Any Colour you Like, So Long as it's White

So there I was at Oxbridge, enjoying the traditional sight of a new avatar going up to anyone even vaguely female and asking for a date.  (He gave me a chance to use the "my girlfriend's just TPed in" excuse, which is always fun... and receives a special Clueless Award for trying to chat up one lady with her very obvious husband standing right next to her.)

But, both Clueless Boy and the husband-and-wife - and several others who wandered through - were wearing unfamiliar, and rather sophisticated, avatars for new people....

The reason being, of course, new default avatars from our noble benefactors at the Lab.  So, it became necessary to take a squint at these and see what is what about them.

What we've got, you see, are mesh avatars.  The basic body is rendered invisible by a full-body alpha layer, and a mesh shape attached which acts exactly like your basic SL body.  It's rigged, so it can change to reflect alterations in your basic underlying shape... up to a point; you can't do anything fancy like changing the face, for instance.  And of course system clothing and other system-layer stuff like skins won't work on these things. 

What are they like?  Well, they vary.  Some of them have really good detailed skins, others are... less good.  They come with various bits of rigged mesh clothing, some of which is very good, as in "cannibalize it for other outfits" good.  (Tali and I both fell with glee on Kate Beckinsale's "Vampire Hunter Alison"'s leather trenchcoat.)  There are other components which are worth nicking - one (otherwise fairly naff) female form has a set of included shoe alphas which might work with a bunch of pumps I can't currently use because they're invisiprim based.

The design of the avis is quite interesting.  By and large, although some are traditional SL Barbie-dolls, there is a tendency towards more naturalistic sizes and shapes, which is rather gratifying (says the seven-foot blonde stick insect).  The male avatars are pretty good looking, and certainly better proportioned than your usual SL man-mountain with very short arms.  One thing I noticed, camming around them, was that the faces are, in places, a little bit asymmetrical.  This is good: real faces are a little bit asymmetrical.  On balance, we may expect a more interesting and (arguably) more attractive set of new people running around SL.

Oh, they'll all be white, of course.

Well, no, that's not strictly true - Tali found one vampire avi who is unmistakeably African male, apart from the fangs.  So that's one unambiguously non-Caucasian.  And some of the others might look vaguely Asian or Latino, in the right light... or might at least look as if they know someone who's Asian or Latino....

It is at this point that I heave a sigh, because this is an old, old rant, but it still needs to be ranted.  It would not hurt, dear people in the Lab, to be a little bit inclusive.  Just to the extent of offering options for non-Caucasians.  Just to the extent of admitting they exist.  One non-Caucasian avatar in the new batch.  One.  And even that one isn't fully human.

The excuse for this, apparently, is that the selection of new avatars is based on an analysis of what people actually go for when they're developing an initial look.  The problem with this, it seems to me, is that defaulting to the majority choices makes the alternatives invisible.  SL gets flooded with lookalikes, and the next batch of new people to come along adopt the same look, to fit in, and eventually we all look the same....

Assuming new people do come in, of course.  I have to wonder just how appealing SL looks, based on its available choices, to people of anything other than Caucasian origin.  My guess would be, not very. 

Seriously, LL.  Options.  Inclusive options.  From the outset.  There is no excuse for failing to do this.

Welcome to SL,and you're welcome to it

A certain tendency - of which I approve - has been visible in the Destination Guide in the past few weeks.  Until fairly recently (I wasn't paying attention, so I can't say exactly when!) a search among "Popular Places" or "Chat Hot Spots" would be sure of turning up a long, long list of infohubs.  Now, they are all gone from those listings.  The only infohub I've been able to find in the Guide is the hitherto inactive one at Murray - and, from the way it seems to be deserted every time I look in there, it's probably still inactive as an infohub (i.e. people don't get randomly routed to it).

Now, this is all well and good, because I have vented before on the toxicity of infohubs, and describing these hotbeds of LOLspeak, gesture spam and casual racial abuse as "Chat Hot Spots" is like saying the Black Hole of Calcutta was a cosy place to meet new friends.  But, as reforms go, this one still isn't going anywhere near far enough.

The problem, as I see it, is that new people are still going to be routed randomly to infohubs, often quite early in their SL careers, often also quite late in their SL careers, as there is nothing like a crowded infohub for putting you off SL for good.  For that matter, oldbies can get sent to them from time to time as well - people attempting logins on unavailable Caledon regions, apparently, often end up at the Adult-level hub at Arapaima, and it is hard to imagine a greater contrast with Caledon than that.  So, infohubs, it seems, are still a cross we have to bear. 

It's something LL really should do something about, and there are a couple of possible things they could do.  The first one, of course, is to staff the damn hubs and enforce their own rules.  Put an on-duty Linden in each active hub, sitting under the no-weapons-no-nudity-no-disturbances-no-spamming sign, with a banhammer cocked and loaded ready to fling offenders off the sim.

It's an option.  I doubt it's anyone's preferred option, although it would have the benefit of putting some Lindens back on the Grid - I have seen one in my entire SL career to date; if they're out there, they're not in the places I go to.  But, it would require dedicated staff resources, and the Lab is feeling the economic pinch like everyone else these days, and it would be a soul-destroying job.  So -

- the second option: let the Residents do it themselves.  (Hey, if it's working for SL9B, why not for this?)  There used to be a programme - everyone who reads this will remember it, I think - whereby some sims were designated as Community Gateways, with tutorials on SL in place and volunteers on hand to acclimatize new people into the ways of the Grid.  And, for the most part, it worked; indeed, for the most part it still does.  When LL axed the Community Gateway system, many of the help sims carried on regardless; places like Oxbridge, NCI's sims, Ajuda SL Brasil, other names we can all think of, all kept rolling on.  Without SL support, some of them fell by the wayside - I miss the old LGBT hub, which used to have a walkthrough tutorial almost as good as Oxbridge's, but which was just a conference venue last time I saw it.  But many of the Gateways are still there, the staff are still ready and willing to help... and sending people to them will give a much better impression of SL than bunging them off to be spammed, sexually propositioned, vampire-bitten and generally abused at an unmonitored infohub.

There are probably other options I haven't thought of.  But I am certain that there is a real need for people to be able to get into SL and be welcomed into it - for new people to be routed to places relatively free from predators, trolls, and other species of griefer.  And there are people willing to help, so - come on, LL, why not take that help?

Basic Mode: how they could have done it

Following on from yesterday's post, and the comment on it (I have a reader? Wow!), I thought some more about how Basic Mode might have worked as intended.

The problem with it was, it was very much all-or-nothing - you either had Advanced Mode and full functionality, or you had Basic Mode and the restricted subset.  If you wanted to do stuff that wasn't available in Basic Mode, you had to log out and change modes.  (At first, changing modes from Basic to Advanced meant relogging twice, which made one more very sound reason to switch to Advanced as soon as possible and never look back.)

Inara's comment yesterday got me to thinking, though, about how they could have made the Basic Mode viewer the introduction to SL that it was meant to be.  We all know, of course, that not every menu option is available by default - we are familiar with pressing Ctrl-Alt-D to get the Advanced menu up, and, if you're in V3, Ctrl-Alt-Q for the Develop menu.  So, I said to myself, why not extend that concept?

You could start with a viewer that had the functionality of Basic Mode directly available, but which contained all the other features as "unlockable", just like the Advanced and Develop menus.  So, say you realise that there are 5,271,009 other people running around in that stock vampire avi, and you want to look different from them - you find an information point or a more experienced resident somewhere (ideally, a welcome centre like NCI, Oxbridge, White Tiger, the Shelter, someplace civilized anyway) and instead of telling you to log out and log back in, they show you the keypress or whatever it takes to unlock the Appearance editor.  You feel the urge to spray plywood cubes over the landscape, so you find someone who tells you how to unlock the Build editor.  And so on.

Of course, you couldn't use a viewer like that as a thin client, like I was talking about yesterday - it'd need the full functionality set built in from the start.  But, if you wanted a sort of "SL-with-training-wheels" approach, where you gradually grow into the full set of SL activities - or, if you like, stop at a level that makes you happy - then that is one approach you might go for.

Thin clients

An offhand comment in a NWN discussion thread - about how good it would be to be able to drop in to a sim via a web browser - got me to thinking about this.

It's not a new idea, of course - in fact, LL did trials on implementing it.  I forget who it was who visited Oxbridge using an in-browser viewer; he had to log in under a throwaway test ID, and he wasn't able to do complicated things like move... but, there he was in the Oxbridge plaza, chatting away neat as you please, via a web browser.

Then there was Basic Mode, and it is hard to think of a more complete misapplication of a potentially useful idea.  Basic Mode became the default for new sign-ups towards the end of V2 development; it was a viewer mode which deliberately made most of the menus and functions inaccessible - you couldn't change your look except by picking a different default avi, you couldn't TP except by going through the Destination Guide, you couldn't build or buy anything, period - and it was the bane of our lives at Oxbridge for a while, because new people kept on turning up, and they would want to know how to do things, and nine times out of ten whatever they wanted to do was something you couldn't do in Basic Mode.  We had to set up gestures that told people how to log out and log back in again in Advanced (i.e. normal) mode.  It was hellishly frustrating, and I'm sure it can't have been much of a welcome to SL for the new people.  "Welcome to SL!  Now get out, and don't come back until you can do it properly!"

Basic Mode was announced with much fanfare and hoopla in the SL official blogs; it died silently and unmourned a few months later... but.  If you knew what you were doing, and had set up an avatar look that suited you, and didn't immediately need to build or buy anything, and had friends who could offer you TPs to social events... if you just needed an SL presence for a bit... Basic Mode was something you could live with; certainly a big step up from running in a text-only viewer.  And, it always seemed to me, the reduced feature set of Basic Mode was something that might just squeeze into a browser plugin.  In short; as a starter for SL for beginners, it sucked mightily, but as the basis for a thin client that would allow access to SL through the web, it just might have been some use.

I have no idea if the Lab is thinking along those lines, or even if they should be.  Goodness knows there is plenty of stuff on their plates right now to keep them busy.  But... it always struck me as a possibility, and a potentially interesting one.  It'd do a fair bit to open up SL to the web-going public at large, I guess.  That might not be a bad thing; let people come inworld via browsers and see what it's like, rather than getting their ideas from CSI or vampire-themed advertising campaigns.

Then again, these casual visitors would probably end up at an infohub, so....