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Despite vendors’ rapturous embrace of Second Life, many observers remain skeptical about its legitimacy as a business tool, or serious environment for real- world business. (Non porn business, that is.) Face it, the minute IBM starts dropping wads of PR dough and allocating marketing bodies to Second Life, it’s time to run in the other direction. Sad but true. It’s like watching a high school vice principal trying to be hip and happening. It just doesn’t wash. And frankly wouldn’t you prefer that he not even try? (Related aside: Fake Steve Jobs’ thread about Irving Wladawsky-Berger holed up in the Second Life metaverse was brilliant.) Read the rest of this entry »
Virtual worlds have been attracting a huge amount of interest this year, driven by the success of Second Life, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and a host of others that have hit the headlines. When faced with something so shiny, baffling and new it is reassuring to see that imaginative artists have always intuitively understood both the charms and the dangers of leaving this world for another. Children’s writers in particular have made it their business to dramatise the process of imaginative escape into other worlds, and so children’s literature is full of that liminal moment when a child crosses the threshold and leaves the safe, ordered world they know for some strange new world in which everything is entirely different. This is of course a staple of narrative, not just children’s narratives, but there seems to be something about children’s minds which makes the feeling of leaving real life and entering a magical new world particularly seductive. Read the rest of this entry »
