Second Life Land Baron?

Remember Woody Allen's Love and Death? His father, a Russian peasant, owned a small piece of land. It was so small, in fact, that he kept it in his jacket.

I feel like that, because I've purchased my first SL property. I needed to move Pappy to his own place, because we are planning expansions of the area on Richmond Island for student projects.

Tenchi Morigi is consolidating her land-holding in SL, and as a result she gave me the plot where the Stability Now! headquarters had once stood. It's not completely free, of course. For those who have never owned land, it's the way Linden Lab rakes in real money. For Premium residents like me, after my first 512 square meters of owned land, I pay a "tier fee" to the company each month. In my case, it's $5 US a month.

Not bad for the "Hellbilly Home Place," so our rip-snortin' hillbilly family can terrorize the neighbors.



These include some creepy place called "Vile Chapel." At least it's so far up in the air that I had to fly there in the car to find it.



But a vampire's paradise has nothing on the even creepier virtual suburbia on the other side. Pappy went over there to have a look..only a matter of time until we all are on the ban list.



Since I'd rather have vampires come after me than to dwell in the suburbs (in either life), I have to wonder: why do avatars move into these dreadful places-that-are-no-place? It's bad enough in real life, but in Second Life, where anything can be done or made, why? Perhaps, as the housing market collapses and real suburbia hits the skids...the hollow dream of conformity can struggle onward in this irreal place.

The Holodeck Paradox, Part 1

I've been reading Edward Castronova's compelling Exodus to the Virtual World, one of the best books yet on probable social effects of these technologies.

One of Castronova's key points concerns the increasing realism of virtual worlds; he compares them to Star Trek's Holodeck. I'll call his idea "the Holodeck Paradox": if the Holodeck were able to deliver a perfect simulation of the perfect personal fantasy, why would anyone on the Enterprise do anything else?

And as virtual worlds approach a "real enough" level of simulation, what will be given up in our real lives as we spend more time in-world(s)? Right now, SL is laggy and not as stable or intuitive as other forms of entertainment. Alternative social worlds--I'm not talking games here--are rickety like OpenLife (in my experience) or cartoonish, like the IMVU boopsies pictured above. My ideal lifestyle is not that of a Bratz dolly.

But virtual worlds will improve: when they have the GI Joe Adventure Team down, I'll be lost in virtuality. So let's take stock. Castronova is not afraid of using empirical and personal evidence. So I'm going to take inventory of my own life over the past two years in-world in SL:

• Less time with books and DVDs. I don't watch TV, except for an occasional clip or entire episode over the Internet. I am again reading more (working on only three books now) than a year ago but my pace has slowed . The writing, posting photos, and leaving comments in the blogosphere, not the actual time in-world, seem to be what devours my free time.
  
• Less time with face-to-face gaming. I never went for online games, because I'm more a gamemaster than player. When playing or refereeing, my interest was never about "leveling up" but about creating virtual places and adventures in my many role-playing campaigns (for more than 30 years). I rarely had time for more than a weekly "nerd night" with the usual suspects, but now I do not spend much time designing RPG "runs" and don't set up a massive WW II board game every so often and play it solo.
• Less patience for idiots. I've never suffered them lightly, but I have less and less patience in real life for stupid people since I began associating more often with clever SLers (idiots abound there too--I just walk away).
• Less money spent on hobbies. I build fewer model aircraft (I'm OCD that way) and collect fewer classic GI Joes (the shelf is full, too). Yet while these nerdy hobbies have yielded to "stuff" acquired in-world, other hobbies continue as they were before I made my exodus to virtual worlds. These survivors tend to be physical or spiritual: biking, gardening, a yoga practice, and do-it-yourself projects.
• More time writing. Now this seems paradoxical indeed, but the virtual world has given me subject matter for informal blogging, fiction, and academic articles.
  

Overall, my hobby time and not my personal time with friends and family (none of them are idiots) has been altered by my time in-world in Second Life and, more recently, OpenLife.

The Holodeck may well arrive one day, but perhaps the slowness of its development will give others time to adapt habits and hobbies to a transformed notion of leisure time. Meanwhile, some tough adjustments will be made. I strolled across the quad to observe a class, and fell in with a colleague who knows about my work with SL. He is not taking a winter break to a mountain cabin because both kids and his wife cannot leave high-speed internet. They need it for their World of Warcraft lives.

There's a world of a story in that lonely mountain cabin, waiting to be told.

Run, Pappy, RUN!

Location: SL gun dealer's shop

Iggy's Note: Intercepted message to a Second Life Gun-Dealer:

I wants tu thank yu fo' givin' a poor Hillbily gal a chance tu kamp. I plans tu get me 1400L tugether so I kin buy them-thar .44 Magnums yu got. Then I kin BLAST that fat rascal brothur o' mine, Pappy Enoch! Whee hoo!

Keep up the bizness o' deth. I luvs shootin' stuff, espsheshully stinkin' pole-cat brothurs hoo owes mee munny n' a glass eyeball (I lost mine in Roller Derby tryin' tu pay back taxes when Pappy run off tu Secund Life). He won't pay no restitushun to our famberly, but I am a-gonna make him pay a heavy ol' price :)

OpenLife Update: Rough Spots Still

By Guest Writer Mojobox Kane
Location: OpenLife, at Juliana Fivestar’s Freebies in Tune Valley

Ain’t I lovely? OpenLife has been very laggy today. I kept trying on a package of freebie skins, and I ended up looking like the Frankenstein monster remade by Beeble Baxter.

Skins and my fetching looks aside, there are improvements already in my OpenLife experience. The teleporting works, but I do not have these in OpenLife:

• SLURL links (they take you to the Second Life grid)
• Search (they take you to the Second Life grid)
• Home (Thomas Wolfe was right). When I tried to go home to escape some gray-avatar lag, I fell like Icarus into a patch of open water called The Black Sea
• Money. It all seems like play money, since there is no connection between OpenLife Credits and a real-world currency. I do know that between logins today I somehow lost 9,000 of my 10,000 credits.

I was able to upload some SL textures to OpenLife so now I have blue jeans. And now that teleporting works…I have found Tune Valley and a life-raft called a freebie shop. No more barefoot Mojo.


Stylin’ shoes, no? Shut your mouth.

I can say this much: OpenLife will be a boon to content creators on the run from SL or simply looking to find a world that enables them to employ their SL skills and textures. True, you gotta rebuild from scratch complex content, but this virtual world could become an open-source paradise. When I made my jeans, I gave Ms. Fivestar a pair so she can give them away again.

For free. Just like the best things in real life.

Cybersex also followed us quickly to OpenLife. In trying to find some male-walk anims, I came across a pile of free animations. Many of them are sexual from their names and a few have “Gor” in the name. Oh, GREAT. the Goreans will be here, too.

I continually relogged in an attempt to get my skin and hair correct. I did find, by randomly teleporting, a region called Hell that is decidedly idyllic for a new and half-made world. That’s me in the picture..the little cloud of gas.


Later I tried again from a much faster connection. I remained a ball of gas for some time. I managed to meet another OpenLife resident, who noted that he was quite new to it and Second Life. The latter, to him, seems to be “one big storefront.” More on that later. I fear that too in SL; we’ll see if OpenLife can remain a creative frontier for long.