Does anyone know of a good rl architect working in Second Life? Or maybe an architecturally trained builder? Are there any schools doing architectural training on the grid? I’ve heard the idea suggested a few times that SL would be great for training architecture students, so I’m wondering if any of that is going on. But I’m even more interested in finding out if anyone is somewhat seriously studying the concept of designing buildings specifically for avatars in a virtual worlds.
I know in the real world architects have studied and explored how to make living and working spaces that are more efficient and pleasing for meat based life forms like us to spend our time in. I’m sure they study things like what’s the best size for a bedroom or bathroom or kitchen. I’m sure there are numerous reasons why you don’t typically find living spaces over garages. Bathrooms are usually pretty similar. There are good reasons to have certain window sizes on certain sides of the house. Some people prefer a big open living room, even at the expense of less second floor space. There are a lot of design decisions that go into making homes and buildings that people want to be in.
I don’t think those same design rules apply in a virtual world. Avatars have different wants and needs. Physics don’t hold the same in Second Life. In a virtual world you have more possibilities because you don’t have to think about the strengths or durability of the materials you use. You don’t have to worry about fasteners being strong enough or load bearing walls or anything like that. You can even suspend rooms in mid-air and call them skyboxes.
I’m sort of reminded of the game The Sims. Anyone who has played that a while knows that you don’t do well by building the kind of house you’d like to live in. The Sims have different ideas about what makes a good house. They want small spaces with all the most important areas right together because they don’t have much time to roam around. You simply have to learn to build houses differently to make a Sim happy. I think we’ll find it’s similar in virtual worlds.
I really like a lot of the houses I’ve seen in SL. The meticulously realistic buildings look very cool. And if you are trying to show prospective students what Princeton looks like, you want to show them the coolest looking buildings on campus and you want them to look like the real thing. But I wonder why it is that we all go into our Second life homes and put in dining room tables and kitchen appliances and such that we have absolutely no use for. They don’t do anything. They are just for decoration. So why don’t we get rid of them and save our precious prim counts for something that might be useful to us in some way. Chairs aren’t necessary, but at least they do make us feel comfortable when we are chatting with others, so they serve a purpose.
The one thing that I find really curious is that the way houses and buildings are laid out in Second Life seems to follow real life pretty well, but makes it difficult for avatars to actually get around. I even hear seasoned SL residents joking about how they still run in to walls. I think my least favorite thing in SL buildings is stairs. Some are downright frustrating to navigate. I had a really hard time once getting to the top of a lighthouse because of the winding stairs going to the top. In one shop I went to I tried to get up a really nice looking winding metal staircase about half a dozen times before I gave up and used the teleporter. It was so tight of a space that I would always get to a point where I could no longer make upward progress, but if I turned slightly to get around, I’d fall back down to the floor. In a lighthouse that you are trying to represent realistically, I can see the point of the staircase. In that shop, it seemed like just a waste of prims. If it’s mostly for decoration, then just make it phantom so no one is tempted to try and use it. The point is, things like staircases really aren’t necessary in a world with teleporters.
So, I’m really curious what buildings might look like in a few more years when more people start to think differently about what’s possible in virtual worlds. Will we cease to see stairs, in favor of teleporters? How about if we make inside walls phantom so they still give us the feeling of separate rooms without the need to navigate around them? Will we see more open spaces allowing people to fly rather than walk? Will we have less rooms because we don’t need kitchens, bathrooms or bedrooms? (You can always rez your toy bed for those special moments, right?) Do avatars need/want privacy? What good are locks on doors if someone can camera into your bathroom unobserved while sitting across the sim? Will we build upward instead of outward with skyboxes to save space and save on tier? If we do, will that eventually cause problems when we can no longer see the pretty Windlight sky because of all the high-rises?
I’m really curious about these things, so give me your ideas. And if you know a good architect I could talk to, please point him/her/it my way.
August 3, 2008 at 1:15 pm
There are four things to count in with SL buildings:
usability
likeability
realism
cost
Anything we create has to compromise at least with two of those. E.G. if you need something to get from one floor to another…. you can make steairs (bad usability, can look good and real, is prim heavy), or ramp (good for walking, usually look bad, not quite resembling RL, cheap) or place a teleport (usable, not looking good and not realistic unless you are in sci-fi environment, cheap).
So we are making combinations of the four elements according to what best serves our need s at the moment and for the specific build.
Question that echoes through the whole post is will those things change, do we evolve in virtual world? Sure.
Fashion changes.
Some things that were unusable year ago are quite OK now. Not only that most of us practiced climbing those weird spiral stairs, if lag is lower because our computers are getting stronger() it is easier to move around.
Costs dropped drastically when sculpties came.
Factor that is the most interesting in this regard is realism, i.e. our need to recreate meatspace in virtual environment. We need walls, bathrooms, some even refuse to fly or use local teleports. Sure it will change too. No matter how something inpossible iRL, pople gets used to it so it doesn’t break the feeling (or immersion to use the popular word). We also learn that virtual world and meatspace are two different places, each with its own rules.
On the other hand, we’d never sacrifice some things. It doesn’t matter that avatars don’t need food, there will always be restaurants in SL. Dinning is not just taking food, it is an important ritual that is so much more than eating. It doesn’t matter tht one can see tons of naked bodies in a skin shop, it will be always thrilling to peek up the girl’s skirt and we’ll keep the feeling of hiding our intimate parts and undressing only at private places (unless in the – so common – case of exhibitionism, but you get the point).
August 4, 2008 at 8:23 am
my own personal desire is that people can get out of their boxes in their minds and dump some of the stuff that’s not needed. having said that, i also have constructs and just set up a little temporary office for myself i can rez over my plot when i want.
but to think that we are just mirroring the mundane in the virtual is a little sad. after all, the architecture of RL is artificial too. it’s all man made, man created. so why not create a new kind of artificial architecture in SL?
i admit, i get a little tired of seeing beautiful avatar after beautiful avatar, and perfect unusable restroom after perfect unusable restroom. we’re so obsessed as a species with perfecting our own tiny constructs that we’re dragging them into a world where anything is possible, and tossing out those things that don’t jive, regardless of how cool or mind-freeing they can be.
August 4, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I don’t know if I have the time to respond fully right now, but I’ll try a start. This has given me a lot to think about and I’m still working a lot of things out in my head.
Dandellion:
I think your categories are interesting and a good way to start looking at the situation. I think I would differ on them a bit, though. Perhaps change “likeability” to “aesthetics.” And I think I would drop the “realism” category altogether and lump it in with aesthetics. The reason is that “realism” seems to me to be more a matter of taste. And, as I argued in another post, “realistic” describes what you can do in the world you are currently in. Flying isn’t “realistic” in first life, but it definitely is realistic in a virtual world. Why? Because you can actually do it. It’s part of the “physics”. On the other hand, procreation may seem realistic to people, but it’s not realistic at all in the context of Second Life. (Personally, I find prim babies to be a rather odd thing to want. But to each his/her own. Heh.) I think different people have different ideas about how much of the real world they want brought into virtual worlds. Myself, I’d like to see a lot of real world stuff jettisoned from virtual worlds if it is not necessary. I’ve already got a real world. I don’t need another limited sub-set of it.
You brought up the idea of immersion in your comment and I think that’s an interesting topic. I suspect a lot of SL residents look for more “realism” to add to the immersion. But I guess it kind of depends on what you want to be immersed in. I think The Far Away is very immersive, especially when you are floating around listening to the parcel soundtrack. But to me the immersiveness doesn’t come from “realism”, but rather from the opposite. I feel immersed in it because I’m forced to suspend my ideas of reality. It’s the very things in that build that seem the most out of place which make it so immersive, in my opinion.
And as far as realism and immersion go, I find that a strange idea. I used to play a lot of online games like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc. And what I always found online is that most people were there for the game, and hardly anyone had any use for role-playing. It was the platform and what you could do with it that mattered. Not trying to create a certain type of environment.
Yet, when I go into SL, it seems that people are more interested in role-playing than they are in getting the most out of the platform. People try to make it look more and more like real life, and they want to pretend to eat and drink and have sex and everything else you would expect in real life. But from an avatar’s perspective, all of that is pretty unnecessary. So I guess I don’t quite understand the dynamic in which people are pragmatic and don’t want to pretend in role-playing games, but they want to play “real-life” in a virtual world. (Actually, I may have to re-think part of that statement, but I don’t have the time for it.)
Unfortunately, I have to leave, so I’ll try to finish my thoughts later. Thanks for the discussion.
August 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Aesthetics definitely sounds better than likeability. But I would still keep it as a separate category from “realism” which does need a better name
I do agree with both of you that realism, that is an attempt to recreate meatspace in SL is at least silly we cannot neglect the way our brains are functioning. Some “unreal” tings we accpet, some we just refuse to go with. And that is different from person to person. Question what are determining factors of what will go and what not is getting more complicated each time I think about it.
August 8, 2008 at 6:42 am
Dandellion:
I read the post you linked to. (Your blog, right?) I also read the responses and the article you referenced. What I seem to be seeing from all of it is that there is some kind of disconnect people have with the subject of “reality”. There really seems to be two classes of people: those who can’t get comfortable with things in a virtual life that don’t mirror real life, and those who who see virtual worlds as “real” in their own right. And I wonder if that is a divide that will always exist, or if it is a matter of acclimating to a new environment.
I’m reminded of an experience I had doing some volunteer work in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachians. As a northerner, my ways and my thinking didn’t go over well down there. The culture really is different in many ways than I am used to. And there was a hostility there to anything that was different. Very often people would disagree with me or criticize the way things are done in other parts of the country. And the response I got quite often was, “That’s not how we do things here.” It was very dismissive. The implication was there was one right way to live and do things (the Kentucky way) and then there were other ways, which were all wrong. I wonder if it’s a similar situation in virtual worlds. As if, even with all of the possibilities inherent in virtual worlds, they are still wrong if they don’t match what some people consider normal.
Another thing I wanted to touch on was the point you brought up about eating. I’ve actually never seen anyone eating or drinking in SL, but food and drinks exist, as do kitchen appliances, in abundance. Although those things are unnecessary for avatars, I think the point is well made that they can still be important. In the western world, especially the US, we don’t place much importance on meal time and sharing food together. But many other cultures consider this a very important part of their lives. So I can see “pretending” to eat as something that actually is important, at least culturally, in virtual worlds. Similarly, many cultures enjoy cooking together, so I would have to re-think my view of kitchen appliances some. I won’t be using any, but I wouldn’t begrudge them to other people. I still wonder though if, as people become more acclimated to virtual worlds, whether those things will lose their importance, or be supplanted by other rituals that make more sense in a virtual world.
August 8, 2008 at 6:54 am
Radar:
I won’t comment much, because I do think we are pretty much in agreement. But, getting back to the architecture thread, you brought up something I think is pretty interesting about SL. You mentioned a temporary office you can rez over your plot when you want. That is one aspect of SL that I find fascinating. The simple idea that buildings, furniture, etc. do not have to have permanence is really exciting to me. When I first bought land in SL, I immediately put up a house and started rezzing the furniture I thought I would like to have. And after furnishing one room, I ran out of prim count. And the more and more I have been considering furnishing my parcel, the less and less sense it makes to have a house and permanent structures. Especially after buying Itazura’s RezzHUD. (Available for L$500 on SL Exchange) I’ve become more excited about the idea that I can have whatever room I want with the click of a button, whenever I want. There is no need for permanence and a lot more variety available to me. I’m also planning on doing away with any walled rooms, since they offer no privacy or security anyway.
That reminds me of one thing that the blogger that Dandellion was referencing had to say about immersion problems with SL the way it stands. It is a bit disconcerting to have walls and walkways and such designed to more or less direct traffic flow and someone’s experience of the world when you can completely circumvent them so easily. In some ways it does feel more natural to follow paths and not walk through walls, but then, quite often, I think, “Why bother going that way?” Once again, I suspect that people will adapt and sensibilities will probably change, but who knows?
August 12, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Wonderful thread. And really interesting points and perspectives.
First, on the question of whether there are real life architects in SL, the answer is yes, and they’re a highly vibrant and effective community. On the one hand, the work they’re doing has implications for real world architecture, in particular using Second Life as a site to prototype designs. The most famous example of this, of course, is the Wikitecture project which won an international award for design.
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/03/wikitectures-pr.html
Further explorations of the architecture for virtual worlds are spear-headed over at The Arch amongst other places. Their work on reflective architecture in particular I find quite amazing.
http://archsl.wordpress.com/
I’d also suggest that as far as virtual architecture, you have a look at what Archidemo is doing:
http://archidemo.blogspot.com/
There was also an UCL working paper that’s worth a read:
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2008/08/renaissance-of-geographic-information.html
As far as virtual architecture, I debated this some time ago and although I’m not sure I’d stand by my post in its entirety ( http://dusanwriter.com/?p=124 ) I’ll just post a quick snippet:
“If virtual worlds feel real, have objects with real value, evoke real (and perhaps enhanced) emotional responses, and ALSO allow the creation of objects and environments that aren’t possible in the physical world – then as new objects and environments are created, maybe we’ll start to see things that change how we view ourselves, the culture we live in, and the world around us. If so, is it possible to invoke spiritual responses because we now have access to new and creative metaphors? This doesn’t replace the spiritual/creative response you might get from seeing the stars at night or an inspiring cathedral. But perhaps it extends our toolkit for invoking this response.”
“As we explore new ways to represent and interact with objects in the virtual space, the lessons for ‘real space’ may include the carrying of new archetypes that change how we perceive, feel, and react to environments and each other. We have the potential to expand the technological and artistic reservoir from which we can draw symbols for a shared understanding of our place in the world.”
Thanks for a wonderful dialog.