So my third travelogue will be focusing completely on the virtual world of Second Life and how recent events have made them shift their strategy. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its users. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown and today is inhabited by millions of residents from around the globe. However, in the past year SL has begun to feel the same effect as us in the real world. There has been a virtual-bank meltdown and a lot of the banks that were in SL have lost big sums of money and backed out of the scene completely. Banks nowadays are looking to cut costs and SL is not a priority for them.
Also, due to the nature of SL it has become a place of fantasy. Unfortunately a lot of people are utilizing this virtual world to take part in offensive acts such as: public sex, rape and child pornography. So as mentioned in my previous post, Linden Lab (the creator of Second Life) has decided to clean up SL’s image and is now pitching itself as an online schoolhouse. They will focus on holding more educational events, community meetings and cultural events.
My travelogue will research how SL is changing. I will do this mostly through fieldwork with the help of my friendly avatar Pascui Carlucci. Meet her:
I want to see if the change in strategy is reflected throughout SL and if so I ask myself if it is truly a new beginning for them or the end? Stay tuned…
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- Adios SL! (5) | andrea_arellano
- SL: On a decline? (6) | andrea_arellano
- Newmindspace (6) | Austine
3 Comments
Ooo, this reminds me a lot of the class we had on SNSes. There are always three things that get in the way of group progress:
1. Sex Talk (as you’ve described above)
2. ID-ing an Enemy. Having a common enemy.
3. Worshiping something, like an extreme fan club.
I wonder if the first one is the only problem that SL has been faced with. It would be interesting to see if you can find examples of the other two things, using Pascui Carlucci of course.
The first time I logged on Second Life, I walked into the basement of a random building and discovered it was a dungeon devoted to drawings of animals with exaggerated human anatomy. The pictures were in frames hung on the walls that changed every couple of seconds. In the center there was a user created horse that you could, uh, ride if you wanted to.
That was the last time I went on Second Life.
I was a little disappointed though, because I thought SL could be a really interesting concept, so it’s interesting to hear that their trying to recast the program as educational. I’d be interested to hear a little about how it moved from what it was when it launched to the strange place it is today. Maybe you could find people in there to tell you the history of the place from, kind of like an oral historical record?
Also, you might want to check out the Playstation Home service that’s just launched on the PS3. It’s very much like second life, in that it’s an open kind of world that isn’t much until content is added, but it’s focused on new ways of advertising instead of…furries.
Playstation Home: http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Home
I thought another crazy thing about second life may be to explore how second life effects real life. Like I have heard tons of stories of people doing crazy things in real life because of second life (like the story of the women who killed a guy who was her husband on second life cause he cheated on her)…