Building Tip: Little Pink Boxes! Building Flop: Millennials & Creativtity

Location: House of Usher

A problem with group building is how often we forget to "share with group" when we lay down a prim.

Today, I worked with Jordan, the student assistant helping with the House. Mostly we were testing textures and making sure our permissions were correct. I created a visual cue for her (and me) to remind us which prims need fixing. A free script for floating text sits inside the full-bright pink cube, so we can indicate a location with some level of specificity.

There's nothing pink or even bright in Poe's tale, so we won't mistake this tidbit for the scenery.

As we built, I had a fascinating conversation with Jordan. Like many her age, she does not see the point of SL, and though she's a good builder, she finds the creation tools tedious. I only agree with that final point, especially after spending hours chasing down flickering edges and closing gaps in walls.

Her first claim made me sad, as I'm always sad when I encounter the imaginative impoverishment of an entire generation of "taught-to-the-test" Americans.

Jordan and I talked at length, across the tops of our monitors, about the lack of creativity that has marked the educational experiences of too many Millennial students. Jordan agrees that she and her peers have never done much imaginative play. One result of this is a goals-oriented approach to all work at school and social activities beyond it.

SL, with its culture of creative play and creative chaos, just seems beside the point--the point of getting ahead in life--that Millennials crave.

That, readers, is a problem far larger and scarier than any virtual world, and there's no pink box that can fix it.

Pedagogy First, at The House of Usher's Front Door

Location: Front Door, House of Usher Build

I am continually surprised by how much little details count, with this generation of college students.

We want, in our build, to have pedagogy drive the design. It would be easy to build with some "cool factor" in mind. Coolness could mean too any scripts early on, too much fussing about the furniture. These might simply detract from the immersive experience we want. After all, the faculty members working on this house want to make Poe's story come to life.

Part of that is getting students engaged in wanting to change Poe's ending, while comparing their decisions to those of the narrator.

One thing I did spend time doing--maybe too much time--is making a decent front door for the House of Usher. It's the first impression, after all. Thanks to a simple scripting technique by Bob Suter with IBM, not to mention a publicly available script, I soon had a slab of plywood in place that would open on a hinge and not in the center. Then I dove into some vacation photos of old English doors, as well as battered versions of a family crest for the Usher Family. I soon had a seven-prim textured door that had seen better days.

Inside, of course, we'll use simple one-prim rectangular doors, but in a virtual world complexity of design becomes necessary at key spots. For the library railing where Roderick's books will be scattered about the floor, I employed a TGA file with lots of transparent cut-outs.

When the faculty member for the Poe class looked over my shoulder, he approved. "That railing texture looks like bones."

Good touch for a Poe story! And in Richmond, you can have a sense of the author looking over your shoulder. Our town is haunted by his tragic life. We have to get this right.

Faculty in writing-intensive classes don't think visually when designing assignments. But for this project to work--even when my writing students beta-test it for later courses on Poe--I'll need the skills of a story-teller, cinematographer, and graphic designer at one stroke.

Stay tuned. No lag so far at the House...but lag happens. Let's hope that it's in the service of good pedagogy.

Amazon.com is Watching You

Location: Richmond Island's House of Usher Build

As I make prims fit and have fun with Photoshop designing textures, all so we can beta-test this simulation next semester, something that would have given Poe even more nightmares has happened.

Anyone following tech news knows how Amazon.com reached into Kindle owners' machines without their knowledge to remove copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. How appropriate and how unfortunately ham-fisted for a company that should know better.

Printed books have this power: ownership. It will be a long time before I buy an e-reader of any sort. Although a company spokesman noted that the company will not do this again, Amazon needs to provide a legally binding contract to Kindle owners stating that it will never do this again.

The power of a major corporation to erase works of literature in an increasingly paperless world is terrifying. There's not much of a leap from that to a totalitarian state erasing our books.

Make mine paper: I'll be reading Mervin Peake's Gormennghast tonight, in a thick edition that includes all three of the Gormennghast novels. And Barnes and Noble cannot come and seize it, nor can Uncle Sam, without a major domestic incident and quite likely, violence. Books are worth dying for.

As for Poe? I had planned to offer my students the option of downloading "The Fall of the House of Usher," in a free Kindle edition, instead of buying the Penguin Classic edition. Now they'll have to buy the paperback and I'll use it as a lesson about how fragile knowledge can be, when others control it.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

Location: Richmond Island and the Moon

As I began to assist our university's team on a build of a House of Usher, for a new course in Rhetoric and Communication Studies, an idea struck me. I thought of the moon landing by Apollo 11, 40 years (and a day) ago.

I was a nerdy space-kiddie then, and I recall Neil Armstrong's first step as one we'd all follow. Those were heady days, with a task force report stating:

We conclude that NASA has the demonstrated organizational competence and technology base, by virtue of the Apollo success and other achievements, to carry out a successful program to land man on Mars within 15 years.

These words were published in September, 1969. In 1984, we had just barely gotten the Space Shuttle off the pad, to languish in low-earth orbit.

Whatever the merits and demerits of human-crewed spaceflight, the 60s program had a "reach" and a promise of new worlds, even if they only were available to a few lantern-jawed rocket-men.

I feel pretty strongly that one of the feelings that motivates me to work hard in virtual worlds is the promise of a frontier, albeit an electronic one, with a sense of embodiment that I never had on the "flat" Internet. And when I attach one prim to another, I'm making something new in a new world.



Our House of Usher build, and the rest of SL for that matter, are not Mars colonies, but they will have to do. And it may explain why so many builders and creators are drawn less to games and more to worlds that permit user-generated content.

I'll just keep building and hoping until, to quote Tom Wolfe in the New York Times, we do set about "recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars."