Supposing that the best place to begin is experience, perhaps we can look to how we learned in the browser. We all know what Active Worlds is; how to use it, where to go to find people... its various nuances that we like or dislike. Learning about that took some time -- even though I was hooked on my first day. Building certainly took a while to understand, even if my first attempts were pretty awful. (BTW, I know those coordinates in my memory even after all these years!) Despite a rough beginning, I did manage to learn about correctly spacing objects and I had a great time doing it! From my first build I went on to create my first town, and as I began interacting and collaborating with other users, very early on I understood that we all had a different level of competency with the technology, and looking back on that now perhaps that has to do with how we came to experience Active Worlds and virtual technology in general. One guy came in right from AWGate. I came to build after getting some help in AWNewbie. A few days later I brought in a friend from class and taught him myself! Back in 2002, there were plenty of ways for new users to learn and understand Active Worlds.Today, this is still true. Perhaps not to the magnitude, but AWGate is much more educational than it has been in the past, and AWSchool is more active than I've ever known it to be. AWNewbie has seen better days, but the framework is still there and generally, if a new user wants to learn, well, they'll have plenty of options. This is all well and good for the ones who have made it as far as AWGate, but I think our focus needs to move even further out. Out beyond our universe -- to the 2D web browsers that are the bread and butter of the typical internet user's experience. What does Active Worlds look like... to them?
Here's another story from my early days in Active Worlds: Around the time I immigrated, I was 12 years old. I was in 7th-grade and obsessed with a virtual pets website called Neopets. Neopets had a social feature that was essentially the equivalent of a guild or a club in modern games -- I don't remember the term they used for it and can't be bothered to log in and check. At any rate, I had started a group and as I was fleshing it out, I wanted to find a java chat room that I could copy over for the group to use. I went to some resource search engine that I trusted (this was before Google was kingpin!) and typed in 'chat room' or something, and Active Worlds came up as one of the first results.
From the description it didn't sound quite like what I wanted, but it might have been useful and the paragraph describing sounded intriguing enough to install it anyway... and I've been hooked from then on. So for me, all it took was a well-written paragraph and some free time. The experience may be similar for a lot of older (in terms of usage) citizens. Maybe they read a good article about Active Worlds, or heard from a friend or saw the banner ad... something simple. Back in 2002 and times before, the internet was different; the various forms of media that we immerse ourselves in today simply weren't available.
All of these stories and throwbacks have a point. If you'd take a look around today, you'd probably notice that the way that Active Worlds is described to people viewing from a webpage really has not changed at all. Despite its problems, the flash/slideshow on activeworlds.com is really a big (official) step in promotion. They may have been keeping up with the times for corporate presentations or pitches, but we normal folks certainly haven't seen any of that. My laborious point with all of this elaboration is that how you express the 3D environment to potential users who are stranded in the 2D is critical. They don't understand. I didn't understand; all I was given was a nice paragraph. In our age of streaming video, flash (which seems to be on the way out), and websites that have to be more than a nice pamphlet, it is critical that users have the opportunity to understand -- in their common language -- what Active Worlds is.
That means keeping up with the times; that means video.
If you read the previous post, this may be no surprise. I personally am very fond of video and in Active Worlds it is ridiculously easy to record video; we've got a utility in the browser that does all of the work! Load that bad boy up on YouTube and in a few minutes you're set! The nice thing about video is that from the viewer's standpoint, we as the presenter can get the best of both worlds. What you see is what you get. We can bring the 3D experience into the realm of the 2D, offering the video as a literal window into what these new users will get when they install Active Worlds and join the fun in AWGate.
I suppose on a philosophical level it's a bit like cheating, but all's fair in love and war, right? In an age where the internet is one big distraction after another, you'll never get the attention of a new user with a well-written paragraph. Even finely-crafted articles will only have a limited audience. A good video can offer deeper experience to new users, and with the absolute ease of creation and production that we've got, perhaps we should explore that route on a more professional level? The pro's certainly outweigh the con's, from my view of things.
I will say that the slideshow is a good start. It hits on some selling-point features that Active Worlds offers and is a good presentation in the format given... but it's really only half-way for the internet audience today. They aren't exposed to powerpoints or slideshows everyday; but they do see video a lot. It's just a comfortable format. A good video is really what that space needs, and may even WOW people coming to visit our neck of the woods.
Anyway, that's it for today. I'll leave you with a video I made in AW a year or so ago. It's a fun music video. Enjoy! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment