Tales of cyber-neurosis
April 13, 2008 Leave a comment
I’ve been out of town for a while, so as usual I’m way behind the pack on the latest bombshell from Linden Labs, the changes to the SL trademark policy.
I’m pretty sure that the new rules, if strictly applied, mean that I have to pay LLabs for the privilege of using their trademark, or else change the name of this blog. However, since approximately nobody ever reads these posts, I’m hoping that I’ll slip under the radar.
March 23, 2008 Leave a comment
Weeks pass. Did I tell you that I was a slacker?
I’ve not been on the grid much this month, but I did manage to make up with my neighbour, the guy who overshadowed my little house with two big rocky outcrops. He owns a big estate that completely surrounds my patch, and he has offered to buy me out, though I declined, since I like the view, and I can’t be bothered to look for a new place.
He was a bit pissed off with me because I had restricted access to my land to just me, which meant that there was a “No Entry” zone right in the middle of his property, which I can see would be annoying. I’m not sure why I had done that, since it is impossible to steal things from people’s houses in SL, so there is no reason not to leave your place unlocked, and I have nothing worth ripping off anyway. Some atavistic territorial instinct I guess.
Anyway, he responded by banning me from his property, which meant that I couldn’t step outside my own front door without running into a big red forcefield, and couldn’t go anywhere without teleporting. Again, there is no logical reason why this should bother me, since, at the end of the day, SL is just make-believe, but annoy me it did. I briefly considered starting a proper feud by putting up a big billboard with abusive slogans about him and his girlfriend, but good sense prevailed, and I compromised by buying a lockable door for my cabin, and opening up my land to all-comers. A day or so afterwards my neighbour gave me free access to his property, and now we live in perfect harmony.
Or almost perfect harmony. I’m still a bit cross about the big rocks, so I’ve retaliated by painting my house bright blue, which clashes with the rustic theme he’s trying to create. I’ll probably get tired of it before he does though.
February 14, 2008 Leave a comment
I’m still exiled from Second Life, due to unreliable tradesmen – it would be a lot simpler if I could just point at the walls to make them change colour. Still, I’m not missing it too much, since my real life is about ten million times more interesting than SL at the moment anyway, and I don’t have hours to waste in front of the computer.
Despite my confident predictions, Obama seems to have the Big Mo, and Hillary looks in serious danger of losing. It seems like the super-delegates are going to line up behind whoever is ahead in the popular vote, even though I thought the whole point of having super-delegates was to provide a safeguard against the party getting swept away by a tide of enthusiasm for a lightweight nominee. Texas and Ohio on March 4th will be Hillary’s last chance to turn things around. I can only hope that the primary voters stop and think long enough to realise that McCain is a very electable candidate, and that it’s going to take someone with more experience than a few years in the Illinois State Senate to take him on.
January 31, 2008 Leave a comment
My real-life house is getting decorated at the moment, one consequence of which is that my desktop computer, with its fancy graphics card, is packed away in a box under the dust sheets. I can access the internet on my old laptop, but I’ll be exiled from the grid until the paint is dry.
My trusty old Toshiba Satellite is a bit slow, even with a stripped-down linux distro (DSL) installed. Its original Pentium processer ticks over at a steady 166MHz, but it really doesn’t have enough memory to run Firefox, which means that web pages can take an age to appear, even over broadband. It’s reminiscent of the old dial-up days in a strangely comforting way though.
Being unable to get into Second Life may be a blessing in disguise, since just wandering around on the grid isn’t really the best way of finding out what is going on anyway. Instead I’ve been reading other SL blogs, which is rather more illuminating, not so much about Second Life itself, but more about the interests and preoccupations of residents, or at least that subset of the population who blog their experiences. I should probably start leaving comments on some of the more interesting blogs, but to be honest getting into any sort of dialogue seems like a bit too much hard work at the moment.
Anyway I’m still a bit distracted by the the Democratic primaries. Opinion seems to be divided about the significance of Clinton’s good showing in the supposedly meaningless Florida vote, though bouncing back after the South Carolina result has to give her some extra momentum ahead of next Tuesday. It’s not clear which way Edwards’ supporters will shift now he’s out of the running, or what effect McCain’s performance in the Republican race will have. I think the latter development may swing people towards Hillary, since she seems better equipped to take McCain on than Obama does. I’m still fairly confident that Hillary will win, both the nomination, and the vote in November.
January 23, 2008 Leave a comment
Reuters have a dedicated Second Life news centre, which is a pretty good way of keeping up with how SL is impacting on the real world. The big story this week is Linden Labs’ ban on unlicensed banking, which came into effect yesterday.
I can’t understand how anyone failed to see the ban coming, especially after LLabs outlawed gambling, since the motivation was exactly the same – LLabs’ desire to avoid falling foul of US law by providing a platform for wire fraud.
I am also struggling to comprehend how anyone could have thought that depositing money in an SL bank was anything other than folly, since a glance at the SL economic statistics reveals that the economy is nowhere near developed enough to support the creation of institutions of finance capital, which means that any “bank” purporting to offer interest on capital was odds-on to be some sort of Ponzi scheme.
January 13, 2008 Leave a comment
Tarissa, commenting on my last post, says that she visited a Barack Obama Second Life site a while back, but I still can’t find it, just a couple of “Obama for President” groups. I checked out the official Barack Obama website, and there’s no mention of an SL presence. Maybe he had one, then closed it when he found out that the Hillary already has SL stitched up.
John Edwards does have an SL “Campaign Central”, but every time I try to go there I get the message that “the system was unable to complete you teleport request in a timely fashion”, which might be a metaphor for his whole campaign.
Nevada is up next, on January 19th. (Actually Michigan is next, on the 15th, but Hillary is the only major candidate on the ballot, the others having withdrawn because the date was moved). Annoyingly there don’t seem to have been any polls in Nevada since December, at which point Hillary had a healthy lead, but obviously things will have changed since then, especially since the influential Nevada Culinary Union have endorsed Obama.
I’m starting to get a bit obsessed with this race. God knows what kind of state I’ll be in by Super-duper Tuesday.
January 10, 2008 1 Comment
After her unexpected victory in New Hampshire I was inspired to visit Hillary’s Second Life campaign headquarters:
There wasn’t a lot going on, but I did pick up a campaign T-shirt, and a “Hillary” yard sign.
I tried to find Obama’s HQ too, but, despite his supposed appeal to youth, he doesn’t seem to have an SL presence.
I’m leaning towards Hillary for the nomination, not because I’m particularly enthralled by her platform (Mike Gravel has the best policies), but because I like her personal qualities, particularly the way she has stood up to years of vilification in the US media and still come out fighting. All the mainstream candidates are hopelessly compromised by their reliance on special interests for campaign funds, but Hillary seems to be the most focussed on some sort of personal vision of what the country should look like, and as such I think she would make the least worst President, of the candidates that are likely to get elected.
It’s all academic anyway, since, like most of the world’s population, I don’t have a vote, even though the outcome of the poll in November will affect my life in a lot of important ways. All the US citizens I have known over the years have been pretty sensible, so I guess I can trust them to make the right decision. Mind you, I thought that 4 years ago…
December 20, 2007 1 Comment
I noted a while back that there seemed to be essentially no restrictions on what Second Life residents can do with their property, and my neighbours have proved this with some spectacularly anti-social development:
As you can see my little mountain hideaway is now overshadowed by a big rocky outcrop that my left-hand neighbour has thoughtfully constructed on his land, presumably with the intention of creating enough flat space for a substantial dwelling. At least it looks natural, unlike the giant bookcase that the guy on the right has installed on his patch of mountainside, the purpose of which I can only guess at.
I know that I shouldn’t be too bothered by this, since I spend only a tiny fraction of my life in my cabin, and my “land” doesn’t really exist in any material sense anyway. It has been annoying me though, in way that is indistinguishable, in nature if not degree, from the feeling I would get if my real life neighbour cut off all my sunlight by planting a massive hedge in his garden. I guess that goes to show that even a sceptical observer like myself can be unconsciously drawn into the virtual reality of Second Life.
December 6, 2007 Leave a comment
I’ve not had much time to be online this week, so I don’t have any interesting Second Life stories to recount, unless you find virtual interior decorating particularly fascinating. (I got a new coffee table!)
Instead I’ve been catching up on some reading, looking through back copies of CyberPsychology and Behavior. There was an interesting article in the August 2007 issue – “The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft”. The researchers recruited a sample of 51 World of Warcraft players, and got them to complete rating scales evaluating their real-life personality, their in-game personality, and their ideal personality. The characters were (mostly) viewed as closer to the ideal than the players’ real selves, with players who rated themselves poorly more likely to idealise their characters. This isn’t terribly surprising, but it’s always nice when intuition is given some scientific back-up.
Also interesting is “Multiple subjectivity and virtual community at the end of the Freudian century” a paper by Sherry Turkle from back in 1997, looking at psychological aspects of MUDs. Turkle notes that a player can create multiple characters reflecting different aspects of the personality, and deploy these adaptively in different situations. She draws parallels with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but argues that, unlike in DID where such personality splitting is dysfunctional, in the context of a MUD it can be integrative, and lead to enhanced functioning.
Neither of these papers relate directly to Second Life, but it seem likely that SL users will create and use their characters in similar ways.
November 30, 2007 Leave a comment
This blog has been getting a steady trickle of hits, most of them via Google searches featuring the words “second” and “life” somewhere (like “second life adverse events” or “how to find adult club in second life” – that guy must have been disappointed). Hardly anyone ever leaves a comment, so I’ve no idea what visitors think of the site, but I suspect most of them click away again pretty quickly.
Since it’s clear that there is no way that I’ll make money from Second Life by any means other than writing about it, I’m going to have to do something to improve the stickiness of this column.
Writing stuff that’s vaguely interesting would be a start I guess. I can see two ways that this column might develop an audience.
The first option would be a gonzo-journalism style travelogue, where I dot around the grid like a virtual Hunter S. Thompson, cataloguing the collision between the established order and the emerging counter-culture. The problem is that Second Life hasn’t been around long enough for a dominant culture to develop, so nobody is really pushing the boundaries, because there are no boundaries to push against. I guess I could contrast SL with real life, but my feeling is that SL is more of a complement to the existing social order than a threat to it, so there’s none of the sense of danger that would give the column some edge. It’s possible that I’m underestimating how liberating the SL experience can be for people though, and it might be more revolutionary than I think. There is probably some mileage in exploring that further.
The alternative model for the blog would be a character-based episodic narrative, something like “Tales of the City”. To make that work I’d have to find some sort of vibrant SL social scene and immerse myself in it, and I’m not sure that I have the patience for that, if such communities even exist. I don’t think my writing skills are up to it anyway.
Even if I do build up a readership, there would still be the problem of turning hits into revenue, something that has defeated smarter business brains than mine. Advertising perhaps, or syndication, particularly to non-internet media. Maybe Rolling Stone would bankroll me while I did some in-depth research, like John Travolta in “Perfect”. They printed a big article on Second Life just a few months ago though, and anyway it’s not like I’m Lester Bangs or anything, so maybe not.
Second Life Shrink 