Group items tagged

for virtual worlds as serious games

a story about a Second Life player who had gone from fat to thin. The player had told Philip that after seeing himself manipulate the image of his avatar, he reckoned that he could also manipulate his actual physical being. This is a strange story of simulated world impacting real life on a most basic flesh level.

But now we seem to have reached a point where the rapid addition of capabilities is no longer the key challenge, and indeed can be counterproductive.

talked about how all too often Linden Lab is now simply ‘in the way’

a company of almost 250 people

How do I add a mark to a trail? Create a new mark and give it the name of an existing trail, and it will automatically be added to the end of the trail.

How do I create a trail? Create two marks with the same trail name, and they'll automatically be linked together.

Who can see my trails? When you first get install the browser extension trails you create will be visible to all users.

My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.

The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?

There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.