New Academic Journal About Virtual Worlds

Image: "Jellyfish," from Elif Ayiter/Alpha Auer

Tip of the top hat to Nina Ayoub at The Chronicle of Higher Education for this story.

Peter Monaghan's Aug. 4 story at The Chronicle explains how Elif Ayiter of Sabanci University in Istanbul and Yacov Sharir, of The University of Texas at Austin, have launched Metaverse Creativity, a refereed journal dedicated to "the examination of creativity in user-defined online virtual worlds such as Second Life."

Ayiter is a multimedia artist whose avatar, Alpha Auer, has a wonderful photostream at Flickr Sharir is a choreographer and recipient of an "Arts And Virtual Environments" two year fellowship at UT Austin. We have good editors who know their materials.

The first issue will launch online and in print in October. To my knowledge, only one other academic journal, The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, exists in this emerging but interesting field...dare I call it "metaverse studies"?

Welcome and best wishes on your journal, Professors Ayiter & Sharir.

Third Rock Grid's Rising Sun

Location: Japan, Edo Era

One of my first assignments for Prim Perfect will involve Third Rock Grid, where a small but passionate group of "Citizens" are building the virtual world.

My story about "3RG" will feature an interview with PhD candidate Margaret Dashwood (Margaret Michalski in SL) who had made her home in the grid.

We had begun a tour of Rising Sun when a crash stymied me. I came back later for another tour and more photographs, with graphics pumped to high and the MacBook handling it fine, even on a wireless connection. I used the notecard feature of 3RG (nice to have this in OS grids) so I could ask the sim owner, Dartagnan Nakajima, a few questions about what makes 3RG special to him. As his profile notes, he “came here in August, 2008 and have been here ever since.”

I'll run his answers here as well as more details about this grid.

Nothing profound to say yet, except the grid is usually stable and its content impressive. What I'm seeing conveys one clear message at least.

If virtual worlds have a future, it will be in network of small grids rather than Second Life's "one big metaverse" model. As soon as some entrepreneur contracts with bespoke designers to make multi-grid inventory possible without violating IP, the game will change for good.

Bald-Headed Freak Joins Prim Perfect Staff

Location: Other Grids

I'm pleased to announce that starting with this issue of Prim Perfect, I'll be writing a monthly column about grids Beyond Second Life.

This opportunity to work with Saffia and her talented collaborators will also have a salutatory effect on me. I hope to bring an outsider's perspective to a journal that does a fine job of covering fashion, architecture, and design in virtual worlds. There is, after all, a lot to be found beyond Linden Lab's walled garden.

It's too easy to stay in the familiar, well trodden paths.

It's wise, given the year's turmoil at the Lab, to lay some "just in case" plans if an acquisition or bankruptcy leads to all our virtual goods going "poof." It happened in There, Lively, and Metaplace, after all.

With those sobering thoughts in mind, my first trip will be to Third Rock Grid. After that, who knows!

Second Life's Destination Guide: Why I Like This Buried Treasure

Location: Planning Virtual Travel

This began as an update to the previous post, until I discovered that Linden Lab has already done something I was about to recommend for retaining player...I mean resident...interest.

The clever and intuitive "destination guide" can be found, though after too many clicks, from a featured area at the bottom left of the log-on window. It's also there when one clicks on "world map," but that's not enough because in either case. The visitor must scroll to the very bottom of a few selected sites to get the big list.

The guide deserves greater play. Perhaps instead of the moon-eyed couple in Paris or the shopaholic in the little videos shown to all visitors, why not feature a different roleplaying group or cool location with each reload of the window, using machinima they prepare for the occasion? At the top of the page, I'd add "stuff to do."

Just as the model companies mentioned in my previous post sponsor contests and promote groups, Linden Lab could promote these key communities in SL. With a click the visitor could could discover the nature of the RP community, see some photos, read a few ground rules, and learn of places of interest in-world.

The problem would be how to feature something like Gor (not technically "adult") without raising a ruckus in the mainstream media that sporadically cover SL. I can see it now: "you too can become a slave girl!" I leave it up to Linden Lab to figure out a way to showcase roleplay without that particular problem. They already have "Sexy Islands" up there, as racy as I'd suspect they'll get.


The guide also features the UT system project as well as the ever-popular (or annoying, your choice) Bloodlines game.

The impression is of a large and diverse community. That should be front and center, not Ken and Barbie on the Eiffel Tower.