Second Life

Once again, my post comes in the form of another email from Warren Ellis, one of the greatest minds in comics. In this email, Warren talks about a free online game called Second Life, where unlike other MMORPGS, this one has no goals or purpose whatsoever. I've been playing for a couple days now and its unlike anything I've ever seen or heard of in the game industry. It is actually pushing the boundaries of what life is like in an online world. Mr. Ellis writes:

Over the last month or so, in free moments here and there, I've been fiddling around with something called Second Life. I imagine a lot of you have heard of it, but

SECOND LIFE

if you haven't.

It is, if you'll allow, an attempt to transpose the "Metaverse" of Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH to the real world. It's an electronic planet where you take on an "avatar", a human figure representing yourself (more on that in a minute) and move it/you around in the mode of a computer game. For the Warcrack tribe, it's like this: a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game with no goals. A game of (second) life with nothing there to actually achieve.
It has its own currency, pegged to the US dollar, and its own simple economy -- actually, a posthuman economy, since there is no hunger, thirst or need to sleep, and everyone can both fly and teleport.

In the orientation, when you first launch SL and get your avatar etc, there is actually a singular moment of oddness to be had; you'll be pootling around getting your clothes for your entry into SL and what have you, and suddenly someone in front of you will take off into the air...

There's quite a tribe of the transgendered on SL, which ties back to the avatar thing: you get to be whoever you see in your head. You choose from a limited list of surnames, create your own first name, choose your gender, how you'll look, etc, and so you can establish an idealised, experimental or alien identity on SL, and you fully live that identity while there, to the extent of buying SL property in that name and beyond.

Personally, it drives me slightly crazy. I do little more than explore, in the snatches of time I get to hook into SL. And -- and this is a purely personal thing -- I dislike walking around with a fake name. SL have set up a few of the Technorati, like Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig, with full transpositions of their real names to SL, where they do occasional public appearances, lectures and the like. But that's obviously not extended to everybody. Although I
understand that some Suicide Girls models are going to be set up with SG names in SL with appropriate avatars. I just have a strong sense of my own identity and would not want to walk around without my own name, so I'm never going to be involved in SL in any serious way.

But what fascinates me about it is possibly the same thing that makes me crazy -- it's goalless. You're essentially invited to be an electronic frontiersperson, to obtain parcels of land and learn how to build your own homes (from the ability to generate and morph & mutate generic building-blocks that comes with your avatar) and to, I guess, find and enter communities. And eventually, I presume the hope is, to make SL better in some way for the people you share the electronic world with.

Which is really kind of an interesting thing. An entire population released to do nothing but make art and fly...

-- W