Derek seems to be surrounded by people falling victim to Second Life these days.
This virus is spreading like wildfire... first my boss' boss found out about it, then all of our helpdesk people, now it's like spreading to other schools, and a good friend of mine it seems mentions at least once a day how she was doing this, that, or the other thing "in SL".
Yeegads, people, do all those things in the REAL WORLD. You know, The Big Blue Room. The room with the Scary Yellow Orb in the ceiling. The one those Luddites called in the ancient tongue, "Outside".
And that's where Star Trek: The Next Generation comes in. I'm stuck in an episode called "The Game". I'm Wesley Crusher, they're all the rest of the crew, and I'm really hoping Data figures out how to crash the game for good before they pin me down and force me to join in.
He doesn’t get the appeal.
Now, frankly, I don't understand the appeal. At all. I mean not a single bit. Except for those who are chat-room addicts desperately starved for human contact, or people who want to live out their Furry Fetishes, the attraction of Second Life is completely lost upon me.
Same here.
Thankfully, I've not fallen victim to this plague myself. I've avoided trying out Second Life for two reasons: (1) what I've seen of it so far hasn't been compelling enough for me to plunge in, and (2) knowing me, I could easily get addicted and find hours of my days vanishing in a hurry.
Posted by jzawodn at February 24, 2007 07:34 AM
I agree - it's much better to criticize something without experiencing it firsthand. That way, you can maintain your aura of coolness wherever you go - and we all know how important that is.
It's a very invigorating experience to make fun of those SL losers while we internet winners take care of stuff that actually matters to people - like showing them ads to make them buy more stuff they don't need.
I'm happy to admit that I don't 'get' second life, but I'm not alone:
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/journal/journal.php?user=toothpaste&id=573&readcomment=1
;)
I have to admit getting sucked into it about a week ago - just to find out what it's all about. They have a very interesting business plan. Both Linden Labs and a significant number of members are making *real money* selling virtualized goods.
The biggest money makers are a) real estate, b) things to adorn your real estate, and c) sex. The last one is not to be overlooked. The number of sex-related items for sale is staggering, and people are buying them and living out their desires in animated 3-d. If they do it right, there's literally no limit to money making opportunities. Just like the real world, people will pay for luxury items - even if the luxury items are just vectors in this case. They correspond to real needs. The real estate market is interesting, even though they can create more property at any time and change the supply side. There's is still some value in obtaining desirable property. For some it is close to other big draw locations, and for some the opposite.
Where Linden Labs doesn't yet have it right are two areas - scalability, and a refinement of IP rights. Currently, to build complex items, it can't be done in component fashion unless all the components are free; because permissions for a complex object inherit the most restrictive permissions of the components it was built with. If they solve that problem and provide royalties for component makers there will be a rash of new markets emerging, with some actually quite awesome virtual products.
Scalability is a huge concern though. The rendering engine starts to fail when you get more than 30-40 people in a 'region'; all doing complex things. So for all the millions of members, you can realistically only hope to interact with a handful at a time. The 'popular' destinations are impossible to visit - precisely because they are too popular.
A potential solution to this problem would be the ability to provide multiple views of the same space, where the only other visitors you see are those in your list of buddies or some other limiting criteria. It's an interesting challenge for them to come up with a social dynamic that works given the technical restrictions.
There are a lot of other dark sides to the place as well; such as gambling, prostitution, and crime (really), but overall it's interesting and highly addictive. The ability to generate revenue and capital from selling goods in (essentially) a MUD is quite novel.
For those people that have been struck with the SL virus, send them to the parody site:
It says what we all want to say.
I would love to visit SL but unfortunely I suffer from tech third worldness I have no computer from which to visit. It is I guess another one of those things where only those who can afford a SL can have a SL. Maybe a technology can be invented so we can all enjoy the "importantness" of this world we call Second Life.
This argument seems to go on and on. Why does participating in Second Life make any sense at all? I won't go into the mutitude of reasons one could state, but I can tell you how I justify my use of Second Life.
1) IT'S AN INTERESTING EDUCATIONAL MEDIUM - HIGLY IMMERSIVE AND INTERACTIVE (...if you know how to use it; )
2) PURPOSE - WHEN YOU HAVE PURPOSE IN SL, e.g. EDUCATION, THE MEDIUM TAKES ON COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DYNAMICS BECAUSE A GOAL IS BEING PURSUED - ONE IS NOT REDUCED TO A MERE "CHAT ADDICT".
PS - IF ONE ONLY SEES SL AS A CHAT MEDIUM, THEY ARE SORELY UNAWARE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE IN SL. TEXT-BASED COMMUNICATION IS NOT THE ONLY FORM OF COMMUNICATION POSSIBLE.
3) NETWORKING - HIGLY INTERESTING AND CREATIVE PEOPLE CAN BE FOUND "WASTING THEIR TIME" IN SECOND LIFE.
4) CREATIVITY - SL ACTS AS A WONDERFUL STIMULUS FOR CREATIVITY ( NOT JUST IN-WORLD BUT ALSO IN REAL LIFE)
Having poked around with it, I really don't see it as any different than web/IRC with some added multi-media options. Nearly every one of Kip's arguments could be more effectively made in other media. (Remote education comes to mind for a lot of it.)
The "avatar" angle is cute, but more of a gimmick than a requirement. I guess the thing that I find most annoying is that I'm nickeled and Linden Dollared to death about everything.
I fully understand that "I don't get it", nor do I think less of folks who "do". It's no better or worse than any other MMORPG.
What I'd REALLY enjoy is if someone were to take the public domain Quake or Open Arena engine and allow folks to host their own "worlds" on their own servers. Give folks a way to mess around with this stuff on their own, where everyone sets their own rules.
I was "into" SL about a year ago when a bunch of my friends got on. After a couple of weeks it got boring and we all went back to IRC. I still go back every now and then, but usually it's just me wandering around waiting for stuff to render...
Yeah my one and only experience with SL was freaky. It was last Saturday evening and I was sitting at home and decided to go and check things out. Created my character. Did the orientation bit. Went into whatever the main area where everyone was milling around was. Started talking to various people. Added myself to the bloggers group, the Baltimore group and the SXSW group. Within 5 minutes of being there, with an anonymous name, a reader of mine asks, "Baltimore? SXSW? Blogger? Are you Technosailor?"
Uh... yeah! Thank god I wasn't doing anything embarassing at the moment. :-)
BTW, have not gone back to SL since.
Second Life is the gateway to the destruction of our society. For everyone who admires it for it's "educational and creative" purposes, I think you need to rethink what you are getting yourself into.
Why would you sit on a computer all day running around in a virtual world when you can go out into the real world and experience these things first hand. Second Life is only an escape from people's reality, but it is only instant gratification, because as people get more and more immersed into the game, their actual realities begin to crumble.
This program needs to be destroyed for the sake of our people and for the sake of reality. Also if you haven't done any research, there have been many families crushed by virtual worlds such as SL. Great marriages get destroyed because someone gets immersed into this program and meets "the love of their life" and in turn destroys the relationship at hand.
SL and all other virtual worlds are leading us down a dark and endless path that destroys people's lives and will keep doing that as long as it exists.
Oh my, Troy... you sound like a medieval priest telling women not to have sex... or may be a modern one, who's in turn sued due to child abuse.
Don't you read? Why take the bother to fly to an imaginary world that someone else wrote, where you can do nothing but just observe what the author decided happenned in every aspect of that world? Do you (and all people like you) want to bury all books so that all people are forced to live 24/7 our real lives?
Come on, give me a break. I love reading and writing, and SL gives me the opportunity to write my own novel while reading the others, and making a huge one altogether. A novel that just ends up writing itself.
Particularly, I find it very amusing recreating (sort of) my real life in a virtual world, and see what it comes out of it, if something similar to what I have, or may be something absolutely different... is it our decisions that make or living, or is it the environment which gives our decisions the importance it considers and then decide what happen to us? Don't you ever wonder such things, Troy?
By the way, I love thinking Casad Zeffirelli is like a Matrix character, just believing she is real and I am just a dream of her.
I should read Snow Crash. (just a note to myself, sorry).
If you feel like it, visit my blog at casadzeffirelli.blogspot.com, and get to know her... I think she's fine (not as much as me, but anyway lol)
Yes, SL is going to destroy lives and families, much like rock 'n roll did in the 50's.
I am a SL addict, and I also get outside and 'do real things'. I enjoy the creative aspect of SL, and no you can't exactly do some of these things in real life
On any given day, I can take 30-60 minutes and travel to a half dozen virtual art galleries and interact with the creative people behind the art - something that would not be possible in real life (unless you had big wads of cash laying around).
Within 2 weeks of getting started in SL, I opened a virtual gallery of my own. Again, something not really possible in the real world.
In short, you will find whatever you are looking for. It seems that many critics are only looking for moral degradation. No surprise, they found it.
