Sherry Turkle and Virtual Worlds

Location: Prognosticator's Chair

My students are in the midst of Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's jeremiad about the dangers of technology that throughout her book she calls "always on" and "always on you."

Though few Second Life or World of Warcraft users carry these imagined worlds around in their palm, given the beefy nature of the client software, many do spend lots of time in-world. Turkle's subjects mostly find escape there, and she freely admits that one can use these imagined spaces for "embarking on a potentially 'therapeutic' exercise" (212).  Mostly, however, she focuses on gamers like Adam, on the verge of losing his job, or Pete, who cheats on his wife with in SL, having a relationship with an avatar named Jade.  My students had their worst stereotypes of these immersive environments supported by Turkle's book, which otherwise does such a fine job of critiquing the other from of addiction to online activities, the augmented self of texts, apps, and phones glued to the users' palms.

It would be been interesting to see what she'd make of Fran, the 85-year-old Parkinson's patient, who with her daughter created SL avatars. As Wagner James Au reports, Fran was able to visualize herself standing again unaided, while watching her avatar Fran Seranade do Tai Chi or dance. Soon enough, Fran recovered some mobility.

Tom Boellstorff, author of Growing Up in Second Life, has met Fran and her daughter. He and other researchers are studying what has occurred. It's a heart-warming story of the sort rare in Turkle's book.

I will speculate a bit here, something I warn my students against since for them, the art of extrapolation from solid data may be safer for their grades.  I'll let you readers grade me.

Alone Together began as Turkle's "letter" to her daughter Rebecca. In Paris, Rebecca had spent her time texting and on Facebook, instead of taking in the city's many delights. Turkle was disappointed and has crafted one of the best critiques I've encountered of our relationship with our machines and the loss of such things as "the rewards of solitude" (3).

I hope that my class will remember Joel, Turkle's research subject who is an SL builder, both of content and community. Yet I fear Pete or Adam will stay in their minds instead. I do not possess the professional expertise to question how Turkle's bias might have influenced her writing about virtual worlds, but as a reader, I would have liked more Joels, and maybe a Fran, to balance the negative and all-too-common stereotypes of gamers as addicted, soon-to-be-unemployed, social castoffs.

In fact, I'd go so far, an an educator who has used Second Life and OpenSim grids and SimCity 2000 in class settings, to make another claim. Whatever the validity of Turkle's data, her method of presentation about gamers weakens for this reader her critique of social media, texting, and other potentially addictive behaviors.

That may be my bias, given the ease with which users of those apps can get a regular fix.

Work Cited:

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. New York, Basic: 2011.

A Novel Way to Market a New Virtual World

 
Location: Watching one door close as another creaks and threatens to open

I read Iris Ophelia's post that Tiny Speck's Glitch will close, joining the ranks of Google's Lively and Raph Koster's Metaplace in the bin of might-have-been sensations. Will Cloud Party be next?

I loved Glitch for a short while, but did not spend a great deal of time there after the funny concept grew a little tired. I never found community as we ran about squeezing chickens, planting seeds, and donating goodies to appease the giants and curry favor with them.

Iris noted that she too had tried it and stayed away until she heard the world was going under. She also noted the beautiful content she'd found. It was not enough, since not too many folks even knew that Glitch existed.

I'll quote at length from the company's closing announcement about why it failed to attract a user base large enough to sustain the world:

And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up. Glitch was very ambitious and pushed the limits of what could be done in a browser-based game ... and then those limits pushed back.

I have said, many times, to colleagues still vainly cheerleading for virtual worlds that I see the future daily: students using handheld devices, not heavy-duty desktops or even, increasingly, laptop computers. I feel sorry for virtual-world evangelists today, especially though naive enough to think that Linden Lab's bizarre corporate culture will pull off some miracle and make our media landscape that of 2006 again. Virtual-world evangelists remind me of me and my geeky Apollo-era friends, waiting for the Moon Base and our flying cars. Going on toward 50 years later, we are still waiting.

So does Glitch's closure mean that the virtual world concept is doomed to failure? Unlike SL, Glitch was fast and ran in a browser. So Flash or not, what could the next starry-eyed designer do to bolster the success of a virtual world with user-generated content?

How about market the world outside the echo-chamber of those who use and write about virtual worlds?

There's My Flying Car! A Vision For Marketing a Virtual World

No world with big aspirations is going to get enough users by cannibalizing SL's user base. Not Glitch or Cloud Party. None of these, including Google's Lively or Koster's Metaplace, advertised.

Compare that to the big games. I saw lots of adverts for Mass Effect III and now for the Assassin's Creed series, including ads on television. Would such expensive TV blitzes help a new virtual world? I don't know, but I have a notion that something different might.

I am about to read Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, a novel I'll teach next term in my first-year seminar Cyberspace: History, Culture, and Future. The novel's setting is largely a near-ubiquitous virtual world called Oasis, and today I began to think: what if an author worked with a game designer from the start to let readers of the book enter the book's world? And what if the book contained clues and puzzles that might be of use in the virtual world?

Cline beat me to the punch, partly. He announced that:

I’ve hidden an “Easter egg” in the text of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Ready Player One. If readers can find this hidden clue, it will lead them to the first of three increasingly difficult video game challenges. The first video game challenge is an Atari 2600 game that contains another Easter Egg that will lead you to the Second Challenge. Completing the Second Challenge will lead you to the Third and Final Challenge.

A winner, Craig Queen, won an actual DeLorean car. While Cline did not take the audacious step of trying to get someone to build Oasis, he's on the road to it.

His contest is pure marketing gold, the sort of thing that Linden Lab could have done but never did, in their assiduous attempts to avoid advertising their world. Imagine giving away a real automobile in 2007, at the height of the SL frenzy, for a Premium member who had solved an in-world riddle. It would have made national news, and Linden Lab would have easily parted with a Porsche or two.

The Lindens relied on free media buzz and insider hipness to pump up SL. We are more harried and tethered to our mobile devices now than five years ago, so cutting through the smog of information would be harder. And hip? That's no longer the case for virtual worlds, so it escapes me why Tiny Speck, with a platform both more obscure and more stable than Linden Lab's, did not promote their game.

If someone can figure out how to create an immersive space that can be accessed by the computers we carry in our hands, it will still need marketing, where Tiny Speck, Rezzable, Linden Lab, Raph Koster, and Google all failed. It will take a tie-in to the broader geek culture, and it will take something like what Cline is pioneering: cult book and world released together.

Bringing SL Back to the Conference Room?

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Celia Pearce image from her Web site
Tom Boellstorff image by Olivia Hotshot

I'm pleased that VWER will again host Tom Boellstorff, author of Coming of Age in Second Life, and Celia Pearce, author of Communities of Play, will be guests at a special meeting on August 30, 12:30 SLT. To teleport to the venue at Bowling Green State University in SL, click here.

Tom was an excellent guest before, and we'll all put questions to him in a voice-chat event hosted by AJ Kelton. I'm reading Pearce's Communities of Play now, and I'm looking forward to the two scholars next project, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method.

This time, with two noted scholars and a venue that could be comprehensible to those without avatars, I have offered to show the meeting in one of our conference rooms on campus. Faculty and staff should then see the potential of virtual worlds for the sorts of meetings that would be hard to arrange and moderate on the fly in real life.

Given my experience with conferencing software, I also feel that virtual worlds offer a better venue that encourages less passivity. There is something powerful about embodiment, even as a cartoon character, that gets folks to talk back in a meeting.

Notes from the Trough of Disillusionment

Location: Down in the Valley So Low

Next Friday, I agreed to give a short presentation to faculty colleagues in a learning community focusing on new technologies.

My topic: "3d Virtual Worlds: Down in Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment"

Here are a few notes from a Blackboard page I created to guide our discussion. I do plan to log into Second Life and OpenSim during our meeting, as well. At least two of the group tried SL and were not impressed with the platform, for one or more reasons I'll list as detrimental to the spread of virtual worlds.

Readers, what am I missing? I'd love to hear your perspectives on this. My notes follow, except for links to content in SL and other grids worth seeing (from Virtual Ability and Genome Islands to the WW I Poetry Sim and my Usher Project).

All links below will open in new tabs/windows.

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The sector for public 3D virtual worlds has fallen into the Gartner "trough of disillusionment" since Fall 2008, just as the global economy teetered on the brink of total collapse. In what follows, I offer some reasons and resources, based on my five years of work in Second Life and OpenSimulator virtual worlds.

Here is their 2009 "Hype Cycle" snapshot:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1124212

In 2011, while other technologies advanced, the Gartner authors concluded that "virtual worlds remain entrenched in the trough after peaking in 2007."

For Second Life in particular, several factors hurt:

• High pricing for content-hosting without offline backups. Linden Lab, SL's maker, ended 50% discounts for education and non-profit customers in October 2010, at which point Richmond left SL.
• A competing open-source alternative, OpenSimulator (or OpenSim), often hosted locally on campus servers and capable of URL-type linking to other campuses or corporate projects through a technology called Hypergrid.
• The difficulty of the SL user interface and the steep hardware requirements of the client.
• The stability of the virtual world and the need for frequent client upgrades (both largely resolved today).
• The relatively slow pace of empirical evidence for teaching effectiveness in immersive 3D environments. Ironically, this has emerged in 2010 and 2011, but by them many campuses had decided to focus more on mobile technologies and social networking for teaching. Many with an investment in virtual worlds moved to OpenSim instead.
• A perception that the environment was too "gamelike" for serious learning. SL is more of a "sandbox" that permits user-generated content, including games. One can more easily make the case for using SL in education than, say, World of Warcraft. Ironically, "gamification" is a buzzword for emerging educational technologies in 2012. Was SL too early?

The SL brand's reputation for social and adult-rated usage did hurt, but this proved the least of the problems for my classes. My students encountered SL's X-rated culture and giggled. I made them sign waivers to avoid adult content unless 1) it was after class and 2) they were not representing themselves as members of the UR community. One or two students did research on "relationships" in SL, but they age-verified to be able to go to adult-zoned parts of the virtual world.

What Virtual Worlds still offer, despite their learning curve:

• A way to build simulations at low cost. I could not make a ruined Victorian mansion appear on campus for my House of Usher simulation (see below).
• A way to interact for virtual conferences in an embodied way. I do not find teleconferencing and 2D applications such as Elluminate as engaging for participants. SL encourages all participants to become active, in my experience from the weekly Virtual Worlds Roundtable and the annual conference, Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education.

Hamlet's List: The Case for Stratifying It

Location: Head on Desk

Every month, Hamlet Au publicizes a list of Second Life's fifty most popular places. Here's the current one. The data come from Louis Platini's Metaverse Business site.

A commenter at Au's blog noted that segregating the list by maturity rating might give current and potential SLers a better idea of the platform's uses.  I agree...it's not censorship to sort the thing by rating or at least purpose.

Adult content, on the Zindra Continent and private estates, could be assessed with a click. So could education and arts (even if it's erotic art). So could roleplaying sims.

Concurrency at social sites of any rating tends to trump sites used sporadically by a group of avatars for, say, a business or academic meeting. Bowling Green State's virtual campus hosts up to 50 of us for a big meeting of VWER; the rest of the week, concurrency is probably far lower there.

Hamlet's list distorts what can be done in SL. Last month we did have Gerontology Ed Island among the dance-clubs and more salacious sites....now it seems to be all fun and games, of one sort or another.   I've not been to #7, "London City," so it may be a virtual version of the real thing.

As it is, the list hurts those new educators who might enter SL and embarrasses the rest of us. Au is the best known writer about Linden Lab's metaverse, so I'd hope he might change matters next month.

I imagined this scenario in a comment to Au. Here is is again.


Dean Wormwood: Thank you for coming in today, Professor Lag. I wanted to ask you about this Second World thing you use with classes.

Lag: Life, sir. Second Life.

Dean: Yes. Well, it's a lively life!

Dean shows Lag Hamlet's list
Lag raises trembling hand to forehead

Lag: Oh.

Dean: So, do you know what "bukkake" is?

Lag: Um...new type of Sushi....um...region in Second Life dedicated to Japanese culture.

Dean: Nice try. I Googled it...now don't tell me "Gor" is a poorly designed site about the former Vice President.

Update, 8 October: Hat-tip to Hamlet for publishing a new post with PG-rated regions. Of course, many educational sims have Mature ratings because of disturbing content or museums that feature nudity.  But this is a good step!

Educator/Avatars: How to Dress?

Location: VWER Meeting 

Last week, the weekly meeting focused on this topic, and I'd like to share the full transcript.

As one might imagine, the topic proved rather contentious.  Some felt that self-expression trumps other concerns.

I'm not convinced, at all. My own position boils down to this:

• Human avatars in professional clothing work best for introducing a virtual world to those who don't know it but may have a stake in one's career, evaluation, or funding (such as a demo to admins or colleagues)
• The same approach works best with students new to these worlds. Since I'm at a school filled with non-gamers, I dress conservatively at first as Iggy. Later on, I might "Steampunk out" or appear as a robot. Not at first, however. As students got more comfortable in-world, I found they too wanted to wear flaming tophats or become cardboard-box people.
• Even when one looks more or less convention, I feel that details can send the wrong message. In the picture below, Iggy is wearing an "Uncle Gabby" T from my favorite, and very politically incorrect, cartoon, Maakies.  Gabby is drinking and driving. Yeah, I'd wear that IRL to work.

What do you readers think? Are forms of appearance rhetorical stances, when you can be anything you want in a 3D world?  If you are a nonhuman all the time in SL, are you obligated to change that to impress a skeptical audience you wish to woo?

Mini Me, Redux

Location: Becoming my car

I love my RL ride, a chili-red Mini Cooper S. It's crazy-fast and a little silly, like a small dog who thinks he's big...and somehow manages to beat the bigger dogs.

When I saw the new "vehitars" from Linden Lab, available in the latest update of Second Life's viewer, I knew I'd have to be "Casey," a tip of the bonnet to my reborn Mini Cooper.

The SL design is toylike, so I hope that BMW won't bring suit. If anything, it's more evidence that the Mini, as a toy or a RL car, is just what a New York Times reviewer called it, "a BMW with a sense of humor."

As for Casey's performance, well....it's an avatar, not a vehicle. He won't win any races,  but his rendering cost is only 442. It's my lowest ever. Say, how about an Olds 442 vehitar!

Whatever the results when I drive to the next educators' meeting, Casey and his kin among the new avatars proves that Linden Lab, like BMW, does indeed have a sense of humor.

Compared to my vehicular Mini in SL, which proved so disastrous on my last and very laggy road trip, Casey won't have problems with sim crossings. I can now explore SL's road networks...as fast as the vehitar can run.

Now all I'll need is a Fiat 500 named Luigi and I'll feel that I'm in a sequel to Pixar's Cars.

Rebranding A Troubled Name

Now that the news is out that Linden Lab wants to rebrand their signature product, I'll toss my tophat in the ring along with other more famous pundits. Who knows? Lindens may glance at this blog for chuckles…not long after I mentioned Savage Worlds game system's motto of "Fast! Furious! Fun!" in a post, Linden Lab rolled out their "Fast, Easy, Fun" campaign.

Okay Lindens, here are some names and metaphors for Second Life's rebranding:

Serious Ideas: Back to Our Roots:

Linden World: It began there, so let's get back to basics. It is YOUR server cluster, after all. I'll take my mesh version of a Primitar now, please.

Your World: This gives residents a sense of autonomy even though you still own the servers. I'd like a name of this sort best, along with "Your World, Your Imagination" as a revived Motto. It would appeal to educators.

Metaverse / Utopia: Try a name that merges your origin with the idea that SL is better, in some regards, to the world of flesh. Neal Stephenson won't sue you guys. You could call it "Lindenverse" or "Lindtopia" if you wish. Or give Philip Rosedale his due and call it "Philtopia." Most of us have a little utopian streak; even my old nemesis Microsoft made good with me and other Mac OS users with their Mactopia site, a useful spot for MS Office software updates and tips.

Frontier: I'm fond of the metaphor. We've been denied the "final frontier" of space, unless one means cyberspace. Facebook, which I'm coming to accept as a way to stay in touch with a few RL friends, is decidedly not a frontier. It's a virtual pub, at best. A virtual world with user-generated content certainly is a frontier.

Dubious if Accurate:

Sandbox: This is what SL is, after all. Even some hard-core gamers who would otherwise sneer at SL's graphics and lag admit that the platform is a place to make things.  The problem with this theme would be how it sounds to an audience beyond gamers. I think of kids with plastic pails and shovels when I hear "sandbox."

Names / Metaphors to Avoid Like the Plague:

Eighteen Again, Forever: I saw this motto once in an SL shop. Nothing suggests flabby 50-somethings like it.  Okay, I'm a trim and outdoorsy 50-something, but I don't want to pretend either. While "Dress Up for Grown Ups" seems to work for IMVU, would it for SL?  Why just be a fancy chat room full of fashionistas?

Otherworld: SL is a world apart from the one of matter, but to make folks see it as an extension of their lives, much as any other hobby might be, avoid the idea that we are in an "other" place.

Second Life: I've written how toxic the rhetorical implications of the name can be. Ditch it ASAP.

A World That Dares Not Speak Its Name?

Location: New York Times Web Site

image courtesy of the Language Lab site

My departmental chair sent me this story about the use of the Virtual Globe Theater in a class at Bryn Mawr. I read it with great interest, seeing in it the sort of nuanced story about virtual worlds that too rarely appears in mainstream media outlets.

Not once, despite the clear image of the Second Life client on the screen of a laptop, was the Linden Lab product mentioned by the reporter.

I have an idea that, as noted in an earlier post here, that the name "Second Life" is so tainted by sensational stories from a few years ago, or tainted by the "once was big" reputation among technologists, that the brand name simply got dropped. As Hamlet Au noted for the Language Lab project, its site does not mention Second Life on its first pages. The video they provide flashes the name "Second Life" on screen for a brief instant, when the woman demonstrating how to get started downloads the client. The product name also appears on the Language Lab FAQ page about job opportunities. It is refreshing to see that SL knowledge is a prerequisite for a job.

There's no mystery here for me: the Second Life brand-name is toxic enough, but the product good enough, to create this discomfort. How can Rod Humble rebrand his product?  If Linden Lab had taken a different route with the enterprise version and licensed it under a different name and with a lower price than they did, they might have achieved more uptake.

Language Lab students do not need a larger world than English City and the cluster of other restricted-access sims, the Language Lab sim, to attend classes. The other "LL" in this story might have taken a different route to offering its product to just such potential customers.  Doing so under a different name ("NewWorld," "Metaverse," "MatrixLand," even the old standard "Linden World") would have helped make many projects like Language Lab's viable.  We might be talking about hundreds of thousands more regular users in various SL shards.

Part of me is proud to see increasing evidence that the use of virtual worlds can go "mainstream," as we all hoped in the glory-days of hyperbole and utopianism before 2009. Part of me is sad, however, that when I do say "Second Life," in any group of colleagues, the grins come out still, because every negative (and usually exaggerated) stereotype about slave-girls of Gor, virtual sex, and more from 2007-8 rushes to mind.  Now that CNN plans to close its bureau there, the last of the big-media holdouts is gone.


What next? That is Linden Lab's decision.

Escape Plus: Secondlife.com's Need to Turn a Page

Location: Linden Lab's Public Face

Before we ever create that first avatar, we visit a Web page. Think for a moment about how Linden Lab presents its product.

This post rehashes a complaint that AJ Kelton made, who gave me permission to use his name. The issue shows why LL is chasing a certain type of customer at the expense of others. That is certainly a reasonable business proposition, but as Lindy McKeown replied at the SLED list discussion begun by Hiro Pendragon, Linden Lab has an excellent alternative to beginning the SL experience as they do.

My post to SLED:

A damning moment came up in our weekly VWER meeting. AJ Brooks had a few colleagues wanting to try SL. They did not get further than the SL Web site. One look at the Valentine's Day video on display, however, ended their interest.

Sorry, Mr. Humble; tattooed love-boys with their Celtic ladies-fair might work for grown ups who want The Sims Plus, but whatever actually goes on in-world, you'll lose your remaining educators with marketing like that.

So perhaps LL can have a less romance-and-escape-oriented front page with a page that manages to promote the service with prominent links to "What sort of second life do YOU want? Gaming? Education? Roleplay?"

Show a video with some shopping, but then show visitors getting into the Titan II / Gemini Stack at the Spaceflight Museum. Show visitors in the virtual Sistine Chapel, then show them racing cars.

Lindy's reply is brilliant:

I have to say the messages on the front page of http://secondlife.com seem pitched at a single (and maybe extremely profitable?) market. People who want to make social connections that may lead to "relationships" (of one kind or another).

Sadly business decisions by non education-specific vendors of products and services impacts education use of those services. Comparing it to Blackboard is like comparing not just apples to oranges, more like candy bars to oranges. Blackboard is designed as a learning management tool. Second Life is designed as a social tool that has been adapted for use in education and after that happened, Linden Labs made some mileage off that.

I am left wondering how the education community might influence the "front door" policy to be more inclusive *nudges the business educators in the ribs for ideas* so that it isn't a turn off for newcomers from other potential markets like education? What a shame this page isn't the front page! http://secondlife.com/community/?lang=en
That video includes education.

I like Lindy's idea, and that community page a lot. Without too much difficulty, LL should pitch SL's amazing content at a broader audience. The "kiss on the fake Eiffel Tower" began before the new CEO arrived, and it's up to him to change it.  There's nothing wrong with a kiss or a Valentine in a virtual world. As for adult content, Linden Lab has done a fine job of zoning and moving it to age-verified regions or behind closed doors on private land. Too many SLED respondents took my complaint to mean "oh, that sex is wrecking education in SL." Nonsense.

Sex is elsewhere on the Internet, and these Web pages about SL are not about sex. They are, however, about a narrow perception of a virtual world--an "escape" to use the Lindens' own words--that could be marketed far better to a broad audience.

So Linden Lab, change that front page to something more inclusive than "escape": perhaps learn, explore, play, connect, invent, love, build, and (most importantly) return?

Update 3/7/11: Hat-tip to Sheila for noticing the Freudian Slip in my original "location." Corrected after many guffaws.

A Visceral & Negative Reaction to Virtual Worlds

Location: Pondering

Reading Hamlet Au's interview with Rod Humble, Linden Lab's new CEO, coincided with an event in class that merits some prognostication.

I've long called for a new name for the product, but I fear that Linden Lab and other VW makers face more of a challenge than that.

Mr. Humble will need to figure out a way to earn the trust of more Millennials, if that's a demographic LL wants. I encountered a visceral, rather angry reaction from a small group of 18-22 year olds today after one student simply asked "what is this Second Life thing you research?"

A short, non-evangelical reply of mine followed, explaining what I've done in SL and now am doing in OpenSim. I noted how embodiment leads to more participation at meetings than does a teleconference, and I explained how a literary simulation in a virtual world expands the notion of reading to a different sort of participation.

A heated but interesting discussion followed, mostly about how the avatar masked a person behind it and could lead to increased mistrust. Something about having an avatar mask and another name pushes so many buttons in my "typical" group of bright, careerist students (one exception, a blogger/gamer in the class).

Paraphrased reactions:

• Our generation wants transparency
• How do you know the person behind the avatar is who they say they are?
• This will *never* fly in a business setting, especially if someone comes to a meeting wearing a set of wings or a raccoon head
• Even a setting like Protosphere, with business-only avatars (I got a quick screenshot) is not serious enough and could lead to mistrust.

Etc. etc.  I could argue that they'd change their minds after a few weeks using a virtual world, but the class is not even remotely related to the topic.

I get this negative reaction in every class that hears about virtual worlds. I hear similar stories from colleagues at different sorts of schools.

Maybe we educators are wrong about these spaces. They'll have to be photo-realistic and connected to real-life identity, even more surely than a Facebook profile, for them to reach widespread adoption. For Gen-Xers, however, that sounds too boring to contemplate. We were used to identity being in flux.

It might help if young people learned to relax and have fun again. And that is not only the voice of a grumpy geezer, but a voice that inverts the usual "you young folks need to work harder!"

Yet I've never seen a more serious generation of students, in 25 years of teaching, than these. And they are sheltered. That worries me, because even with complete transparency and apparent knowledge of others, you can be cheated and abused.

Sad to say, but they'll just have to discover that without a virtual world.

Update 2/10/11: Students e-mailing to say how much they enjoyed the debate: good sign of more to come.  Also fixed spelling of "Visceral."  I had "Viscereal": strong cereal, indeed, these debates.

Linden Lab Embraces SL Romance

Location: Averting My Eyes

Second Life's rep as a place for online hanky-panky was the butt (ahem) of many jokes during the media-hype era of 2006-7. At that time, the Lab often played it down, then moved overtly adult content to its own continent.

I thought that the move to Zindra was wise at the time, and it's essential now that minors are in-world, but I always wondered why the Lab dodged the "hook up" scene that is so much a part of their world.

It was with some satisfaction that while logging on to the Lab's web site, I spotted an advert for "When Strangers Click," an HBO documentary.

You can visit the site and watch Clip # 4, where a fellow chats about the romance that blossomed in SL. It all looks rather innocent, two avatars dancing and kissing under a perfect night sky in a garden where no one need stoop to pull any weeds.

Perhaps Linden Lab wanted to promote this as a counterargument to all of the stories of more visceral encounters in their world? The sappy romantic music had me laughing, and I can imagine my chuckles swelling to howls of merriment when my students stumble upon the clip.

At the same time, and for the first time in a long time, I see the Lab making a savvy marketing move. They know their core audience is not educators like me or the hard-core gamers of my weekly "Nerd Night" crew. It's not even my fellow-travelers, SL's wonderfully creative artistic community.

Increasingly LL's bread-and-butter customers are roleplayers and fashionistas and those seeking romance.  These folks want toys and experiences. And to thrive, the world needs new blood. So why not sell your platform's core strength?

Get out the Barry White.

Could we expect more of same from the Lindens' new CEO?

A Great Time To Invest in Virtual Worlds?

Location: Building the Usher Family Crypt

Yes.

As I paste megaprims together in Jokaydia Grid, I read of two exciting developments for educators using virtual worlds: John Lester's job as Director of Community Development at Reaction Grid and Avatar Reality's announcement that Blue Mars will be able to launch well on the Mac OS, older PC hardware, the iPhone and iPad (and soon) even on a fast wireless connection.

Why should educators strapped for cash invest now? Although I have never been one to proclaim that anyone actually owns land in a virtual world, the situation today is analogous to the real-estate market. With competition for Linden Lab now and lower prices, it's a good time to get started.

• In Second Life mainland pricing is very low and other closed grids like InWorldz and Blue Mars are offering service and content that are catching up to SL fast without SL's reputation for cybersex and griefing (unfair though that may be).
  
• In many OpenSim grids the emergence of hypergate jumps allows connections between locally owned and hosted grids, so we have an archipelago of worlds that can scale, limited only by the number of servers distributed across the planet. That model seems to have worked pretty well for the 2D internet.
• OpenSim stability continues to improve, in my personal experience and according to Maria Korolov's recent survey, 84% of OpenSim users would recommend the technology to others. and Mesh, groups, and other features that many SLers love (or want to have) will soon be there. With that comes the avalanche of content from Google's 3D Warehouse.

I'm sanguine enough about this moment to spend out-of-pocket for my sim at Jokaydia Grid (it's a bargain). In time, with a proof of concept there and, one presumes, a simpler UI, I want to show colleagues on my campus again why virtual worlds matter for building simulations. Then the institution can make the next step of hosting its own grid or renting space again.

By then I'll have our own hypergate at Nevermore sim, in a family graveyard beyond the House. It will resemble Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, including W.W. Poole's tomb. He's the Richmond Vampire, and his crypt is locked as if to keep something inside. I'll toss the doors open and make that our hypergate to the growing worlds beyond our bit of rented land.

Feels like starting all over from the lessons, good and bad, learned in the last four years.

Gor & The Educators: Our Best Reason To Leave Second Life

image courtesy of Nightflower's New World Notes Post

Location: Letting Door Slam Behind Me, Washing Hands, Burning Bridges, Etc.

Nightflower wrote an interesting post on why real-life women chose to roleplay Gorean Kajirae (slave girls). Her blog contains a full interview with three Gorean women.

Disclaimer: I've long felt that adults can do what they please online as long as the acts are consensual and others do not have to watch. I've long been ambivlaent to Gor; John Norman's prose is terrible and clearly a reaction to the rise of Feminism in the 1960s. He's certainly never made full professor because of his Gorean fiction, though I suppose it made him a lot of money in the 70s, when the lurid covers attracted an army of teenage boys. I stumbled through Tarnsman and Slave Girl back then. That was enough. Even for a horny teen, the prose was dreadful when Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft awaited.

That said, no academic administrator who barely knows SL would fail to be outraged that this content is on the same grid as a campus. One counterargument deployed holds that campuses rarely censor internet use (totalitarian schools like Regents and Liberty don't count for me).

Yet the argument ignores a basic fact: SL's adult content is different from educational sites being on the Inernet alongside sites with X-rated content (or that promote Gorean lifestyles). Unlike other vendors we use, LL hosts both. If Blackboard hosted both RP slavery and campuses, we'd leave that software provider fast.

Here's another chat about Second World...I mean Life, with an administrator:

Department Chair: Joe, come on in. I was reading "Iggy's" blog for your annual review. Sorry to hear our campus is leaving Second Life so suddenly, because you'd planned to use it next term, true?

Iggy: Yes.

Chair: That's bad, but part of me is glad.

Iggy: Why's that?

Chair: You know I've spent my entire career writing about women's issues in literature, and so much of modern feminist theory is about the backlash to what we painfully accomplished, especially since the start of the women's movement in the 1960s.

Iggy: Oh no. You found the Goreans.

Chair: Yes! I learned about Norman's books when I first was in grad school in the 70s. We laughed because it was such a pitiful attempt to subvert our progress. Norman was such a cheap hack, too, that he didn't pose much of a threat.

Iggy: Yes, his writing is horrible.

Chair: His academic writing must not have been much better. He never rose above Associate Professor. But then you have people roleplaying these relationships in a virtual world. It's disgusting that real women would do that.

Iggy: Some are fake women.

Chair (laughing): I hope their "Masters" don't find out. Well, this new virtual world we are going to use...does it have Goreans?

Iggy: No adult content at all.

Chair: Great. If the right-wing morons at our local paper got wind that we share space online with such content, the editorial pages would be a nightmare. Let me know when you have The House of Usher moved to this new provider. And I want to see that article you've drafted on immersive literature.

A few years ago, as advisor to out campus literary magazine, I and the student editor got "called on the carpet" by the folks who fund it. The current issue opened at the midpoint to a poem with X-rated language. I defended the work, but the campus official said "this was on tables at parents' weekend. If the students want to print and distribute it, okay. But if they continue to print this sort of content, they should not expect any funding from us next year. Maybe they can sell cookies to cover their costs."

Thus, readers, I bid the Goreans, their home stones, their slaves, and their "natural order of things" a fond farewell.

Does Concurrency Matter to Educators?

Location: Reaction Grid Core Region

No. In fact, I'd argue that it only matters when we need students or colleagues present for an event.

I've been thinking about a popular criticism by non-educators that campus spaces in SL, and all spaces in OpenSim, tend to be "ghost towns." Well, compared to some popular social spaces in SL, I suppose they are. But then so is my real life campus when classes are in session. Except for a few students sipping coffee on the library patio, we look deserted. You'd think our student body came to about 100 souls.

Educators tend to come in-world for a purpose, often during our regular working hours. We don't tend to "chill" as much with our friends or students. In fact, when we do, it's rare enough to merit a blog post.

That's why the concurrency of THREE seen in the image above from Reactiongrid does not bother me all that much. My House of Usher build in Second Life is also empty 99% of the time. During the other 1% we are giving tours or, in character as Poe's characters, running a simulation for students.

So educators need to take a lesson away from this for assessment. The Writing Center I direct does not use number of visits as an indicator of success, but looks to repeat visits by writers, performance on rubrics related to written communication, and feedback from visitors.

Likewise, educators using virtual worlds will need to provide comparative scores to those not using simulations but completing similar work, gather narratives from users, and more. We might measure peak concurrency and report that, when we hold meetings, classes, and other events.

We should not, however, be counting heads when we count beans for assessment. And to non-educator SLers who don't understand, I say "Sorry no one was around. We didn't build these spaces for you guys, even though you are more than welcome to visit. We built them for learning, and that does not need constantly high concurrency to happen."

September Roadtrip: Mini Me, Broken Road

Location: Rock-->me<--Hard Place

When I'm not on my bicycle, a Mini Cooper S is my favorite ride, a wicked-fast but economical rascal of a car. A scamp but not a cad. It has more personality than would be legal if boring people ran the world. Well, they do run it. . .but they've yet to ban this sort of frugal fun.

So I had to get a Mini in SL, eventually. Thanks to ALV Rau, I found a Cooper a lot like my RL car, though it's not an S model and lacks the black bonnet stripes and top that sold me on the actual vehicle. Caveat: I dislike red cars, but black is always in style and Mini Me is at least as much black as red. Visit AL Motors in-world to have a look at the typical (but well done) SL Supercars and other unique items, like a Seat 600 (Spanish version of one of my faves, a Fiat 500).

With high expectations, I set out. How did Rau's virtual Mini hold up in SL?

Well, size matters a lot. Compared to the '59 Caddy or the Dominus Shadow I often use for road trips, the Mini can turn on a virtual dime, a virtue that commended my RL car to me as well.

I began my journey at Yadni's Junkyard. I had high hopes of making this circumferential journey back to the same spot.



Rau's driving HUD was a welcome companion on this trip. I could shift, monitor my speed, and do other tricks without losing sight of my driving. It's not nearly as good as using a wheel and pedal that a dedicated game could have, but I'm fast-fingered and can manage a keypad and a mouse for this sort of experience.



The car's interior is also well done, and though not a perfect match for my actual Cooper it shows a lot of care on the builder's part.


Normally, that level of detail would making driving a virtual car an immersive experience, but the Department of Public Works was on lunch break, I reckon. The upgrade to Server 1.42 did not improve sim-crossing much. A few sims, at first, loaded so smoothly I had great hope. But then I came to it: world's end at the Calisto/Atlas sim crossing.



Stuck there, I did something I'd never dream of doing in my real car: I texted. Yes, I got on IM and began to rage against the stupidity of a company that could not get such a basic service to work, especially after spending untold hours of staff time building a highway network in a world where we can fly and teleport.

What can Linden Lab do? Well, fixing it would be a modest suggestion. Hamlet Au reports that Linden Lab has just hired a Kim Salzer, an "an alumnus [sic] of Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts" as the Lab's VP of Marketing. Good news, if the Lab wants to "game up" SL, but Ms. Salzer will need to get the coders working hard on fixing the physics of sim-crossings. Otherwise, even a single vehicle cannot make a short run through nearly empty sims.

Otherwise, don't market SL with images of racing vehicles. It won't happen without some major changes, and SL's fleet of cool vehicles will remain simply eye-candy for dream homes and RP sims.

I'll attempt the same route next month and see how it goes!

Thoughts about "Gaming Up" Second Life

Location: Making Stuff

What's the biggest difference between MMORPGs and virtual worlds? Making stuff. You can level up and buy things in a typical MMORPG, but you cannot make the world around you. That for me keeps me out of online gaming (though I'm considering buying an Xbox for driving and WW II air-combat games). My main games are face-to-face RPGs, often as the designer and GM for a campaign. I don't design too many game mechanics, but I do my own "sourcebooks." Essentially, that's been my calling in SL.

Of course, most of my fellow SLers are not builders or game masters. What will attract more of them? I want to riff off Scott Jennings' post on this topic (found via New World Notes). I fear that while I like most of his points (lower systems requirements, make the UI simpler) he misses the social aspect that keeps the demographic I know best--affluent 18-22 year olds--away from both virtual worlds and MMORPGs:

Serious games are for losers: that is the vibe on my campus and those of my colleagues. Gamer-kids make up at best 5% of my campus. I'm betting that outside of Computer Sci. and similar programs at larger schools, that's also the percentage. They've also been warned by adults for years some version of "game a lot and you'll never work a real job. You'll fail out of college, live in a basement, and clerk in a convenience store, if you are lucky."

I'm betting that, given the oft-reported plateau in World of Warcraft registrations, that they've reached geek-saturation. Mainstreamers on this campus will play console games, casual games, but not MMORPGs or, for that matter, play in virtual worlds. They lack time and the stigma of being "too into it" is too strong.

College kids already have avatars: themselves. The mainstream kids I know--this is an affluent campus--live avatarian lives already, thanks to parent-granted credit cards, nice cars, and weekend social scenes that rival Cancun's. The time required for serious gaming takes away from that and FaceBook, a time-hog if ever there were one, facilitates real-life contacts and rewards that bolster their social lives. No magical sword or cyber-hookup can compare. I'm betting that at larger and more economically diverse campuses, students have other distractions, such as jobs off campus, but also put real-life socializing, augmented by social networking, ahead of games or anything like them.

In addition to those two observations, Scott also skips a few key aspects that make SL hard to "game up":
Virtual women are not (all) fat guys. I'd argue that a key demographic for Second Life consists of women who do not want to shoot stuff. Linden Lab will have to depend on its users to make games, since they don't do that sort of in-world content; the Lab makes infrastructure. Games to emerge need to involve puzzles and adventure more than hack-and-slash, and I base that claim on statements by actual women, academic and otherwise, who use the world socially.

I love the meme of "fat naked man in basement" as much as the next geek, but it's a stereotype of SLers and, for that matter, for many gamers. We need to lose it when we speak seriously about attracting and retaining an audience.

Sex sells, but only for a while. Sex is already a big in-world game, even though college kids seem bored or frightened of that aspect of SL. So I'm betting that the wistful (or cloying: you choose) promo for SL with the starry-eyed couple on the Eiffel Tower was aimed squarely at "the bored housewife," another demographic often used as a meme about SL.


I bet that, in a year, that guy will forget to put the seat down at night, too.

While such residents exist, does the allure of cyber-romance have enough staying power to keep a hobbyist occupied for more than a year or two? The only SLers I know from this demographic have left it because of boredom, what Richard Bartle calls "drift" in his book Designing Virtual Worlds. So while sex sells, the world has to offer more than that. Bartle says it well; to be really popular such venues need "content so potent that people can be quite willing--indeed, positively enthusiastic--to repeat an experience over and over again."

Game it up the right way. Linden Lab has flailed around this issue, trying to promote SL by linking it to Avatar, then to the Twilight books and films. With a grid this big, if the Lab put some energy into themed gaming region where tier and lag were low, then invited the best content creators to build the initial infrastructure, they might have a hit on their hands. And get the physics to work, too: driving in Second Life is laughable. Why build those Linden roads if one cannot use them smoothly?

When Linden Lab has an intuitive UI, preferably Web-based, they need some splash. Perhaps some real cash prizes, in the $5-$25K range (chump change for a company like theirs), for a "SL Idol" contest? They could promote this in more mainstream venues; right now their ads only reach a niche audience.

The way it is, but better? Linden Lab has a product that cannot easily--as currently construed--become Left for Dead, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online. The Mainland continents could become a sort of "Lifestyles of the Virtually Glamorous," which has been enough to keep The Sims franchise going strong. Caveat there: my students look at The Sims as a game for teenage girls.

That is not the demographic that "Ancient1," who replied to Scott Jennings' original post, sees This SLer runs a business serving "tens of thousands" of SL residents:

My experience has been that I am predominantly meeting working class family people over 35 years old who pay for land and services in Second Life because its their part time hobby to be in a virtual world. You could say its an escape for folks who work hard, have life and family stress like we all do, and login to Second Life to just “drift off” for awhile in another world.

I agree. Most of my social interactions outside academia have been with folks who have good computers but not always the right educations to wield power and influence in the ever-more-stratified US meritocracy. They use social media often as much as my students, but they do not have the casual social lives that college kids experience, often into their late 20s. The older users who typify the SL base are smart and well spoken, but cannot own Harleys and go on exotic vacations. Maybe they want to play a warrior or a vampire for a while.

SL could then be their "game." How Linden Lab keeps that audience coming is beyond me. Perhaps the mass audience will never exist, as it does for Facebook. Erik Sass' post on the continuing existence of SL among a niche audience takes a contrary view :

In this arena a small, highly-engaged niche audience may be more valuable than a large, apparently indifferent one (Facebook, I'm looking in your direction).

Right now we cannot even keep the educators in SL, as we realize lower costs and more freedom to host and back up content exist on OpenSim grids.

Brand Confusion at Linden Lab?

Location: Linden Lab Web Site

As I consider the range of ads that Linden Lab has run lately, I wonder exactly what type of user the Lab wants. Hamlet Au has championed growing SL's population by making boundaries more transparency between real-life and avatar identities. He's done so in a number of posts (here's the latest one) about linking social-networking sites to avatars.

I'm not opposed to that idea, though I like the notion of letting SL residents opt out of such conflation of realities. At the same time, I wonder if Linden Lab has thought through the rhetorical implications of a few of their advertisements.

Consider these images:These white heterosexual couples are moving into their Linden-supplied dream homes or finding "a place to love," a term used in a few places by the Lab. If these handsome folks are not married to each other in real life, they are at least ready to hook up in their second ones and perhaps have kids, as in this one that Linden Lab pulled after catching a lot of grief about the appearance of a virtual child.


Except for the last one, these images lend credence to the portrayal of SL as a meat-market, one that James Howard Kunstler used in his recent podcast about virtual experiences vs. real ones.

And at the video Linden Lab links under "about Second Life" you will see token tinies and furries and robots only in the closing scene. The black male avatar is carefully depicted as a business man in suit and toting a briefcase: Obama with the nuclear "football," perhaps?

I do not wish to suggest Linden Lab engages in any form of racism. In fact, I wish their Community Standards could be enforced in real life. But images say a lot about who they want to attract. Luckily, here's an exception to the current rule:

She's a lovely woman in both real and Second life. This campaign, one that includes at least one image of a person becoming a nonhuman avatar, seems to match what Hamlet is calling for at New World Notes.

It's not unusual for a company to appeal to two very different sorts of users; General Motors does not use the same appeals when selling an Impala, a GM pickup, and a Corvette. But GM is selling us products based upon an established brand identity in the marketplace. Linden Lab provides a service that most folks I know have never considered necessary to their lives, even if they have heard of a "virtual world." Despite my Peak Oil beliefs, I'd challenge you to find many Americans who don't know what GM is, let alone argue that the automobile is not necessary to how most of us live.

Linden Lab has to figure out what its place in the social-networking / gaming world is: GM could, for a while anyway, afford to be something different to everyone. A small firm like LL needs focus, and I'm not seeing that in their current advertisements.

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