Reading Radar

It should be no surprise that in our explorations, a lot of the fun is clicking things and seeing what interactive features the place has to offer. I mean, that’s the whole POINT of SL is various types of interaction, right? Otherwise we could all just pile into IRC and type the night away. So it comes as a bit of a downer when an “official” sim has little or no interactivity. The ABC Melbourne Australia sim is once such place, and it’s too bad as it could have been a lot of fun. I’m guessing that the ABC in this case stands for “Australian Board of Commerce” or something, not ABC Television as in “we need writers.”

When you tp over to the sim, you wind up at a landing point with a lot of weird, flippy triangles flapping around. Umm.. okkkay. Can any australians here tell me if melbourne is prone to having flocks of weird, flippy triangles hovering about?

As we stood in the “landing zone,” we heard some odd noises of people talking and other noise, so we turned up our sounds. Apparently they’ve recorded public sounds of people scurrying about and generally acting australian in an urban setting, and put it in place here to simulate a hive of activity in a busy city. Unfortunately… this place was totally deserted.

Sadly, walking down the alley of stores only increased my disappointment. The stores were just facades.. you couldn’t go in, and there was nothing to click on or open. The building skill level here was basically “make a large square wooden prim, and apply some textures based on pictures of a store in melbourne.” Bummer.

The only place that was set up to actually enter really confused me. It was a square building, with one large room, which was textured to look like the sides of buildings. The effect was that you were standing in space inbetween the walls of buildings. And then there were rotating, colored, semi-transparent cubes in there with you. Ok… they are promoting drug use amongst tourists.. very nice.

The only point of real interest we found in our brief visit was the part I dubbed graffiti ‘n’ garbage alley.

There was also a cafe setting, and you actually could sit at the tables!!??!!! I think the name of it was laneways. I’m not really sure. No one could be found besides the 2d waiter, and he wasn’t talking.

Past Laneways was an open gathering area, or “park”, and beyond that was a water facing section with apparently some changing rooms. Being the shy people that we are, we opted not to use them in each others company, and anyway the sim crashed at that point or something as we both got logged out and wound up back at home when we logged back in.

I just don’t know what to say to any entity that comes into second life and builds a very non-interactive build, which then attracts precisely 0 avatars (besides us, anyway) and in no way would ever bring back anyone for a second visit. Please, people - make something that people can engage with and want to come back to or at the very LEAST recommend to others. Mmmmkay?

Now in fairness, we didn’t see the whole sim before it crashed, and the rest of it might have been the most interesting, interactive, and exciting place in SL!! But I seriously doubt it.

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