To-Do List: When Admins Fret about SL

Location: Richmond Island

It's never happened to me on my campus, but I hear stories from elsewhere. "To protect our students," some institutions restrict use of SL or other work online. In some cases, students are not even authorized to leave campus sims!

It's ironic, and we really put the "loco" into "in loco parentis" with policies to protect young people who are old enough to die in combat (yet not drink, legally, in the States). Faculty and I.T. folks who teach or work with SL, if you ever get any pushback because of adult content or violence in SL, try these approaches:

1) Remind them of the new Linden Lab policies regarding adult zoning and age verification.
2) Show class policies, release forms, and other documentation to prove that you do not authorize students to do anything non-academic for class. As I once told a student who wanted to become an exotic dancer, "that's not part of my class. What you do in your own time is your business."
3) If they agree, develop with your inquisitors and the campus legal people appropriate release forms and waivers for students to sign.
4) Show your inquisitors Tutankhamen's tomb, The International Spaceflight Museum, or Genome Island.

Nuclear Options:

5) Take a look at the films showing in your student commons. If the "Hostel" or "Saw" series have been on the schedule, let your inquisitors know, then ask if seeing graphic tortures, rendered with photo-realism, is worse than a glimpse of full-frontal pixelated nudity or video-game-style splatter.
6) Go over their heads to a senior administrator who actually knows something about life online and has been sympathetic in the past. Play the academic-freedom card and see if a bone-headed policy can be subverted or overturned.

You will likely make enemies with this last option. If so, especially if you are younger than your enemies, relish the notion that you'll work (maybe live) longer than they will. Virtual worlds and open-access online are bigger than any university. We'll win on this one, if we act responsibly.

Blue Mars: The Wii of Virtual Worlds?

Location: Avatar Reality Web Site (images courtesy of the company)

The buzz about vaporware is becoming buzz about beta-testing. If your Windows Vista PC is ready, you will soon be able to try Blue Mars. Before I rant a bit about my dislike for any world that prohibits user-generated content, I must admit that Avatar Reality may end up with a hit.

After all, hardcore console gamers made fun of Sony's Wii at first.

It's not sexist (by a viewer) to point out that all of BM's preview images features modestly dressed female avatars. Maybe the boys designing the world prefer to look at babes as they alpha-test, but I think it more than that. Women have been in Second Life in large numbers (no one knows a precise percentage) and they may well be attracted to BM. This was Sony's premise, and men are using Wii as well; with an alpha-male in my family and a great-nephew I recently got top score on Rock Band with the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop."

Hey, ho! Let's go!

I've been rather savage to Blue Mars, since aside from my Mac zealotry, I learned that user-generated content by casual end-users would be prohibited. I'd even called BM "Blue Suburbia" on an e-list, after a designer of corporate simulations noted how consistent and business-friendly it would be for people who did not want to make anything. He even hearkened back to the "flying penis days" of SL, an era mostly gone.

I admit that the screen shots look appealing. But so does a theme-park.

Those with the skill to use 3D tools like Maya could make content:

Blue Mars client and interface is focused on enjoying the world through play and interaction, not content creation. Rather than force developers to learn new ways to create content through our own proprietary toolset, we support industry standard content creation tools like 3DSMax, Maya, and Flash.

Also from the company's FAQ:

Most city developers allow small vendors to set up shops in their city to sell virtual items. We will be announcing more details on this program in the coming months.

Here a line gets drawn: a virtual world that would make residents tourists by default, playing easy-to-use games and shopping shopping shopping for 3D pixelated versions of things they can no longer afford in our collapsed economy.

Keep in mind, however, that Wii thrived despite the need to purchase a dedicated console and not use the PC already on lots of desks. Nintendo marketed Wii to a demographic not already using a competitor's product. I suspect that the bad press about the wild sexuality in SL (rampant and overstated in too many tech journalist's pieces) is on the radar of corporate women: they'd be BM's first residents, then the boys would come over to socialize and try to act cool.

It would be a social-gamer's paradise, as the Sims has been. And it would bore me to tears with the nightclubs, the drama, the GOLF:

So yeah, I don't care for the idea of Blue Mars. If I cannot make stuff, even silly Lovecraftian books for Armada RP that whisper to me, I'm bored easily.

Unless I want really mindless and geeky fun. Then for Windows-based mayhem I'm betting on Stalin vs. Martians, more of my idea of a Monthy Pythonesque game that is easy to play.

T-34s and a five-story-tall, break-dancing Uncle Joe crush alien stooges to save Mother Russia in a dialectical materialist free-for-all! Go Stalin go! Shake that thing!

Forget the Red Planet. I'm going to play with the Red Army. Where's a PC? Gabba gabba hey!

A Conundrum Over Graphics for Linden Labs

Location: Second Life Education Roundtable

Photo Courtesy of Olivia Hotshot

I was so proud, as a faculty member, to have two of my students, DMZ and Socrates, join our weekly meeting as part of a student panel on SL. They really did a great job.

I'll run the entire transcript soon, but one point that Socrates raised is worth an entire post. He liked using SL in a class, and felt it helped his learning. Yet at the same time, he said this:

I do not see myself using Second Life after I graduate... but I do see myself using similar technology in the future. I am attracted to the concept of a virtual world with endless opportunities but the graphics are not strong enough to hold my interest for long.

For some time, I've argued that educators need stability more than fancy graphics. I'm not a gamer so SL's graphics are fine by me. Every time they get ramped up, it means ever-increasing requirements for graphics-cards and RAM on our systems. This orphans some students in the midst of a class and makes maintaining SL in a lab setting extremely difficult.

Socrates and other potential SLers, who are used to game-style graphics, want better graphics without lag to hold their interest.

How will Linden Lab satisfy both constituencies and grow its user base? On this question hinges a lot more than the fate of one virtual world.

Inventing a World in the Real World: Peak Oil

Location: Scaling the Peak Web Site

I was pleased to come upon this blog after I met the author on campus. His approach is less snarky than that of Jim Kunstler, a long-time correspondent of mine whose writing I'd discovered shortly before he visited campus. I love Jim's wit and sense of outrage at the outsized lifestyle of US consumers.

For at least this one post, I thought I'd diverge from my musing about virtual worlds to mention Peak Oil and its likelihood, in a time when fuel prices have dropped and some Americans I hear are singing "Happy Days are Here Again" as if sustainability were some sort of 1990s option.

Peak Oil is a simple concept: at some point, the planet's entire supply of oil reaches a halfway point. Past that, try as we might, aggregate production falls and keeps falling. New supply does not offset losses of older wells. This happened in the US after 1970, using a model developed by the Geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.

Hubbard predicted a global peak in the 80s, but finds in the North Sea offset that. Where are we now?

Close to Peak Oil for several reasons.

First, the economic downturn stymied new exploration and led to a slowdown in alternative-fuel projects. New discoveries are smaller and harder to develop. Major fields such as Mexico's Cantarell, the North-Sea wells and the Kuwaiti fields are declining. The biggest "elephant" field of them all, the Saudi Ghawar, is widely believed to have past its zenith because the Saudis are injecting it with seawater to keep its pressure up and the oil flowing.

As soon as global demand recovers, we are all in for a wild ride, because oil prices will skyrocket as production lags demand and reserves are tapped fast and hard.

What sort of world will we build, as the easy oil goes away?

Many books discuss it, but suffice to say two models stand out:

Power Down: A life lived more locally, more self-sufficiently, and with fewer luxuries and less driving. Sprawl in the US will shrink to local villages or become abandoned. Commerce will be local. How local and at what pace, no one knows. Here alternative fuels and carefully managed oil supplies permit a gradual scaling back of our habits. I'm using Richard Heinberg's term for this model; his book of the same name is a good read.

Long Emergency: Jim Kunstler's term. Here we end up fighting resource wars, facing chaos at home as overfed consumers elect what Kunstler likes to call "cornpone dictator." Globalism falls apart, and we all sink into, at best, a 19th century way of life for the foreseeable future.

Don't believe me and the authors cited? We might just be alarmists and easily dismissed, at least until one reads "Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations," an innocuous- sounding 2005 report from the Army Corps of Engineers. It acknowledges the reality of Peak Oil and warns:

• "World oil production is at or near its peak and current world demand exceeds the supply."
• "Unless we dramatically change our consumption practices, the Earth’s finite resources of petroleum and natural gas will become depleted in this century."
• "To guess where this is all going to take us is would be too speculative. Oil wars are certainly not out of the question."
  

I have heard--and not verified this--that the dearly departed Bush Administration was outraged by this report. They and their oil-baron friends didn't like that sort of news from anyone, especially from the military.

Memorial Day is coming and with it, the driving season. With that, gas prices are staying above $2.00 a gallon. Let's hope for Powering Down, with more walking, biking, hybrid, electric, and biofuel cars, and a renewed rail system run from power plants and not on imported diesel.

In either model, we'll have to invent a new way of life, and the re-building will be as strange to us all as anything from a virtual world. I'm not betting on any technological dei-ex-machina. I think we'll get along, more simply, with traditional ways of living and some--but not enough--new technologies. A lot more of us will work in agriculture.

As for our current level of supersized and suburbanized abundance? It's as much an hallucination as were the housing bubble and funny-money of leveraged debt.