The Virtual World Postcard Project: Wait Wait … Don’t Load Me!
Dear Friends,
Once I was waiting in the New Delhi railway terminal to catch a train for the five-hour ride to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. An announcement came over the PA that the train was running 17 hours behind schedule. Seventeen hours late to start a five-hour trip – the mind boggles.
The patience required to ride the rails in India is nothing compared to what you need in a virtual world. Sometimes I think about how exciting and fascinating virtual worlds are, and I can’t figure out how they’ve been around for so long and had such a relatively small effect on mainstream culture. Then I log on, and I remember exactly how.
Consider: I can launch Firefox, load a web page, sign in and be reading my email in under 20 seconds. Just launching the Second Life viewer takes a full minute. To actually teleport somewhere and have the graphics load takes at least another minute and sometimes several. Then, every time I move around even a little bit, there’s a delay while new graphics, text and animations load.
It’s not just that it’s slow. The Second Life viewer also causes my laptop to heat up, forcing the fan to run constantly as long as I’m in-world. The interface is also about four times as complicated as anything else an average person does online. And of course, all of these challenges are enhanced by the overarching unanswerable question that lurks in the back of the mind of any new visitor to a virtual world: What, exactly, am I supposed to be doing here?
Then there are the weirdnesses. Occasionally, for instance, my avatar loads, but not its clothing. I get an alert assuring me that other people see a fully clad figure, but on my screen, I’m flying around butt naked. It’s a little hard to trust that other players are getting a different view. (Plus, it’s a challenge to explain this situation if a family member walks into the room while I’m apparently gadding about in the altogether.) (Plus, how do you build a computer program that defaults to nakedness when things are moving slowly? How can that even be a thing?)
There are more decorum challenges if you, as I do, sometimes explore at random. In Second Life, I’ll look at the world map, locate a spot where there appear to be many other avatars present and teleport blindly to that location. Loading graphics at a location you’ve never been to before is painstakingly slow, and there’s always an element of suspense about what kind of place you’ve arrived at. It could be a disco, an aquarium store, a strip club, a genitalia and facial hair shop, or a fetishwear outfitter.
When you first teleport in, all you get are geometric shapes. These become blurry objects as more data transfers. It’s only when the final details resolve that you really have a sense of what you’ve gotten into, and whether you want to get right back out again.
The bottom line is that exploring a virtual world sucks up technology, time and patience.
Riding trains around India is well worth the delays – The Taj Mahal, The Golden Temple, Tirupati Temple, Jantar Mantar, not to mention the best shopping and eating anywhere in the real world make even the most uncomfortable, slow journey worthwhile.
Is Second Life worth the effort? Not for everyone – not even for most people. Both the technology and the interfaces need several generations of improvement before they are ready for widespread use. To really gain mainstream purchase, virtual world navigation must be as easy as using a television remote, and as fast as loading a web page.
A reason for optimism: In the 1980’s and 1990’s, many of my complaints about virtual worlds were levied in almost identical terms at the Internet itself: “It’s slow, confusing, unreliable and of questionable purpose!” Things changed, though, and there’s reason to think the same will happen with virtual worlds. The current technological and user-interface impediments are the only real barrier to the mainstreaming of virtual worlds, and they will ultimately and inevitably be overcome.
August 10, 2011 @ 3:05 am
I would add that the reason that it likely takes so long for Second Life to load is because the mainstream laptop computer doesn’t have a dedicated graphics processor (a limitation of most lower end consumer laptops), and that Canada has slipped behind much of the developed world when it comes to broadband internet speed. Where many Canadians are using connections rated between 3-10 mbps, many other countries are using connections that are between 25-50 mbps (or so I’ve been led to believe by various denizens of the internet).
So for those people who for whom Second Life a way of life, they likely have invested in both a more substantial computer, and a more robust internet connection. That really just confirms your hypothesis; as long as users have to be so invested in virtual worlds, they’ll never really be mainstream.
August 10, 2011 @ 5:23 pm
I wonder if the technology will just catch up.
Also, given the thesis of The Erotic Engine, I wonder if SLers (and other virtual world denizens) will actually accelerate the technology, creating the demand for faster connections and more powerful computers that then become the mainstream standard.
Wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.
November 21, 2011 @ 3:32 am
Well, back in my P & G days, at the dawn of time… everything you ordered computer-wise had to have a business justification (oh, I long for the days!) So to get the graphic chips that could handle business graphics (Word & 1-2-3 for Windows) or business audio (any sound beyond the ding meaning that your entire days work in one file was now screwed), you had to write out a business justification. Oh, and ethernet cards were 600 dollar add-ons.
Needless to say, time has moved on, and we expect all the above for free, as a given, in computers, as they have come to be considered basics for productivity.