To Build a House with One Day of Experience

By Maki

STAGECOACH ISLAND—If you’ve forgotten about Stagecoach Island, allow me to refresh you.  It’s the corporate client world of Wells Fargo provided by Activeworlds, Inc.  It was our first look at the 4.1 browser and was once bloated with dozens of AW users as well as countless other visitors after learning of Stagecoach in magazines and other news sources.

As you probably guessed, Stagecoach faced a considerable slump shortly thereafter. Users who stuck around began complaining about the inability to own a home or buy land. But would such a feature be possible with the AW platform? And how would you integrate the bank system found in Stagecoach with this ability to build?

Just months over a year after the opening of Stagecoach, users who stuck it out this long were finally rewarded with the ability to call Stagecoach home. Three new “neighborhoods” were built into vast open areas around the island and opened on May 2nd.

Thanks to Stagecoach’s Community Blog site and Wells Fargo’s community liaisons, the launch of the feature received a lot of hype and has drawn nearly two dozen users in-world at peak hours.

Users are given the opportunity to purchase a maximum of two plots of land that are approximately 3x3 landa.rwxs each in size. The plots are in groups of four surrounded by streets, allowing four different people to build in one block or one person to purchase two of the four spaces. AWI needed to implement a way to control building: A bot used universally in-world controls land cover found underneath the terrain. When a buyer clicks a “For Sale” sign and confirms their choice by announcing “yes,” this underground property is converted to their ownership.

Something immediately caught my attention about this activity. Within hours of building having been available, a handful of users were putting up mansions and decorating their dining rooms. Granted, there are a few plots with some random junk on them, and one person I spoke with said the pieces they wanted weren’t fitting together correctly. But I’d never seen someone not familiar with the AW building platform go at it with such confidence.

I know when I first attempted building I was very afraid of the object properties window and hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I recall receiving a lesson or two in AWSchool and producing nothing but a couple of walls.

So what is it that we do wrong in AW? Debates have surfaced with regards to the AW building contests – critics claiming master builders make it impossible to win, others saying we really need to do a better job of teaching new users. Should we get AWSchool back in full gear? Re-open AWNewbie? It may not be the building interface preventing new users from getting started at all. Maybe it’s that in Active Worlds we present building as a sort of advanced ability. We certainly don’t toss users right into it – look where they enter! AWGate doesn’t even allow right-clicking.

In Stagecoach? Users longed for this activity like they knew it was the way the browser was meant to be. When released it was celebrated and accepted as the latest thing to do – not just an optional portion of the experience. Anyone looking at the user numbers before and after could assume building has a much greater hold compared to any other feature of the browser. Building is dynamic and time consuming. Jet skiing is a novelty. Even Bingo, now played twice a week in SI, is seeing poor numbers.

But how is it that building in Stagecoach seems to be coming more naturally? An SI Realty building houses three levels of information about the new neighborhoods and building features – one level for each of the three regions. Several clickable signs open a web page with information like basic building instructions, how to select multiple objects, and how to use the privileges of someone else. In the building you can also purchase, for $100, a day pass to a hidden world called Builder’s Paradise which is apparently a duplicate of the AWMegaOY (megapath object yard) world.

Stagecoach is only one world and three neighborhoods. People there know each other and it’s hard for them to build far from one another.

More importantly though - skills appear to be viral. Stagecoach is only one world and three neighborhoods. People there know each other and it’s hard for them to build far from one another. If someone new comes along, they are welcomed into the family. This close relation among users encourages collaborative knowledge. When someone figures out how to do something, they share it with friends (or steal it from friends). There are no teachers necessary and people don’t have to be left to fend for themselves. With this in mind it’s no wonder you can walk through a house that was built with three days worth of building knowledge and find real-working doors, lighting throughout, and avatars as objects jumping on beds.

On the other hand, only a few plots have been claimed or built upon. The main inhibitor of building is most likely the cost. A 3x3 plot will run you $100,000. Pocket change for many of us who have accumulated a mass of $23 billion (Wells Fargo recently stopped paying interest for a period of time stating users “had too much money.”), but a hell of a lot for someone who has just landed in Stagecoach with the current starting bonus of $50.

The price should be high, though. If you can keep that $50 in your pocket and let it earn interest – it does add up – and that should accomplish the lesson Wells Fargo intended to teach its players of Stagecoach back when it started. Building is likely the only thing in Stagecoach that actually shows users you can’t have everything unless you have enough money – offering mere t-shirts and joyrides before its introduction.

Interestingly, AWI also added a “Special Commands” line in the rights dialog in which certain actions like URL and picture can be entered and restricted from anyone without special commands rights. This was necessary for the protection of Stagecoach users, catering to a younger audience.

This article brings up many discussions but also shows how corporate clients don’t just fund new features, they can also provide a look into the behavior of users and may be useful for re-thinking the way we operate our own universe. So what do you think: A few exceptional individuals or can we change how people learn to build in AW?