Clay Shirky’s Post: Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds
January 30, 2007
We’re experiencing some (continuing) problems with Moveable Type on Corante.com and have temporarily set this up to host comments for Clay’s post – Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds – from 1/29.
January 30, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Part of the low adoption rate in Second Life must be related to the “do it yourself” bent of the environment. You can join the game with an O.K. avatar for free, but after an hour or so, you can spot these beginner avatars easily, and of course, the experienced ones look much better.
Now, you can purchase cool clothes, and even animation sequences – or you can build them yourself. That self-build aspect of Second Life is stronger than any other “environment” I’ve encountered. With sufficient time and effort, you can build anything you want for yourself – at least as well and possibly better then what you see the other avatars wearing / carrying, etc.
When I was 14, I had the time to do this kind of thing. Unfortunately, today I can’t make that kind of time investment in something like Second Life, so I just have an average looking avatar and no land, and I might log in for 3 hours a month, just to look around and see what’s going on.
If Second Life continues down the open source / DIY path, it should live a long life like Quake, but I don’t see it reaching the mainstream the way e-mail and web-browsers have.
January 30, 2007 at 5:07 pm
I’ve written a reponse to both this blog and the Jenkins blog at http://www.secondlife.intellagirl.com
What a great conversation!
January 30, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Bottom line, the elephant will walk, while the dogs will bark.
February 1, 2007 at 9:10 am
The game / non-game distinction is a very useful one. Somewhere between the “magic circle” and “goal directed” points lies the crucial issue, for me: Games provide you with an off-the-shelf purpose, where non-games require you to invent your own. Once a new resident has exhausted the potential for mooching around, they are confronted with their own, first life-type choices among priorities. And that’s just too real to be paying good money for!
The Second Life resident escapes everything in First Life except himself – indeed, the new environmental freedom throws his own baggage into starker relief. I suspect that many who stick with it are doing so by directing their Second Life into the style of one of two basic types of game-playing: a trading game (beloved of low-rent spaceship captains for a generation, already), or a sexual scoring game.
February 1, 2007 at 10:50 am
My own gripe, if that’s the correct word, with the Second Life craze is the implicit snobbery towards virtual worlds, or whatever we call them, like World of Warcraft. WoW and other MMORPGs are more than games, they foster strong communities, stronger I would say than Myspace/Bebo etc. where offline friends still make up the bulk of one’s contacts. I would argue especially for those in guilds that socialising takes up as much play time as questing/raiding etc.
It’s true that the strength of these communities are bound to shared aims and objectives, but historically isn’t this the way many communities were formed?
Great discussion!
February 3, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Clay , I really enjoyed the article and had been drawn in to read it because of a previous acquaintence with your work on HealthCare Information Exchanges.
SL is of course an interesting trend for those savvy folks who have some time (perhaps considerable) – to dedicate to it.
It’s also an exercise (once again) in Reed’s Law or the value of social connectedness on the Metcalf’s Law-based fabric, we call the internet.
World’s like SL will probably not enjoy wide-scale popularity – as you suggest. Yes, the celebrities have yet to check-in en mass, but even when that happen’s, it’ll be short-lived.
And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
I just wish that people would use their SL available time & $$ to apply their social connectedness needs to other things – that actually have a social imperative.
From the looks of SL, there’s some really creative people there who might possibly be better served – serving others with their skills.
Maybe I expect too much. Needless to say, I enjoyed your perspective.
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