Second Life and Virtual Reality as Community Building Tool
After reading about various interesting events that had taken place in virtual venues within the world of Second Life, it finally sunk in. This might have a potential as a civic space, where I could talk to people all over the world about the idea of dignity as a human right.
Second Life is a massive virtual reality environment. It’s not so much a game as a global conference call that takes place in fantastic imaginary settings. All sorts of activists could set up kiosks around the virtual public square. People with common interests could meet and coordinate for political action. One day there might even be ways to facilitate voter registration. Enthralled by the vision of cyber-democracy, I set up an account.
It was very easy for me to get started with Second Life because I have some experience with 3D apps. These skills are more common to people under 30, so I’m sure that for the present participation will skew fairly young. I spent a few minutes twiddling with my character - here she is wearing a “Fight Rankism” t-shirt!
When I did my initial recon, I was a bit disappointed. A lot of the development of Second Life has been commercial, which makes much of the world resemble MYST: The Sleazy Vegas Edition. It didn’t take me long to figure out why a world of virtual casinos was inevitable - in fact it’s necessitated by the game’s economic model.
The number one obstacle to developing civic space within Second Life is its exploitative economic model.
The first thing I wanted to do in Second Life was build a landmark to stand for the cause of dignity while my character was offline. You can’t do that in Second Life unless you own land. Unfortunately land is very expensive within the terms of the game. If you don’t want to indenture yourself to labor some established character, your main option is to collect cash from Money Trees (largesse from the wealthier denizens of Second Life). It took me a few hours to collect $100: this isn’t a fraction of what I would need to buy land: definitely not worth it.
I did try just building a few small objects with a note about dignity attached, to leave on tables and benches. Apparently this is regarded as the equivalent of littering in Second Life, and my objects were quickly returned to my character’s inventory. Suddenly I understood why there are whole sweatshops devoted to farming for game money for online games: since the primary activity of the game (building) costs money, the players themselves enforce a money economy within the game so they can pass on their costs to the next person who comes along.
While Second Life is a really cool idea, I think the business model is questionable. People can get game cash to buy land by paying a subscription fee to Linden Labs (the owners of Second Life). This means that people are paying to contribute their creativity and labor to develop an attractive game space for the profit of Linden Labs. This is worse than Wikipedia, where people just donate their time to the crowdsource the greater glory of Jimmy Wales. Also, you lose the fruits of your investment and efforts if you are banned for any reason (serious legal thought has been devoted to this issue).
If anyone from Linden Labs reads this, my tip would be to subsidize people who want to build. Just make people pay to buy prefab objects, when they want to be conspicuous consumers instead of producers. From the level of advertising that already infests second life, Linden Labs will be able to find plenty of marketing departments willing to play for bling.
My gripe about the exploitative economic model aside, there is potential for Second Life civic space. I’m certainly not the first person to think of it. After searching through the Second Life group listing, I discovered that adventurous students at New York Law School have been developing Democracy Island. I’m not sure what activities they have in mind, but I joined the group just for the heck of it.
I couldn’t find any other obvious political fora, but it could be that I just didn’t hit upon the right keywords. There’s no question there’s room for much, much more development around the concept.
Despite the proliferation of cheesy casinos, there are lots of places within Second Life where you can almost feel the love poured into the landscape. Some of the creations are as sophisticated as any professionally designed game (in fact Second Life might actually serve as a proving ground for designers). There were all sorts of geeky in-jokes from working stargates to the occasional Tardis to a wreck of the Enterprise.
I probably won’t do very much with Second Life for the time being. As mentioned above, I’m not about to pay Linden Labs to develop their product for them. I do think there’s a lot of potential for community-building and fostering civic discourse (on a global scale) within Second Life, though. I am going to wander around a bit more tonight just to see what’s where - if anyone wants to join me, I’m the one wearing the “Fight Rankism” t-shirt. 
I would encourage you not to give up on Second Life and give it some more time and exploration. The accounts are free, and there are many ways to join groups easily and get access to land. With as little as a $9.95 spent on a monthly account, you get 512 m2 included which is enough to start a little house or office. And I’d be happy to offer you meeting places in my Public Spaces in SL or SL Public Land Preserve for free, just IM me inworld.
I’ve been in SL for 2 years, it’s a pioneering technology, it’s had its rough spots but the main problem it has faced IMHO isn’t even technological but social: the main people shaping its agenda — and thereby the agenda for the whole Metaverse and the 3-D virtual Internet of the future by default — are decided sectarians, often of the hard left of utopian right or wacky techno Kool-Aid variety, with even various social-fascism or communist doctrines abounding. The liberal middle spectrum is absent, and people like you are missing the opportunity to be present at the dawn of an exploding revolutionary phenomenon.
The business model is the way it is because of the ideologies of the founders and early adapters, it lurches from communism to social Darwinism to harsh Reaganomics all in one model, with its various aspects, precisely because the people running it tend to be tekkies without a lot of education or exposure to the humanities, political philosophy, discussions about the classics, etc. They didn’t say, hmm, how can we design an equitable world and a civil society in a democratic and liberal civilization? They just concentrated on the mechanics of building it and letting people come and leaving it open — that was a good thing but it will become in fact closed the more the extremist ideologies are allowed to take root.
Like Russia or Chile or anyplace undergoing upheavals or transitions, the civic space of Second Life has to be created by the people who take an interest in it and are affected by it. It doesn’t spring full blown from the sky. The people who were early adapters tended to be geeks and MMORPG gamers, and then later, some socializers from other games like The Sims Online or There, and they were rather short on ideas of how to build communities other than to follow formulas like “let’s get up a posse and shoot everybody else” or “my family right or wrong”. As it fills up, more educational institutions like Harvard and businesses like America Apparel have begun to establish a presence and will affect how the world gets made.
I totally agree with your concept of the exploitation of crowd-sourcing, what I myself call “crowd-serfing”. There’s been a great deal of that. But there’s also the satisfaction of starting a business, working at it, seeing it grow, having it pay off and being reimbursed for the heavy expenditures of land tier — that’s something I’ve been able to do.
In theory, virtual spaces like Second Life could do a lot to remove or mitigate “rankism”. Of course, they also contain within them the ultimate of rankism, the god-like powers of the programmers and owners of the servers have made the creator class the highest rank of all, and that’s where outsiders need to get to work, or the next century will be ruled by them and it’s not going to be pretty.
Comment by Prokofy Neva — August 30, 2006 @ 4:03 am
Thanks for letting me know about your experience. I’m interested in Second Life, though I don’t have much time to check it out right now.
The thing Second Life seems to lack is a public infrastructure. In the real world this sort of thing has to be addressed through taxes and cordoning off of public land. Public services don’t bubble up from the ground. Volunteerism can be powerful, but it’s rarely reliable. I’m very curious about whether it’s even possible for a public sector to develop in Second Life. I do think the public sector is necessary for a healthy civic life because otherwise access will tip toward those with the resources to buy in.
Comment by Elisa — August 30, 2006 @ 2:25 pm