Hype, or “Everything old is new again”
They opened the State of Play V conference last night (on virtual worlds) with the rough cut of a new documentary about Second Life called Ideal World, produced and directed by Glen Thomas. It was pretty interesting as a primer on virtual worlds and what might be possible with them, told as a story about a couple who were early adopters and now finance their lives on a remote farm in Georgia with their SL earnings.
The one thing the movie really lacks is any skepticism about all this; it’s so relentlessly upbeat it could have been produced by Linden Labs’ PR department. Much of what’s going on in virtual worlds isn’t really *new* - many of the same issues and opportunities were talked about in the early days of the Internet itself, but also in previous virtual worlds (Worlds Away, The Palace, CompuServe…). I don’t find the let’s-trash-anything-popular school of journalism at all interesting, but I do think that presuming that anyone and everyone can benefit from having the fantasy world of their dreams is well…a bit fatuous. Quite apart from whether everyone can afford sufficiently high-powered technology, the big issue is TIME. A single mother with more jobs than children would probably absolutely love to have a fantasy life in which she hung out with adult friends, drove cools cars, wore fashionable clothes, and behaved irresponsibly - but exactly when is she supposed to be able to do this? And will her online friends help with child care?
The one downside issue the movie touches on is network lag, which is, genuinely, the bane of every SLer’s second existence. With businesses interested in SL as a platform, it’s a problem that Linden Labs has a lot of motivation to solve, but I’m not sure it *can* be solved unless someone comes up with a P2P way of spreading the load; AIUI Linden’s design relies on central servers, and I think there’s a built-in limit there in terms of what one company can provide.
If there’s a Blindside issue there, I guess it’s scalability: over and over again on the history of the Net we’ve seen that things that work fabulously well when they’re small and their membership is restricted and/or homogeneous (Usenet, email, blog communities, CompuServe forums) do not scale to large numbers. Usually spam and other forms of network abuse are the problem.
wg
August 20th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Yes, I’m sure there is a Blindside question of “Appropriate scale”
“Ideal World” does sound a bit odd (especially to those of us who have spent years thinking baout Ideal Government). You have to be sceptical about SL to make sense of its limits, and the ideal world has flowers in it.
August 21st, 2007 at 10:02 am
I think it is useful to talk about Second Life, if we all keep in mind the idea that it’s a Beta version of a concept that will undoubtedly emerge. The issues I would like to see discussed regarding Second Life include (but are not limited to)
What kind of difference can an avatar-driven lifestyle make for the disabled?
What role can SL and its successors play in education and training?
Our societies have become increasingly individualized, with family units growing smaller and f2f friendships fewer. Will SL type worlds exacerbate this or provide an alternative?
I have a friend who lives online. She’s intelligent, empathetic, hard-working and pays great attention to detail. She’s obese and has a bad complexion. Living online allows her to function without exposing herself. On the one hand, living online increases her comfort level and ability to live and work. On the other hand, it reduces any need for her to work on serious issues.
Is living online helping her or killing her, or both?