“There’s never anybody there.”

“It’s always just silent, no one talks.”

“Everyone just stands around like they’re all afk.”

“I’m always ignored there, it’s just all about the clique.”

These are complaints often made about clubs and other venues in Second Life, even our favorite ones! The venue’s owner probably doesn’t want things to be this way, its visitors don’t want them this way, and yet they are. Staff have sent out admonishing notices to the group, tried to lead by example, and yet this less-than-ideal behavior continues. What gives? How do you change the culture of a place?

The truth is, this behavior often emerges from the venue’s basic design. I’m not going to delve too deep into psychology here (for one thing, I’m not qualified!) but I will point out some ways that you can encourage or discourage specific behaviors based on how you build your place. After that, I’ll get into a few best practices to help keep your venue on track.

I’ve designed several venues (making mistakes along the way), consulted on several more, spoken with other venue designers, and of course visited hundreds in my time in Second Life. Over the years, I’ve developed some strong opinions on what makes for good venue design. So if you own a venue and need to change things up, or if you want to build a new one, please give some consideration to my ideas! Some well-known places have tried them and found they worked – when their goal was to create a welcoming place with active local chat and engaged guests. If your goal is something else, then ignore me!

Size Matters

The first thing nearly every venue designer needs to hear: scale down! Build smaller! There are lots of reasons for this, and the fact that it’s cheaper isn’t the least of them. However, rather than helping you with your business plan, I’m going to discuss size from a design standpoint.

Local chat range is twenty meters. When you type something into local chat, anybody who’s more than twenty meters away will not see it. This single incontrovertible fact should be foremost in your mind when designing your space, whether you’re building it yourself or looking for a suitable prefab. “But Audie, chat relays exist, you idiot!” Forget them. They suck and they’re a crutch. Well, okay, you can use them, but you should still design your space as if you must accommodate 20m local chat.

I’ve been on dance floors where you wouldn’t be able to hear anybody coming in the entrance, anybody on stage, or even anybody on the other side of the dance floor without chat relays. Don’t do that. A sim can contain a standard maximum of forty avs and your venue will usually have much less. You don’t need that much empty space. (Also yes, private regions can hold up to a hundred avs, but if you have that many people stuffed into one venue, intelligible conversation is probably not your priority anyway.)

Instead, design your venue as a series of distinct spaces, sized such that anybody within that space can hear anybody else within it. That means no more than twenty meters across at the diagonal, though you can fudge that a bit since people will rarely actually be in opposite corners.

You want your venue to have an implicit guarantee: “If I see a person in the same space as me, then they will hear me when I talk.” If your venue does not have this guarantee, if spaces look too big to be able to reasonably hear each other, then the effect will be to smother conversation.

Spreading Your Guests Thin

“Come to my wonderful venue! We have a spa and a gym and a beach and a space station and a waterslide and a massage room and a rodeo and…” It sounds great on paper. As a creative and innovative designer, don’t you want your venue to have tons of places for visitors to explore?

Actually, no.

Have you ever heard the classic advice about what to do if you’re someone’s dinner guest and they serve something you don’t like? You take a few nibbles, spread the rest out around your plate so it looks like there’s less left, then claim you’re full. Well, venues are the same way. Spread people out and it looks like you have fewer visitors.

Consider these two images:

These are two different theoretical venue maps. Green dots are your guests, twelve in both. The red dot is your venue’s landing point. And the yellow circle is twenty meters of local chat range around your landing point. If somebody drops in at your landing point, on which map will your venue immediately look populated? If your new guest says hi, on which map do you think they’re more likely to get a response?

Here’s the lesson: don’t encourage your guests to spread out. Instead, concentrate them. Guests get an impression of your place in just a few seconds. Getting guests to stay rather than immediately teleport back out often requires a critical mass of already-present guests. Get them to think, “Hey, it’s kinda busy, I’ll say hi,” instead of, “Oh, nobody is here, I’ll find somewhere with people.”

The Gathering Area

But you don’t need to concentrate people by getting rid of your venue’s unique features. (Although that is also effective, and cost-saving!) You can have whatever fun secondary areas you like as long as you also have a well-designed gathering area. This is the place where you want your guests to be by default. Your landing point will not be an attraction in itself. You must intentionally design a space for people to gather in. Its design should encourage them to linger there, and it should invite them to interact with each other.

Your gathering area must absolutely be a space that accommodates twenty meter local chat range. It is not much of a gathering area if people aren’t sure if their conversation will reach the other side of the room. Enclose the space with walls or trees or other obstacles (for a dance area) or suggest a space with a circle of seating (if you want to encourage conversation).

Ideally, your landing point should also be within twenty meters of the gathering area, even if it’s somewhat off to the side. It’s also okay if your gathering area is instead visible at a further distance when you land. But within chat range is ideal: people are more likely to stick around if they’re immediately greeted. Also, nobody wants to take a long walk (or worse, have to hunt around for a teleporter) in order to get to where the action is.

You can still have other types of areas or private spaces. However, nobody will be using them 95% of the time… and that’s okay! Your gathering area will be the soul of your venue. Ideally, any other spaces should be just outside of chat range of the gathering area with a clear path back to it. Whatever you do, wherever people might land, give them a clear path back to your real hub of activity.

Function Follows Form

People will unconsciously do what your venue appears to be designed for. Their behavior will reflect the layout and general vibe of the place.

Do you have a circle of single seat chairs? People will sit and tend to interact mostly in local chat.

Are you using loveseats or cuddle cushions instead? Then people will still use local chat, but will also tend to jump into instant message to try to pair off with someone before they’re beaten to it.

Do you have no seating, but the space is still enclosed and visibly small enough for local chat to be reliable? Then they will often use local chat there too, and will often unconsciously arrange themselves into a circle. Fun to watch.

Is your space an incredibly huge box or just a mostly undifferentiated open area? Then people will stand all over, often out of chat range of each other, and mostly do nothing. There is no focal point and not everyone will hear them if they chat, so it’s instant messages or nothing, and as the path of least resistance, your guests will often choose nothing.

If you want your guests to interact, design a space that invites them to interact. A space that accommodates local chat with a clear focal point is about all it takes. If your space only accommodates people standing around at random distances from each other, then that is what they will do.

Stick To Your Niche

What’s your goal in designing your place? What do you want people to do when they’re there? What’s your brand? What’s your place for? These are questions you should answer for yourself, design your place around, and then never deviate from.

And it should really be a niche. Not too specific, but not too general either. You need to give people a reason to go there, something they can’t quite get anywhere else, and a reason to search your place out. At the same time, you need to appeal to enough people to have a decent number of guests.

After that, make sure you don’t dilute your niche. If you’re building Frank’s Foot-Loving Lounge, you don’t also want a room that caters to people with a nurse fetish. A dance club? Maybe don’t also put out a wrestling ring. A joint where you want the general public to hook up with each other? Then don’t employ dancers who will try to pull attention to themselves instead. Basically, once you have decided what you want to do, don’t distract from it by also trying to do something else. Think through everything you want to add.

This goes for your events too! Getting a DJ to spin at your place for two hours is an easy attraction, but is it helping you achieve your goal? The people who want to dance to music are often not the same people who want to hook up at a sex club… so why is your sex club having a dance? If all of your events are unrelated to your niche, then you’ll end up with a core of regulars who are not using your place for its purpose. I really can’t emphasize it enough: Unless your goal is to have a dance club, having most of your events be dances is a mistake.

From design to best practices…

Nobody’s Going To Read Your Rules

The name of this section pretty much says it all. You’ll be lucky if your average guest opens your rules notecard, much less reads the whole thing. Don’t rely on a notecard to communicate your venue’s mission. Your venue should speak for itself.

If you do have a rules notecard (and to be honest, you probably should, just to be on record – troublemakers always try to play lawyer) then keep it short. The less there is to read, the more likely it gets read at all.

Also, remember that rules ultimately exist to keep your guests having fun. Have the bare minimum set of rules that can accomplish this. If you’re enforcing your rules just because they’re your rules and for no other reason, then you’re inflicting the opposite of fun. A lot of venues will kick and ban someone for violating one of their precious rules when they aren’t actually being disruptive. That quickly turns into stories about unfair and draconian management, and soon enough, people who might be good for your venue aren’t bothering to show up.

Consider an example. You run a club that’s all about men dancing for the women, and women aren’t allowed on stage. One afternoon, it’s a slow day, and two men and a woman are flirting in local chat. By and by, the men invite the woman to dance for them, and excited by the prospect of a role reversal, she complies. The men cheer, the woman laughs, then you storm in and put a stop to this clear violation of your rules. Now, what exactly did you accomplish? Are those people coming back?

You have rules to make your venue fun for everyone, within reason. If you find that your rules are frequently stamping out fun instead, reconsider your rules! Some things should be simply encouraged rather than set in stone.

Who Notices The Notice?

A plain truth: a lot of people have group notices simply toggled off. If you’re sending notice after notice after notice frantically promoting this and that, a lot of your members have certainly turned your group’s notices off as well. Keep in mind that they go to offline users’ email as well, so you may also be spamming all your offline members! Sending four notices where one would do ensures only that your notices will end up reaching fewer people.

I won’t belabor the point, but here’s a good practice I’ve arrived at after years of owning venues: Send one notice per event or promotion per day. Any followup (halftime announcements and the like) should be done in group chat with an accompanying SLURL, which you get by copying and pasting from your viewer’s address bar. Relatedly, every group notice should be accompanied by a callout in group chat, keeping in mind, again, that many people will have group notices turned off.

So to sum up, more than maybe two notices per day is probably too many, and you’ll be encouraging people to turn off your notices more than anything else. Any additional promotion you’re tempted to do should be done via group chats, which are less spammy and annoying overall.

The Question Of Voice

I’ve seen venues struggle with this question: Should voice be on or off? Is there a downside to having voice on as just an extra optional feature that people can use or not use as they like? I’m going to argue that there is a downside. My opinion is that if you want voice as a feature at your venue, then it should be a prominent, advertised feature, a pillar of your venue’s focus. If you do not wish to have voice as a central feature of your venue but are considering having it on as an “extra,” I suggest turning it off instead.

People who like voice tend to seek out voice-centered venues, and end up in a circle of friends who congregate at places where using voice is just part of the culture. Otherwise, text chat tends to be the average visitor’s go-to — if your venue hasn’t prominently advertised voice as a feature, most people just stumbling upon it are going to reach for the keyboard before the mic.

Unless you’re up front about the fact that many of your guests will be using voice exclusively, then you’ll be creating a sort of tiered venue. There’s people in the know, talking on voice, and the people not listening in, who are typing away wondering why everyone is so quiet. Many people can’t or simply don’t like to use voice, even when it comes to just listening in. (For one thing, deaf people play SL too!) When they realize there’s a whole layer of stuff happening that they can’t or don’t want to participate in, they’ll feel less welcome and likely leave. Therefore, it’s best to be up front about it.

There’s a well-accepted principle when it comes to designing for inclusivity: Designing your venue to be inclusive to as many people as possible also improves the overall experience for everyone.

Additionally, there’s a moderation issue. Voice is live, and violations of your rules on voice need to be heard in the moment, which means you and your managers need to be tuned in. If you or your managers can’t or won’t do this, then your voice chat is effectively unmoderated. When someone comes to you with an accusation regarding something that happened on voice, you will not be able to verify it. Voice chat as an unmoderated backchannel will, sooner or later, be abused. If you wish to have voice on, there’s simply more work involved, and that work isn’t optional if you want your venue to be moderated at all.

So my advice would be to boil this issue down to two binary choices. You can lean into voice, making it a prominent, obvious feature of your venue, so that every visitor is in the know as they pop in. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to specifically be a voice venue, then I suggest turning it off so that every visitor is getting everything your venue has to offer, and so that you don’t have an unmoderated backchannel that can be abused. Other than that, voice venues and non-voice venues are simply two different sorts of places, and which is better is up to your personal preference.

Cliques: The Clubkiller

Cliques are one of the two most common deaths of a venue. Your club is dying to a clique when it begins catering to a specific friend group above all and is no longer used for its original purpose, or is no longer welcoming to new visitors. When a new visitor feels like they can’t integrate into the crowd or can’t be part of the conversation without first becoming friends with certain people, then you’ve got a clique situation on your hands, and most of those new visitors won’t be back.

Building a club around yourself and a core group of friends who are also into your club’s theme is a good idea — but you and your friends have to be welcoming to strangers, and you all have to care more about seeing the club succeed than having a good time amongst yourselves at that particular moment. Cliques only sometimes form around the owner, though. Perhaps more often, they form around a manager who effectively becomes the club’s foremost leader in the owner’s absence. Sometimes, when a club’s management are mostly absentee, a clique can form spontaneously amongst a few of its regulars.

At their worst, cliques are actively hostile to newcomers. You may have seen this yourself — think of a sex club where there’s always that one chatty group of people, the ones who never hook up with anybody, making fun of everybody who actually shows up there looking for sex, mocking their appearance and whatnot. Needless to say, few people are visiting that place twice. Cliques can also just be passively hostile, though. Think of a club you visit where the regulars are always chatty, but not to you. You show up, but nobody greets you. You attempt to join the conversation, but everyone carries on as though you didn’t say anything. No one is outright rude, but still, do you feel welcome?

The key to avoiding the clique death is to lead by example. Along with your management, establish a culture of being open and welcoming, and greet everyone who shows up. You must also moderate — be there to see toxicity as it occurs, then squelch it mercilessly. If you let mocking and toxicity happen without comment, then toxic people will identify your venue as a safe space for them, and before long it’ll be pervasive. So in summary, be present and lead by example.

You can have the best venue design on the entire grid, but it’s connections with other people that will keep your guests coming back. Your role is to enable those connections — a good venue is bigger than just its owner and their friends!

(This relates to my advice on voice, incidentally — a non-voice-focused venue having voice activated anyway is a common way for a clique to spontaneously arise. If you have voice on, make its existence obvious to your visitors, and be in there to moderate it!)

(You may be wondering, what’s the other most common death of a venue? That’d be the dance of death — read the last paragraph of the Stick To Your Niche section!)

To Sum Up…

Build to accommodate local chat limited to twenty meters. Don’t build too big.
Create distinct spaces where people feel like they’re actually together, instead of individual islands in a vast limbo.
Have an area near your landing point with the sole purpose of gathering guests together to interact with each other.
Secondary areas to explore are nice, but remember that your venue will create more interaction if you encourage people to gather rather than spread out.
Design your venue for its purpose. If you want guests to interact, create a space that invites them to do so.
Pick your niche and stick to it. Don’t create distractions, don’t dilute your venue’s intended purpose.
When planning events, ask yourself who that event will bring in. Is it the people your venue needs to accomplish what you built it for?
Most people won’t read your long notecard of mission statements and rules, but that’s okay if your venue speaks for itself.
Make sure your rules are ensuring fun times and not preventing them. People are there because they like your idea. Trust them and use a light touch.
Don’t inundate your members with group notices. Being in your group should be a positive thing, not an avalanche of spam.
Make the presence of voice a deliberate decision that you lean into, and not a “just because” thing. If it’s on, advertise it and moderate it!
Be present at your venue, lead by positive example, and crush toxicity mercilessly.
Basically, think through every little decision you make for your venue, because your guests will react to them without even realizing it. Set yourself up for success!