Friday, February 20, 2009

Where the Road Ends? Eminent Domain?

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Location: End of the "Old Wagon Road," Sababurg Sim

I've been curious about what the Linden Lab Department of Public Works has been doing.

I'd read that the Lindens have a public-roads project to provide interesting highways. You can see the proposed routes from the Linden's Wiki, posted nearly a year ago. I love the idea of these roads, but what will Linden Lab do when the new route bisects a resident's land?

On one side of the screen, real-life governments exercise eminent domain to get land from owners. Here's a good example of where SL may be posed for an evolutionary change that could violate the libertarian ethos of the virtual world, or where the sheer unreality of SL will trump any metaphors we try to drag along from our world.

Perhaps the Lindens will simply wait for lands beyond the end of the road to go on the market and buy them up. Then the Old Wagon Road will continue.

The Lindens seem to have adopted a tongue-and-cheek approach to the situation where, where the road ends. It's one of the few places in-world where a map tells me "you are here" and provides a bit of verisimilitude as to SL.

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I don't know if the billboards I saw are an inside joke at some resident ("those losers in Ellingson") who would not sell his or her land, a chamber-of-commerce plug to go to Ogilvie to drive on a completed road, or something else that just escapes me.

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Just how long it will be before SL beauties tear down the roads on Vespas, like characters in a Fellini film? I don't know, but Olivia Hotshot already got this photo.

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Not long before such scenes get more common, I'd bet: build it, and they'll drive.

1 comment:

Cecil Hirvi said...

Here's a movie that will cheer you up! Don't worry too much about the Lindens....they die like everyone else.

CECIL HIRVI'S ground-breaking THE SUNFISHER Premieres in Second Life, Friday, MAY 15 @ 1pm SLT!

This original story about a virtual-world weary borg breaks new ground in digital storytelling and machinima-making.

"Cecil Hirvi’s Second Life pursuits, challenge our precepts of how films may be created in the future." -Glendale Daily Planet

The 11th film in the "Saga of Cecil" canon finds our anti-hero wishing for a quick death to end his seemingly fruitless battle against petty tyrants and virtual nincompoops.

Cecil Hirvi's work has been hailed as some of the best machinima work/storytelling being done in the virtual universe and this latest film continues to go where no one has gone before.


The 15 minute film is PREMIERING in Second Life at this location
http://slurl.com/secondlife/RastaOpen4/74/180/42
FRIDAY, MAY 15 @ 1PM SLT

Sim is limited to 20 so respond early to get a seat!

See the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o22fpIJ1l_Y