Marking this to come back and read again later. Great post.
@lindendollars - anything to add? (I always assumed your choice of username had something to do with SL [yikes, I see you were only active for about 3 weeks in early April; come back, Shane?])
It is easy to misunderstand you, you still havenāt clearly stated what you are complaining about. Twice you have complained about āstereotypesā, but when I ask what stereotypes you are referring to, you donāt say.
No, there is also that which is not meaningfully critical at all, which was my take on the article. You seem to be slamming it by implying that it was deeply critical in ways which you feel arenāt justified. Yet you still havenāt bothered to explain what you think its criticisms are, or how you see things differently. Itās more like you are upset because somebody painted an unflattering picture of your friend. If you donāt like it, then you can go into some critical depth, so that people can understand why.
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Minecraft seems like a prime example of what fuzzyfungus called āgames more tightly optimized for specific purposes.ā Not that thereās anything wrong with that! Itās just disappointing that no oneās managed to make a compelling general-purpose VR environment with really broad pan-cultural appeal.
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The VR hardware is still rather unusual. Oculus Rift and Cardboard are steps in the right direction but we need more than lousy steps, we need a whole long march.
Without immersion, the virtual environments have too many drawbacks to really take off.
Iād go with catering first to niche markets, and designing frameworks that make designs of the environments easier (e.g. physics models, libraries of objects and environments, conversion tools for existing data, e.g. Google Earth/Street View models). And, important, have a standard for VR headsets that would provide compatibility between different hardware.
And start with things like CAD and STL viewers, viewers of DICOM medical data, 3d object editors for 3d printers or CNC, physics simulators, visualisation of Big Data queriesā¦
I still have a small, dwindling group of friends I chat with primarily on a MOO.
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I used to have three such small groups. But they fell apartā¦
I do not want to live in a world where Blackboard is some kind of endpoint.
/shudders
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Well, I was a pretty avid user back in 2006-07. I remember Second Life having quite a dated feeling to it.
Thinking it over, that was probably due to how shoddy the overall experience felt. Clicking small bubbles to initiate weird poses or drive barely functional vehicles lost its novelty pretty quickly.
I still visit virtual worlds now and then, but mostly just to take photographs and observe in wonder. āThereā is the last one I visited and despite it being pretty old, I actually thought it felt more fluent than SL.
Again owing to the fact that SL uses those god-awful animation bubbles for basically anything.
Oh and also Linden Dollars is actually why I chose this username. Thanks for asking me for my input!
xo
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Itās the heat death of the metaverse, man.
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We agree to disagree perhaps then. I am off building virtual sets in my backyard Hollywood now. Enjoy the bulletin board - it was fun and super retro indeed 
Forgive me. Bulletin boards when I went to college were made out of wood and cork, not even dialup modems and copper. But what youāre describing sounds depressingly like Facebook or Google Plus. Say it aināt so.
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