The idea of becoming a Second Life user never made much sense to me. My current life is simply too busy to allow me to spend much time in any immersive virtual universe. However, it seems that many within IBM do not share my opinion. In fact, the company has recently increased it’s presence on this virtual world. The most recent proof of IBM’s interest in this technology was the life coverage of the inaugural session of the Impact conference on IBM’s virtual island. This conference is a major event for customers who are planning to deploy SOA solutions based on IBM technologies. Since I work closely with WebSphere products I thought that it could be interesting to participate and use the opportunity to discover this world everyone is talking about.
You probably know that even though I work at IBM I am a long time Apple user. So, logically I downloaded the Second Life Macintosh client on my 17” MacBook Pro. That was my first mistake. A big mistake. The Mac client is so incredibly slow that it is simply unusable. But the problem goes way beyond performance. This is a straight port from the Windows version with no concessions whatsoever to the Apple Human Interface guidelines. Frankly I do not understand why Linden Labs decided to develop (and release) such a crappy port. In my opinion they would be better off asking instead their Apple customers to use Parallels to run the Windows version, at least Mac users would not be so disappointed.
Since I do not have Windows installed on my Mac (why waste valuable disk space) I decided to try to install the client on my ThinkPad. There is no doubt that the client works much better on Windows. That doesn’t mean that the graphics are great, though. The Second Life client uses an old game engine to render the 3D world and it shows. However, what really made me mad was how complicated it is to get past the initial training island. The process is cumbersome and unintuitive. The first thing that you will see after landing on he island is a bunch of people who are totally lost, asking each other what to do to exit the island. If you have played games before that is not too difficult to understand, you just have to learn how to accomplish some tasks and earn stars for acquiring new skill. When you collect all the stars you can move on to the “real” second life world. The problem is that the training process is long and filled with bugs. You have to complete the tasks in order and without interruptions, otherwise you may be unable to get back in certain situations(despite many signs that allow you to retry a particular test).
The most frustrating part is that if you decide to leave your training session, when you come back you will find yourself in an inconsistent state with the objects collected so far and your last position but no stars (although it seems that the application remembers which tests you already passed, which causes additional problems). Be prepared to create a new character (and start from scratch) if you run into one of these situations. To make things even worse, there is no way to skip the training which is totally unnecessary for younger generations used to play online games.
To make a long story short, I was unable to complete the training in time to attend the event. It is clear to me that Linden Labs has spent no time whatsoever to make sure that newcomers have a great initial experience. They have a lot to learn if they want to grow beyond the geek population that is currently playing with their technology. As for me, I will never use it again unless they produce a decent Mac client and they offer true compelling content not available elsewhere on the Internet.