Tales of cyber-neurosis
October 13, 2010 Leave a comment
Whenever I’ve felt tempted to grumble about my job over the last few weeks I’ve reminded myself that I’m not working down a Chilean copper mine. Now that this story looks certain to have a happy ending I think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that our virtual playgrounds all depend on the labour of men in the darkness deep underground, digging out the metals that build the bones of our modern world.
October 5, 2010 Leave a comment
The Tory Party Conference is under way, and the headline news today is George Osborne’s plan to abolish child benefit payments to higher rate taxpayers.
This is a smart political move, as the fuss the cut will generate among the middle classes will dominate the media, and provide cover for the even harsher cuts he has in store for poorer sections of society (the full horror of which we probably won’t know until the conclusion of the spending review at the end of this month), promoting the fallacy that “We are all in this together”.
The attack on child benefit isn’t just about saving money though, it is a strike at one of the central pillars of the Welfare State, the concept of Universality. The idea that all children have the same entitlement, whatever their background, is a powerful statement of social equality, and eroding it is part of the Tories’ plan to turn back the last 60 years of progress and return us to the divided society of the pre-war era.
There is already a two-tier education system, which will be extended by the plans to allow Universities to charge what they like for tuition, effectively reserving higher learning, and the economic advantages it bestows, for the rich. The NHS in England is going to be dismantled in favour of a patchwork of privatised provision, and the general benefits system is threatened with huge cuts. All this while a double-dip recession looms, and millions face joblessness. The wealth gap may have grown massively over the last decade, but it looks like it may get mediaeval in the years ahead.
Grim times. It would be nice to think that things were looking brighter on the other side of the Atlantic, but it seems that the right is set for an unlikely resurgence there too. This month’s Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the Tea Party, their regressive politics (summed up succinctly by writer Matt Taibbi; “After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit”), and how, ironically, their incoherent populist anger is being co-opted by the Republican Party to serve the interests of the financial elites that the TP-ers supposedly despise. The Democrats, meanwhile, seem to have been stunned into inaction by the disappointment that has been the Obama administration.
Grim, grim times. We can only keep working away, and hope that the cold winds of change blow some life into the embers of revolt.
September 22, 2010 1 Comment
Exciting news from Scandinavia this week, where Swedish developers MindArk (the team behind Entropia Universe) have teamed up with the Michael Jackson estate to produce Planet Michael, “an innovative interactive gaming and social experience that celebrates Michael Jackson’s life as an artist and humanitarian”.
I could use this as a cue for a whole host of bad-taste jokes, but we’re much too classy for that here at SLS, so instead I’ll note that MindArk, along with other virtual world firms like (NSFW) Utherverse Digital Inc., seem to be following the sort of business plan that we’ve been advocating for Second Life for a while; don’t chase the mass market, go for the niche customers who are willing to pay a premium for the particular virtual experience they are interested in.
September 13, 2010 Leave a comment
Back in the days of my youth there existed a publication called Soviet Weekly, which one could buy from old tankies on demonstrations, or pick up from big piles that were left in the foyers of certain union offices. It carried uplifting stories about grain surpluses in the Ukraine, or record tractor production in Minsk, along with pictures of heroic cosmonauts, and smiling orphans enjoying free holidays on the Black Sea, all painting a picture of the workers’ paradise that was the Soviet Union. It was always detached from reality of course, and by the late 1980’s it had become completely surreal. Not long before the USSR finally fell apart Soviet Weekly disappeared, and even a few weeks later it was hard to imagine that it had ever existed at all. (It has vanished so completely there is hardly a trace of it on the internet; all I could find were a couple of scans and some old copies for sale on eBay).
I always imagined that the end came for Soviet Weekly when the strain of reconciling what was actually happening with the Party line plunged the editors into some sort of existential crisis, but actually it seems unlikely that anyone took an active decision to kill it off, such was the ossification of the Soviet bureaucracy by that time. The final blow was probably struck by something mundane, like the embassy running out of money to pay the printers, or the old Telex machine breaking down.
Anyway, I was thinking of this when I read that Hamlet Au was throwing in the towel at New World Notes and decamping to perennial next-big-thing Blue Mars.
I don’t want to suggest that Hamlet’s essentially harmless SL-boosting was ever the equivalent of glossing over the legacy of Stalinism, but I do wonder if, like the editors of Soviet Weekly, he eventually found the continuous demand to find positive things to write about a world that was crumbling around him just to difficult to sustain.
September 8, 2010 Leave a comment
We haven’t had a zombie story for a while, so here’s a good one; Baltimore University is offering a course in Zombie Studies, which gives students the chance to “get … ready for a zombie apocalypse.”
“[Students] think they’re taking this wacko zombie course,” says Jonathan Shorr, chairman of the university’s school of communications design, “But on the way, they learn how literature and mass media work, and how they come to reflect our times.”
This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I was a student again; it sounds considerably more interesting than any course in my undergraduate curriculum, and, if the worst happens, it may turn out more practical too.
(For more academic commentary on the living dead see this post from our crypt).
September 6, 2010 Leave a comment
I rather belatedly got around to reading the latest issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research this week, and, among a number of interesting articles, one in particular caught my eye. Who am I – and if so, where? A Study on Personality in Virtual Realities, by Benjamin Gregor Aas, Katharina Meyerbröker and Paul M. G. Emmelkamp, reports on a Dutch study looking at the question “How stable are personality traits when entering a virtual reality?” (This was an issue I identified as worth investigating back in the early days of this blog, though of course I never did anything about it).
The authors recruited 57 psychology undergraduates at the University of Amsterdam, and got them to sign up to Second Life (interestingly, only two of them already had accounts). They then had them complete an in-world version of a standard personality inventory, and compared the outcomes with the results generated when the same students took the test on paper, 7 months previously, during their induction.
The headline result was that the test results were stable over the two settings; the personality traits of the participants did not vary between the real world and the virtual world. This was true over all of the five dimensions measured by the test – extraversion, friendliness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and development.
This result is at once encouraging and depressing. Encouraging because, as the authors note, it suggests that “virtual realities could function as new reliable platforms to assess participants for psychological research”, and depressing because it implies that, however much we dream of liberating a new personality in the virtual world, our old selves will always catch us up.
September 3, 2010 3 Comments
A couple of posts ago I was pondering the question of why I completely lack any sort of religious sensibility; it turns out that it’s because I am perfectly in tune with the Universe.
It would be nice to think that, now reason has banished God from both biology and physics, the proponents of organised religion would accept that the game was up, and fade away without a fuss, but, as I touched on in that post, I expect that won’t be happening any time soon.
Second Life Shrink 
