The Pixel Farm

Second Life likes to cast itself as a digital utopia – a world of unbridled creativity that contains a thriving online economy, political structure and social scene.  Second Life’s detachment from a specific genre give it a unique feeling as compared to other virtual worlds, and it can be thought of as a platform onto which almost any interconnected 3D experience can be projected.

As with any virtual world, one interacts with the Second Life environment by using an avatar as an intermediary.  Unlike many spaces, Second Life permits limitless customization of one’s avatar – mine is displayed below as a flying blue dragon, a cardboard box robot and a human male in a business suit.

Building in Second Life

Unlike many virtual worlds, players (also known as “residents” by the SL folks) retain the intellectual property rights to objects that they create in game.  Construction of objects is handled through a built-in 3D modeling engine which allows one to sculpt objects out of basic geometric primitives (cubes, spheres, cones, etc.)

In addition to being able to create static content, Second Life also includes a built-in scripting language called Linden Scripting Language (LSL).  LSL code, which loosely resembles Java, can be attached to objects to impart them with a wide range of abilities.  For example, here is a glowing antenna that I built for my avatar:

And here is a flyable jet pack that I built to give your avatar that extra push to fly beyond the clouds (unassisted flying in Second Life is limited to about 165 meters off the ground)

Things to do in Second Life

Second Life is chock full of user-generated content.  Depending on your interests, you can spend time at virtual dance clubs, shopping malls, theaters, casinos, space stations – you name it.  Most of my time in Second Life has been spent helping college students get acclimated to the environment, and assisting or running classes online in a variety of spaces.

NMC Islands

The New Media Consortium (NMC) maintains an impressive set of islands that are devoted to helping instructors find new and interesting ways to use Second Life to better engage with their students.  From performing arts halls to conferenece centers to fully functional online classrooms, the NMC islands should be your first stop if you’re interested in seeing how educators are using virtual worlds in their classes.  Here are a few highlights:

For more information about the classrooms depicted in the images above feel free to check out this article on how the space is being used (I worked to help set up this space a while back ..)

Real-Time Weather Visualization

NOAA island contains a wide range of interactive exhibits, including a hurricane fly-through experience and a tsunami simulator.  My favorite spot on the island is a real-time 3D weather map that details current conditions across the USA.  Here’s a screenshot and a video that does a better job at explaining the installation:

Simulacra and Simulation

In the first few pages of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation,” the author makes a fundamental distinction between the idea of “pretending” that something exists versus the idea of “simulating” that it exists.  Pretending that something  exists leaves the “real world” in tact.  For example, a student who fakes being sick consciously knows that he or she is not  sick.  The “absolute truth” that the student is not sick is maintained during the charade.

The act of “simulating” that something exists moves beyond the “real world.”  For example, a student who truly believes that he or she is sick can sometimes produce psychosomatic manifestations of an illness.  In this case the connection to the “real world” becomes cloudy.  Both the “real world reality” (I’m not sick) and the simulated reality (I’m sick) co-exist. Evidence exists for both cases, and neither one can be disproved while the other remains a viable option.

Baudrillard goes on to extend this idea of a non-reality based simulation and begins to apply them to signs and symbols that we use on a daily basis.  He states that, at its inception, an image that mankind produces is, in essence, a reflection of reality that is well known and easily recongnizable by all who view it.  However, as an image persists, and as we look to that image more and more, it begins to take on a reality of its own.  This “simulated” reality begins to decouple from the “real world” and becomes dilluted over time, to the point where it no longer relates to the original object or idea that it represented.

Evidence of this idea can be seen throughout a wide range of virtual worlds.  For example, most virtual worlds try to simulate the human experience by incorporating concepts that are familiar in our day to day lives, such as eating and drinking.  Clearly an avatar does not have the same need for food or drink as we do, but the idea has been ported over none the less.  More often than not food and drink grants specific advantages to an avatar, such as providing an increase in certain game statistics, such as an avatar’s strength or agility.

A humorous example of how the idea of virtual food and drink can be taken too literally can seen in one of my favorite virtual world / real world intersections.  In this video (linked below) we jump right to the end of a music video segment in which the main character (Jeremy) is falling for a girl in the World of Warcraft.  At one point he begins to move in to kiss his monitor, but he is interrupted by his brother (Kyle) and begins to explain how he truly believes that he can live in the World of Warcraft.  Here’s a log of what transpires:

Kyle:  I came here to tell you that Mom wants you to come home
Jeremy:  I’m not going to come home Kyle, I’ve got a new place to live.
Kyle:  I don’t think Dave wants you staying on his floor anymore.
Jeremy:  No I don’t mean with Dave, I’m going to live in Azeroth, at the Inn.
Kyle:  How do you live in a game?  I don’t understand?
Jeremy:  Well I’m bound in Ironforge so I hearth back there at night I stay at the inn, I get some rest & experience
Kyle:  What are you going to eat?
Jeremy:  Well there’s food and drink in the game, it get’s your heath and mana back extra fast, so i’ts no problem

I recommend that you watch the whole episode, though you may want to start from the beginning – Pure Pwnage is a pretty hilarious look at gaming culture.

The idea of death is another example of Baudrillard’s concept of ideas taking on different meanings the longer they are detached from their physical counterparts.  Since their inception, video games have used the real-world idea of “dying” as a way to indicate that one has failed at a given task.  This idea persists within virtual worlds as well – in the World of Warcraft the act of dying more often than not means that you have failed to acthive a specific goal, and you are inconvenienced for a period of time while you work to resurrect your avatar from the nether world.  This can be accomplished by either running around and locating your avatar’s corpse, or by speaking to a special “Sprit Healer” who can return you to the world of the living for a price. In either case the act of dying is minor as compared to its real-world counterpart.

Interestingly the life/death dynamic changes in a genre-neutral environment such as Second Life.  In this kind of world the idea of death has little meaning due to the lack of “goals” in the system.  In essence, there is nothing that “needs” to be done in Second Life, so there is nothing to penalize a user for in the first place.  There are few isolated places in Second Life where combat with other residents is permitted, and in those places the act of “dying” merely teleports your avatar back to its original spawn point, which may be very far away from your current location.

Further Reading

I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson for a long time.  As the story that inspired the development of Second Life, I think it’s an important read for anyone who is interested in virtual worlds as a medium.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Virtual Worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.