Chalk and Cheesy

Went to the Vodafone sim with Oclee, and I am afraid we both disliked it intensely.

The video which is playing on all the parcels features Ben and Lucy Patronising from Vodafone, who seem to think that they are talking to nine year olds.

Perfectionist Oclee declares the building as sucky: poorly constructed (seams all over the place, floors at different levels etc, textures not lined up). The terraforming has gone mad, the stretched land is causing lag, and I have to womder why they set the water 90 metres up and then stretched the land to the point of interference with good operation of the sim, when all the building floats on prim islands…. There are some really badly-built objects.

SL has off days during which lining up a seam can be a problem. Builds have to be done quickly and things can be overlooked. Prims can drift and rot. I’m a developer, I have been there and done that on occasion, as Oclee is quick to point out. But this is pretty bad. Two floor panels don’t just not line up with the prims next to them, they don’t line up with each other either…and one seems to be tilted too. Some builds will forgive that sort of mistake - with a busy texture you can get away with murder. On a plain coloured floor it shows up very, very clearly.

The free skates include the campest skating animation ever seen in SL… doesn’t Vodafone realise that Moopf’s skates are one of the most successful and most popular items in SL, and their free offering just doesn’t compare with Moopf’s $50 version, which many people in SL have?

You can swim… but watch out for the scary octopus, warns Ben and Lucy. Oh my goodness, do they REALLY think that adults will enjoy this, be engaged by it? You can sit and listen to their video explaining what you can do in the sim, you can sit and have tea, you can sit on a flying butterfly. Well, really.

This smacks of a marketing department sitting down one afternoon after a liquid lunch and putting everything they came up with in one sim. They are too taken with the marvels of SL and not discriminating enough to weed out the good from the bad. They have wasted the opportunity they had to persuade me that they know what they are doing in this space. It requires virtually no intelligence to go here - in fact I recommend you leave any you have at home.

They have had one idea to try to provide a marketing viral buzz: a water cooler which doles out a free gift every day. I thought this sounded like a cool idea, and especially liked the idea you could take a vendor home with you and get a free gift each day. The trouble is that it is elementary that the free gift has to be worth having or it will have the opposite effect. And the bench I received really… wasn’t worth spending the 8 prims on.

I was so disappointed… I expected something gadgetty and up-to-date from Vodofone. I love their TV ads. But this…doesn’t come close.

Finally, you can visit the Future Vision area and have a look at Vodophone’s projects of the future. Hmmm. Chemistry. Apparently. Well that’s all I could find to see.

I am all in favour of not having more of the grey or off-white commercial builds that are scattered over SL, but sim builds have to have some unity of purpose! Some intelligence, some understanding of how people explore in SL and how they use sims. Some understanding of what people look for and what they want. The colours and ideas here are all from the nursery. They should know childlike = good, childish = bad. It’s childish in its approach and content. Silliness in SL can be the most enjoyable and exhilarating thing, but you can’t force it - this is like sticking a label on yourself which says “COOL and FUNKY”…it’s just… not.

We travelled to AOL Pointe sim, which is another case entirely. The build is well done, and there has been a lot of thought given to providing activities people might actually want and enjoy here.

There are some minor criticisms… it looks a bit cluttered because there is a lot of stuff, there seem to be far too many posters and signs in the sim - and there seemed to be a lot of textures, which my computer was struggling to load. Even after 15 minutes in the sim it was grey in a lot of places, and a lot of the posters and signs were still unreadable.

The running man spam! Over and over…I wanted to pick him up and seal him to the sticky wall with superglue after the first five or six messages.

That having been said, this is an adult build full of things to explore, and I recommend that you go there and check it out for yourselves. (AOL Pointe 197,171,26)