http://quizzicalcharms.blogspot.com/2007/04/bonus-mission-2-second-life-semi.html
Developed by Linden Lab, Second Life is the latest craze that is making waves amongst netizens. Armed with the tagline,” Your World. Your Imagination”, Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world built entirely by its users, called "Residents", it allows them to interact with each other through personalized avatars. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. (“Second Life”, 2007)Just Another Game?Many call it a game but there are no losers or winners in Second life, it does not involve collecting gold rings and nuggets to add points and moving on to the next level or shooting aliens and weird creatures that comes your path, but yet it is highly entertaining and addictive like most best selling games. “Second Life is beyond a game,” says Foxy Xevious, a Second Life Resident, “it is a tool for artistic freedom that brings people together.” Indeed, you get to meet resident from all walks of life, you get to discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. There is also a high level of interaction going on in there, as you get to socialise and join in these activities. Similar to the idea of living in a fantasy world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), what sets Second Life apart is that “Second Life is intended to be a canvas, rather than a world that constrains residents to a specific theme or style,” says Linden Lab vice-president of product development, Cory Ondrejka. (Cook, 2007)Paint My World, Paint My LifeSecond Life residents build anything they want; they own it and can share it with other residents any way they want. Giving players ownership of whatever they create — from digital vehicles to “skins” that characters can wear to change their appearance— is a critical way “to truly maximize growth and innovation,” according to Ondrejka.(Cook, 2007) Second Life is all about personal expression and your avatar is the most personal expression of all. After all, an avatar is what represents you are the virtual world. It is very simple to personalize your avatar and it allows you to change anything you like, from hairstyles to the color of your eyes, and at point of time. Second Life is a world of no boundaries; you get to explore beautiful landscapes and even an underwater kingdom! It is also all about experiencing things that you will never get in real life. In Second Life, you could dine at the fanciest restaurants or dance the night away in the trendiest clubs and hang out with the coolest people in town. Being a resident in Second Life is more than just being part of a virtual community, it is literally being a citizen of a virtual world. The beauty of the virtual world is that it is a combination of the real world and the fictional world, and residents have the all access pass to experience them.Life of the Rich and the FamousOndrejka says that Second Life is simply drawn from the real world, pointing out: “Economic and market forces work in digital worlds in the same way that they have always worked, from ancient Athens to the modern world.” Second Life has its own fully integrated economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). As residents create new goods and services, they also buy and sell them in the Second Life. Second Life's real estate market provides opportunities for Residents to establish their own communities and business locations. Towards the end of 2006, Anshe Chung, the avatar or Ailin Greaf, has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world. Named as the "Rockefeller of Second Life" by a CNN journalist, she has built an online business that engages in development, brokerage, and arbitrage of virtual land, items and was recently featured on the cover of Business Week Magazine.(“Anshe Chung”, 2007)ConclusionSecond Life is not a game, it is a place you can go and be whoever you want and do what ever you want. That is where the future of the Net is heading to. So if the real world is getting you down, you can always turn to Second Life and lead a semi charmed kind of life. References:1. Cook, B.(2007) Second Life: Build Anything, Be Anyone, Set Your Own Agenda. Apple Hot News. Retrieved on 6 April, 2007 from http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2005/07/secondlife/2. Second Life. (2007,). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 6 April, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Second_Life&oldid=1206965733. Linden Research, Inc. (2007) What is Second Life? Retrieved on 7 April, 2007 from http://secondlife.com/whatis/4. Anshe Chung. (2007). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 7 April, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anshe_Chung&oldid=120060081
Friday, December 21, 2007
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Second Life: Fears of a parallel life
http://www.lowfatbrains.com/tag/marshall-mcluhan/
I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.
But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.
What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.
The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.
What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.
As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.
I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.
I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.
But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.
What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.
The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.
What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.
As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.
I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.
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