I’ve had very similar frustrations with Second Life, from a slightly different perspective: as a former MUD/MOO addict. I’ve just finished a blog post about it (Website link goes to my blog, entry titled “To Hell With Rocket Cars, Where’s My Metaverse?”). In a nutshell: From a user experience perspective, there’s not much difference between Second Life and, say, LambdaMOO or any of the other text-based societies of the early ’90s. I had hoped we would have come further than that in the past 10 years.

You said : “I’m not wild about using my money to buy assets or my time to build value in such a non-portable way. When someone else can flip a switch one day and turn off my work, I don’t like that situation. Lest you protest the unlikeliness of that, I lost a lot of my writing when GEnie shut down, and it’s about to happen again with Dueling Modems. It’s not a question of if but when with this sort of thing. I’d rather have more control over my output than this.”

I really can’t argue with that. And it is a real possibility with SL.

If you remember one of my comments from way early in your SL discussions, I did say that I agreed you had more important things, valueble to you, that you wanted to do. And when I have written here, it’s not to sway you or hook you, or anyone. I try to write to help people “get it”, to get over the perceptual hump. It seems a lot of people want it to be a game that entertains them.

Sure, the interface isn’t all that well made. It suffers from network lag and movement jerkiness (they probably can’t afford the thousands of servers and network infrastructure that a game company can put behind a multi-million dollar budget game.)

But the potential for this to become a metaverse, today, not in some author’s imagination, not in some dark necromantic future, that’s what draws me in.

Tilted Edge, everything you see in SL, was created by a user. Someone very much like you and me. Sure, it doesn’t compare to any professionally made real-time 3D shooter, RPG, or what have you, PRECISELY because it isn’t any of those things.

What will be interesting is how this pans out in a few more real years (beyond our short-term field of vision– actually SL is been around 3-4 years I think)… what has it represented, what has come from it. What will the good ol days of 2006 have meant as a result.

I don’t know the answer I just ride waves.

i’m just not one of them, nor is my video game addicted and hopes to some day be a game designer son – he tried it for awhile and then went back to final fantasy online…

different strokes is one of the true virtues of where we are online now – there really is a little for anyone and everyone