and in general people got by with it.  So, all right, some people picked silly names like, for example, "Glorf" and were then saddled with them, but that wasn't really all that much of an issue....

... well, except for two or three classes of people who wanted some ability to change their names.  The first group consisted of people with a legitimate reason for wanting a permanent name change.  These might be business people who wanted to use their RL names in SL, or it might be people who, for example, had taken SL partners and wanted to change their surnames to reflect their SL family status.  (A third example, of people who just had rubbish names and wanted to upgrade, can safely be ignored; they should have known better than to call themselves "Glorf" in the first place.)

The second group consisted of roleplayers who wanted to be able to shift between multiple personas as whim (or RP need) took them.  After all, if you start off in a Roman RP sim and drift away a bit and get invited to take part in a Star Trek RP, it'd be pretty grim if you had to keep an inappropriate name like "Tiberius".... wait, bad example.  But my point stands.

Now, it may be apparent to you that these two classes of people actually want different things.  One of them wants a permanent name change, one time only (or at least one time for the foreseeable future only).  The second group wants a whole constellation of different setting-appropriate aliases that they can change between at will.  Can you see the difference, there?  Well, that makes you smarter than Linden Lab, then!

In the latter half of 2010, LL announced a completely new and different approach to names, and fur has been flying ever since.  The whole first-name-last-name thing would be gone; you would have a single user name that was just one single string of letters.  But, people said, surely people would soon run out of coherent and sensible things to call themselves, and would be forced to resort to things like "33434434" and suchlike?  (Genuine example, btw, I know the guy.)  That doesn't matter, said LL, because no one will ever see these names.  All they will ever see is the brand-spanking-new Display Name, which can be anything you like, can include all sorts of funky Unicode characters, and can be changed whenever you like!

Astute observers will have noticed that that's not the system we've got now; it was pointed out, with some force, to LL that a setup where anybody can change their name to anything is as close to a full-scale griefers' charter as one could possibly imagine.  And so, after some hemming and hawing, the current system was adopted, whereby:-

• The basic User Name is always visible,
• If you do bother with a Display Name, other people can choose whether or not they see it
• You can change your Display Name only once a week
• There are some protections against impersonation - especially in the case of the Linden last name, for pretty obvious reasons
• Because a whole bunch of existing scripts, and even the login screens of third party viewers, would get broken by the change, a setup was introduced whereby the word "Resident" was used as a placeholder for the last name in the case of a new, single-named avatar.  This is where the idea of "everyone now has the last name of Resident" comes from

Clear as mud?  Right.  But this is where the three different names come from.  I used to be called "Glorf Bulmer", but that is only my Legacy Name now, only it's sometimes also referred to as a Full Name.  My actual User Name is "glorf.bulmer".  I don't bother with a Display Name, normally, though I did once call myself "Brian Spartacus" just to make a point.

I sometimes wonder if the Lab could have come up with anything that so singularly failed to meet anyone's needs or expectations.  You want to change your User Name to reflect your in-world marriage?  You still can't.  You can change your Display Name, of course, but many people won't bother with it, and anyway it isn't the permanent change you were hoping for.  As for the roleplayer communities; well, I just hope you enjoy playing the same role for a minimum of a week at a time.  (Actually, you can change from your Display Name back to your User Name - well, OK, your Full Name - I think - any time you like, but you can't take on another Display Name for another week once you've done that.)

(Are you still mixed up about these Full Names?  So am I.  It might help to think about a newer, single-named avi; if their User Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom" - again, not a made-up example - then their Full Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom", but their Legacy Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom Resident".  Clear as mud, I know.)

Ancillary problems have, of course, developed.  Gibberish User Names very quickly became the norm, as new users discovered the names they wanted were already taken, couldn't think of an acceptable alternative, and settled for adding on random strings of numbers and letters until they found something that worked.  The option to include Unicode characters in Display Names allowed many non-English users to have names in their own alphabets, a triumph! - except for English-speaking users who had no idea how to type in those new names.  (And if someone's Display Name is in Chinese ideograms, and their User Name is something like "ituweds7533dkfteq", one's conversational options are pretty much limited to "Hey, you over there with the face".)  The whole "Resident" marker became synonymous with "newbie" in people's minds, leading to discrimination and distrust, leading to resentment and further distrust.

And let us not even talk about the problems for scripters, or for merchants (LL made the boneheaded decision to use Display Names in transaction logs, the one place where you absolutely have to have a clear record of who you've been dealing with), or people with obscene or otherwise unacceptable Display Names and even User Names (like "affordablecustompcsdotcom" and his wife "mrsaffordablecustompcsdotcom", lovely couple that they were)....

Now, it would be fair to say that this state of affairs has attracted adverse comment.  Granted, pretty much everything LL does from breathing upwards attracts adverse comment, but in this case it was fairly well deserved.  A change request (SVC-7125 ) was officially made, and it has attracted thousands of votes and a comment trail a mile long.

And, now, Linden Lab is moving on this.  And I just hope they're moving in something like the right direction.

Granted, I am more confident about LL these days; under the direction of its new CEO, things seem brighter and happier than they were.  Rodvik Linden has not been afraid to listen to SL residents and introduce improvements (the new V3 viewer answers pretty much all the genuine criticisms levelled at Viewer 2, for instance) and even to reverse his own mistakes (the much-touted and thoroughly horrible "Basic Mode" was quietly dropped once its Bad Idea-ness was amply demonstrated).  So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some effective change on this issue.

Except... the latest messages we've had on the topic indicate all sorts of odd things being considered, "user-community-granted titles" being among them.  And I am dreadfully worried that this might mean they are thinking of some new system of Byzantine and wonderful complexity - and that this might prove to be even more of a dog's breakfast than the current system.

So... all I can say is: please, Lindens, don't eff this one up again.

Fleshing this thing out; an Arduous Process

I am determined to justify this thing's existence by adding some comment or other on a daily basis.  We'll see how long that particular resolution lasts.  (Even money I slip up by the end of the month.)

Anyway.  The quickest and easiest way to do this, it seemed to me, was to add some links to other blogs, mostly those of friends of mine.  (In the sense of "personal friends", or just "people on my Friends list"?  It would be the height of tactlessness to say which is which... it's probably pretty tactless to concede that there's a distinction!  Still, my SL f-list is notoriously jam-packed, and has less than 100% correlation with my actual friends in SL.  More on this subject, perhaps, if I'm gravelled for matter later on in the week.  Am I still in these brackets?)

Of course, "quick" and "easy" are relative terms, and I am new to this whole blogging thing, so using the interface to add blog links is, in itself, a challenge.  However.  I've got the first three links to people (a) that I thought of immediately, and (b) that are on Blogger.  Does this thing link with equal facility to blogs on other platforms?  I have no hesitation in answering: I don't know, and at this stage I don't much care.  After fiddling with unfamiliar software of any kind for more than a quarter of an hour, I start to feel an irresistible impulse to give the whole thing a rest and go grab a glass of gin.  Three links made; third post up; duty done!  Cheers.

In which Miss Bulmer presents herself in a new electronic medium

I suppose it is traditional, when starting one of these things, to say that "Goodness me, I've never done one of these things before, I don't know where to start, what can I possibly find to say?"  And I am not one to break with tradition.  Not only have I not done one of these things before, it is pretty much unknown territory to my typist, too (the physical entity who sits in real space, typing these words and eating far too many chocolate biscuits, and who is unfairly and unjustly described as the Real Me.)

However, let us not be deterred by such formal prolegomena.  Welcome, dear reader, to this aetheric journal.  I am Miss Glorf Bulmer, spinster of the parish of Caledon Steam SkyCity and other parts, and I have probably been remiss in failing to start some journal of my activities in Second Life, given that I have been an inhabitant of that metaverse for some twenty-one months and change, as of the time of writing.  (Which is not bad going, as I understand that boredom, vicissitudes of RL, or repeated ARs for griefing put paid to most Second Lifers before they clock up their first birthday.)

So, here commences, however tardily, and probably erratically, a chronicle of my various doings and musings within the metaverse of Second Life.  Will it prove entertaining, illustrative, edifying and informative?  We shall see, dear reader, we shall see.