Second Chance for Second Life

During a summer of (virtual) scandals, lawyers and the press routinely referred to the financial markets of the immersive digital playground Second Life as “lawless” and “a Wild West” (see “The Fleecing of the Avatars“). The flip side of these derogatory terms is that Second Life is a libertarian’s dream. As one who studies financial markets, I hope regulators will give markets such as Second Life’s enough freedom for us to learn something about how to regulate real-world markets, and when not to try.

It’s more than rock and roll

 

The next epic video-game battle starts this week, but it won’t be fought with laser guns blasting away at frog-faced aliens. This showdown is all about the music. Starting Tuesday, the popular Guitar Hero franchise will be facing a new rival, Rock Band, which lets players not only live out their fantasy of playing hot licks for an adoring audience but do it in a four-piece group with their friends, whether they live down the street or on the other side of the planet.

Second Life’s potential not to be overlooked

The editorial on Second Life in last week’s issue of The Santa Clara was well written. However, as an educator and entrepreneur who uses Second Life in the classroom, I have a few friendly responses.

Second life: unreality check

It doesn’t look like much, at least not from the outside. A pair of double doors on a quiet San Francisco street leading into a converted warehouse. The low morning sun casts shadows across the street, accentuating the edges of the surrounding buildings and making everything look sharper, more real. Once inside the double doors, though, reality effectively ceases to exist. Here there is no death, no disease, no pain, no gravity and no sex – or not as we know it. Here you can be anyone you want to be. Nine years ago a brown-haired, bug-eyed, boundlessly enthusiastic man in his late twenties called Philip Rosedale founded a website called Second Life. The principle behind it was simple enough. Using the latest technology, people would be able to enter a virtual world. There, they could create a new identity for themselves – an avatar. If they wanted to change sex, that was fine. If they wanted to have two heads and a tail and give themselves a silly name like Aurora Lunarsea, that was fine too. There were no limits, except the limits of users’ imaginations, and next to no rules.

The wood between the worlds

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.