I’m no pushover!

There are a great many things to like about shopping inworld: The ability to peruse the contents of a whole shop, without the need to walk around; freebies, gifts and lucky chairs; no messing about with fiddly loose change. However, it’s not all fun and games – there are a bunch of annoyances that go hand-in-hand with the good things: Landing points nowhere remotely near store entrances; barrages of popups on landing; doors that pretend to be windows, and windows that pretend to be doors; and forced landing points that require you to walk through the whole store, rather than TPing straight to where you want to be.

And now, a further annoyance (to me, anyway), seems to be a fairly recent ‘innovation’ that has become a standard feature in the last couple of years in all sorts of settings, but mainly store-fronts: The detestable landing zone sweeper.

Simply put, for the unitiated, a sweeper is a sneaky device that scoops up your avatar on arrival, and dumps you, often in a random direction, several metres from the landing point. The reasoning behind it is that physically moving avatars away from the landing point prevents congestion and bodies piling up in one place. Whilst this might initially seem a good idea, I find it a big irritation and – if I could have it my way – I’d ban the blasted things altogether!

To begin with, I object to being pushed around, whether it’s by another avatar, or some faceless scripted object; if I wanted to lose control of my body, I’d enable RLV and let someone else control me, but for me there are few things as annoying as arriving at a new location only to suddenly be swept off your feet, against your will, with no control over what has suddenly decided to propel you away – it’s quite disorientating, particularly when you’re swept in a completely different direction to the one that you need to go; add the additional confusion of being at a landing point for multiple stores on a sim, and sometimes I simply can’t be bothered to try looking for the store I want. Recently, I was unceremoniously ejected in completely the opposite direction to where I needed to go, at which point I’d already had enough, and as a result they lost my custom.

I think it’s important to understand that shopping in SL is not like shopping in the real world. If I’m off to buy a pair of jeans in RL, I’ll usually be approaching on foot and, for some considerable distance away, I’d be able to see the entrance to the store. It’s unlikely, unless it’s prior to opening time, that there’ll be a mob of bargain hunters cluttering up the entrance, and from the second that I arrive on the scene, I can clearly see where I’m heading, and can breeze through the doors and straight to where I want to go.

Compare and contrast this with shopping inworld. Buying that same pair of jeans presents unique virtual challenges… For a start, I can’t see where I’m going, so I’ve no idea how busy the entrance will be when I arrive there, that’s if I can even clearly see the entrance – chances are, I’ll have to wait until things have rezzed to some degree of recognisability before I can even think about moving, and that can take an inordinate amount of time, with me hanging around with a whole bunch of others having the same problem at, you guessed it, the landing point. Even so, few people intentionally spend more time stood outside the store than they need to – they want to get shopping – so, you’d expect them to make a move once the world has rezzed, however those very same store owners who go to such lengths to ensure their clients are swept away from the entrance then go and muddy the waters, by coming up with a host of distractions that will keep people hanging around there for far longer than they need to.

Again, let’s consider what happens in the real world. Apart from maybe a couple of window displays and the odd sale poster, all of the action happens inside the store. Want to pick up a bargain, join a loyalty scheme, find out the latest news and events the store is participating in? You have to go inside, but not in SL. Inworld, the general rule seems to be to have as many distractions as possible right outside, or just inside, the main entrance. Giveaways and freebies, hunt clues, event landmark givers, group joiners… All of them located right where the congestion occurs, causing even more of a delay in getting through the doors, as customers grab what’s on offer and mill around, moving from noticeboard to noticeboard. If that’s not distracting enough, you then have to deal with requests to put your picture on display, popups asking you to join the store group, and pointless welcome messages, all of which have to be negotiated before you’ve even had a chance to set foot through the door. None of this, in any way, promotes the swift and smooth flow of traffic arriving at the entrance.

Then finally, to add insult to injury, rather than walk across miles of showroom to get to the jeans, I’ll remote cam, then double-click TP to them, which – of course – results in me being dumped right back at my starting point, amongst all the new arrivals waiting to rez, checking out event links, grabbing gifts and clearing screens full of popups, and – adding insult to injury – I’m then dragged bodily off in a completely different direction by some well-intentioned, but utterly unnecessary landing point sweeper, which is where all of this started in the first place!

And, whether you’re a fan of these devices or not, the fact of the matter is that if a store entrance keeps getting clogged up, then, much of the time, simple planning and decluttering of that initial rez point can make a world of difference: Keep it wide open and free of complex structures that’ll take an age to rez; move all the unnecesary distractions indoors, so that people have no need to loiter; do away with all the pop-up messages and nonsense, (everyone dismisses them, anyway); maybe consider having wide-open doorways and no tricky steps, water features and pathways to negotiate, just to get to the front entrance, and you may just find that you don’t need to sweep your landing point, after all!

Given the choice between having a stranger land on top of me, or for that matter, landing on top of a stranger myself, or being bodily whisked away without permission by some scripted entity the moment I set foot in a place, I’d plump for the former every time. While some may not like it, a simple apology, laughing it off, or – heaven forbid – ignoring it and realising this is how SL works, is a simple and far more human solution than being physically pushed around and abused for having the temerity to turn up at someone’s store to buy something.

And, if you don’t like my opinion… You can shove off!

s. x

Come on push it, you can do it
Come on prove it, nothing to it
Come on use it, let’s get through it
Come on push it, you can do it
Garbage – Push It