Linden Lab / Community Creators Launch New Second Life Starting Experiences for PC & Streaming Users -- Veteran SLers Can Visit Them Too
"Perhaps most notably, these experiences are linked through a teleport menu -- a Roblox-like direction, where the platform presents itself as a portal into discreet, individual game experiences..."
Originally posted on my Patreon on March 20 — join to read articles like this first!
Above: Bad Unicorn's Driving Dirty starter experience -- click here to teleport to it!
NUX! That’s the War Boy in Fury Road who tries to save civilization with a daring vehicular maneuver. It is also, fittingly, the name of Linden Lab’s New User Experience working group, a collaboration between the company and community creators.
Launched last year, NUX has been extended to keep trying to solve Second Life’s most ongoing, vexing challenge: Getting new users to keep returning.
On my visit to the Linden Lab HQ last week, Grumpity Linden (the company’s SVP of Product & Engineering) gave me an advance preview of NUX’s six new starter experiences, and the Lindens’ approach to launching them. They are now available to new users on PC and browser streaming (aka Project Zero). And while they’re designed for first-time SL users, anyone with a Second Life account can visit them. (SLUrls at the bottom of this story!)
Designed and developed by community creators, they’re very different approaches to the first-time user experience:
BRAZIL TOUR (above), as the name suggests, is a Brazilian beach town created and hosted by Azula, a large and long-running community of SLers from that country IRL, hosted by group greeters who speak both Portuguese and English.
DRIVING DIRTY, created by popular SL brand Bad Unicorn (read my profile here), is a Mario Kart-style race track with a leaderboard, prizes, and other hooks.
GREEK ROW (below) is a college-themed roleplay experience from Nadir Taov, lead developer of the long-running Crack Den RPG (profile here); it’s actually an adjunct to the larger Crack Den continent.
MIDNIGHT PULSE (which I wrote about here) and MADPEAVERSE SCAREDY CATS originally started as mobile experiences and are also now available on PC and streaming, as is the Linden-made LEARNING CENTER.
Above: Greek Row
Right now these new experiences are being tested to new PC/browser users, with Linden Lab tracking their engagement rates. In one iteration, new users get to choose one of these starting experiences; in another cohort, one is randomly assigned. They’re collecting all this data, as Grumpity tells me, until “we have one winner or more than one winner”.
In any case, these metrics will give them a good baseline to build on. Second Life is currently bringing in about 5000 new signs-up per day (varying by geography and other factors). If these new experiences can retain just 10% of them, we’re talking 15,000 additional SLers over a month. (Emphasis on “if”!)
Perhaps most notably, these experiences are linked through a teleport menu sign at each entrance (above). This is a small nudge in a Roblox-like direction, where the platform presents itself as a portal into discreet, individually-themed games. This could very well appeal to new users more familiar with Roblox, while also helping convey that there is much more to Second Life than just the one starting experience.
My own personal take on these new experiences:
I suspect the Brazil Tour will engage the best, especially as it has a large active community supporting it. I admire the ambition of Greek Row, but worry that the excess of text pop-ups and chat dialogs will overwhelm and intimidate nearly every new user who tries it out. Personally I enjoy Driving Dirty most, and it definitely has the most pro game-level polish. However, I couldn’t find an easy way to race against other players, if a multiplayer mode exists -- the whole point of Mario Kart! -- so that will probably be a limiter.
As for Grumpity, this is just the latest project in her unlikely career at Linden Lab, which first began as a contractor, after which she transitioned to a project manager on staff.
“I kept spending more time with Linden and Linden kept giving me more interesting problems to solve,” as she put it to me. Working at Linden Lab at all is something of a sharp left career turn for her, as she was previously a project manager at an oil and gas company. (”I can weld pipe,” she notes.)
“I never expected to be here this long,” Grumpity adds. “But I have never found a more interesting [project] to do.”
And now she’s fusing this new user-made pipeline to the ancient but still steadily churning rig that is Second Life. Her welding experience should come in handy.
SLURLS TO NEW STARTER EXPERIENCES ON PC / BROWSER
MIDNIGHT PULSE: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/ClubMidnightPulseDT/121/164/160
MADPEAVERSE SCAREDY CATS: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/MadPeaVerseDT/128/128/24
LEARNING CENTER: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LearningCenterDT/167/97/157
BRAZIL TOUR: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/BrazilTourDT/128/124/23
DRIVING DIRTY: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DrivingDirtyDT/116/141/1016
GREEK ROW: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/GreekRowDT/208/231/3771