Scott Adams in Second Life

"About 60% into the video, an avatar that looks like Dilbert appears and attacks me. It was art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me."
Scott Adams

Exeedos, movement of Jah people

Has the great corporate exodus out of Second Life begun?

DeliFaks reports that between May and June, the population of active avatars declined 2.5%, and the volume of U.S. money exchanged within the world fell from a high of $7.3 million in March to $6.8 million in June. It also seems that there are only about 40,000 people roaming around in there at any one time.

Techcrunch's Duncan Riley has done some basic commercial arithmetic: The visitor rate to corporate-constructed locations in SL (0.8-2%) might represent an improvement on the standard online advertisement rate of 0.5-1%, but the CPM varies from around $21 to $180 which makes SL marketing a comparatively risky strategy.

Tim Guest on virtual worlds

Watched Tim Guest plugging his book Second Lives from the Hay Festival this morning.

Guest, who grew up in a commune, believes that virtual worlds provide a modern solution to the alienation problem that drove his mother into the arms of the hippie counterculture: "How do we be together when we feel so alone".

He told the SKY reporter that over time people "become more honest" about themselves in Second Life. He believes that virtual worlds like SL will evolve to become as vivid and complete as real life. This is all very well and good, but what if people's virtual social behaviours also evolve to this point of such indistinguishability? What use are a bunch of honest, miserable, sociopathic avatars? Of course it could work the other way, with manners more appropriate to virtual situations crossing over.

SKY launches its virtual newsroom tomorrow.

Suzanne's guitar

That little video of Chilean agit prop on the grid prompted me to see what else I could find on YouTube. Well, there's this cool little clip showing how Suzanne Vega's SL guitar was made. Below it there's another one showing her avatar 'singing' Tom's Diner live. Interview is skippable.

Experiencing gremlins in Second Life?

Transantiago torched in SL

Since February residents of Santiago Chile have had a new urban transport network called Transantiago , which sounds a bit like Guatemala City's new Bus Rapid Transport system known as the Transmetro....except that it's even less popular with its intended passengers.

Chilean activists decided to organise a protest in Second Life. They began by constructing the appropriate environment, a model of the national palace (famously bombed in 1973 with Salvador Allende inside it) and then gathered en masse to make their feelings felt.

As with all such protests, some just waved placards and 'shouted' a lot, whilst others converted themselves into flames and torched the virtual bus that was parked in front of the virtual seat of government. A minority just took off their clothes. Nobody had thought to organise the the virtual riot squad with tear gas and watercannon.

Many complained of getting "stucked": the idea had been to protest in such a way as to avoid paralysing the streets of Chile's capital, but the sheer quantity of avatar-activists meant that they instead rapidly paralysed the SL grid, with the inevitable loss of user experience.

Virtual child abuse?

Linden Labs urges caution over the great Second Life child-abuse scandal:

"On Thursday May 3, we were contacted by German television network, ARD, which had captured images of two avatars, one that resembled an adult male and another that resembled a child, engaged in depicted sexual conduct. Our investigations revealed the users behind these avatars to be a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman. Both were immediately banned from Second Life."

Er? Is it against the rules to have an under-age avatar, or to use that avatar to have consensual virtual sex with another, past-it looking avatar?

Personal Digital Landmarks

My recent experiences in Second Life − so nearly comparable with actual lived experiences − have had me thinking about those other times when the future has manifested itself in my life on specific, very memorable occasions.

1980 or thereabouts: My father's company moved to Neal's Yard in Covent Garden and got themselves a TELEX machine. One evening one of the secretaries took me down for a demo and we 'chatted' to someone in the Middle East.

Winter 1992: Installed MS Mail (DOS) at home. The possibilities of email immediately revealed themselves, but this was still a private network requiring a local 'post office'.

New Year's Eve 1992: Drunken first exploration of Compuserve. Had a look around the message boards and searched for airline ticket prices. Even allowing for my state of inebriation this was all very astounding. It was still a proprietary system though.

Summer 1994: my first private Internet account. Before this my experiences had been limited to watching others use it and flicking through the remarkably thin 'Internet Yellow Pages'.

One of my first experiments with this new medium was to ask a question in the Usenet group sci.archaeology.mesoamerican: How did the Mexica (Aztecs) make their famed chocolate drink? Within 24 hours I'd had several replies from fairly senior academics in the field.

It all came thick and fast after that. The one other landmark that stands out is the morning in 1997 when I noticed a little green flower in my system tray - ICQ.

Second Life

In my thirty-ninth year my attention has been drifting towards the next level of representation up, which may partly explain my lack of enthusiasm for spending huge amounts of time in a virtual world (almost) one whole level further down. And writers like myself are anyway more interested in the virtuality that is immanent in the real.

Nevertheless, I spent a few hours last night looking over V's shoulder as she made her maiden excursion into Second Life. We chatted for a while with the owner of a private island that hosts a chill-out lounge.

That was after we escaped from newbies island, where people kept wandering up and asking if we minded if they masturbated. V amused herself by telling one L-plated second-lifer a whole load of invented tosh that he took as useful information. Later on she also tried out some misbehaviour, for which she was briefly confined to a burning cage. It seems that there are consequences here too.

I've always preferred tourism in tandem, especially the serendipitous sort. Yet I suppose that once I know the lie of the virtual land I may be more inclined to make goal-orientated incursions on my own.