About

When I was in high school (mid to late 80s) I remember reading an interview in either Discover or Omni magazine. The interviewee was Jaron Lanier. For those who don’t know, he’s one of the pioneers of virtual reality; in fact he’s the guy who coined the term “virtual reality”. I remember being very excited about the possibilities he talked about. But back then I was writing BASIC programs on a Commodore 64 and some of my friends were playing with Apple 2Cs and TI-99s. The things Jaron spoke of sounded like complete science fiction and it seemed you would need a Cray II supercomputer to do. But I loved the idea of it being possible.

Fast forward to 2007. After get burned out on and subsequently giving up years of time invested in games like Everquest and Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot, I heard about Second Life. I had heard references to it before, but it sounded a lot like another online game, so I didn’t look into it. Being academically minded, I listen to a lot of courses and lectures broadcast as podcasts. One night I was listening to a graduate level class on open source that Mitch Capor was teaching and he had brought in someone from Linden Lab to discuss Second Life. It sounded amazing, so I decided to finally check out what a virtual world would look like.

Now I know SL isn’t perfect and people complain a lot about this not working and that being broken and “LL needs to do this and such…” But to someone like me, Second Life is an amazing opportunity. This is just the sort of thing I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for. And my discovery of Second Life happened to coincide with my giving up years of experience in desktop support and network administration to go back to school and pursue a degree in programming. Now that I see where virtual worlds are, I want to focus my research and my new career on working with them.

In one of my communication classes I decided to do a presentation on SL. I had spent very little time actually in SL, but did a lot of research into what it was and how it worked in order to do my presentation. And the gist of my presentation was this: Imagine a world where you don’t need money or a job. Imagine a place where there is no need to eat, drink, sleep, or even wear clothes. A world where you can build just about anything you can imagine and it doesn’t cost money for tools or materials. Imagine a world where you can’t be judged by your skin color because you can look any way you want. And I asked the question, What would you do with a world like this?

Since I’ve gotten to spend more time in Second Life, I’m both excited and disappointed. Unlike most, I’m not disappointed by what SL can or can’t do. I think most people who don’t have a background or any experience in IT or programming simply cannot fathom how incredibly difficult making Second Life actually is. For those of us who have been around computers for multiple decades (I’ve even worked on mainframes. How many people actually know what those are?) it is amazing to see that something like Second Life is even possible. And if you’ve been around long enough to see all of the amazing progress made with computers over the years, you know that it is just going to get better. It always does. So, I’m not disappointed with Second Life.

I am somewhat disappointed that the answer to my question, “What would you do with it?” seems to be answered by the majority with, “Shop, make money, and have sex.” Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not some hardcore, elitist zealot who wants to do away with commerce or sex in virtual worlds. There is a place for those things and we are talking about a place where the key thing is “user created content.” If that’s what people want to do, then fine for them. I just find it perplexing.

I guess I wonder why we want to take a virtual world and try to map the real world right on top of it. I’m not quite sure why in a world where you literally can get by without money does everyone want to focus so much time on making and spending money. Why work so hard on making things that look just like real world items when you can make anything you want? Why when there is a brand new world to create from the ground up do we want to essentially re-make the real world? Why would someone want to come home from work so they can log into Second Life and, well, have a Second Career?

Once again, please don’t misread me. I’m not saying we should avoid all of those things and work for some virtual world order. It’s the degree to which I see these things that makes me wonder. If I had to guess years ago what people would do with virtual worlds, I would have thought people would use the opportunity to shape a reality that is different than the one they spend all of their time in. My disappointment comes from not seeing more true innovation than I do. It just seems to me that not enough people realize that this is an opportunity for a whole new paradigm. It’s an opportunity to escape from the rat race we live in all the time into a world where the rats can have fun and be creative and invent things that aren’t possible in real life.

I don’t think it’s because people suck or they are stupid or anything like that. I think it has a lot to do with comfort level. You make in world what you are used to in the real world. It’s a lot easier to copy things that exist than to create something new. Also, people who can’t afford yachts and mansions and perfect bodies in real life can have them in Second Life. And I do see that as a good start. But at some point it seems like more people would come to the point of thinking, “Man, we could do a lot more than just this.”

Maybe it’s kind of like an evolutionary process and you have to get past the first steps of just making all of this work in a virtual world in the first place before you have the freedom to really expand. It’s this next step that I’m really interested in researching and pursuing and maybe even urging people on to. That’s the purpose of this blog. To explore these kinds of ideas. I’m interested in discussing how people are doing virtual training in ways they couldn’t do it in real life. I want to discuss sims and builds that just aren’t like anything you’re going to see in the real world. I want to hear about how educators are creating learning environments you can’t replicate in the classroom. I want to see how virtual worlds can help people with autism or physical disabilities or whatever have an experience of life they are deprived of in the real world. I want to  discuss how artists are expressing themselves in brand new, refreshing ways in virtual worlds. I want to explore the possibility of social changes that living in a virtual world might allow. And I want it to be a discussion with you, rather than just me spouting my often ill-informed opinions. Instead of blogging about what people do in Second Life, I’d really like to explore the question, “What would you do?”

This ain’t the real world, people. Which is great. Because in some ways, I think it could be better.

Matthaios Brandenburg [e-mail]