PseudorealityPrevails

Yoko Ono's painting in light

Yoko Ono has created an installation of light, a skyscraper that is virtual in real life and real in Second Life. Called the Imagine Peace Tower, the grand opening is today in Reykjavik, Iceland (URL), and on this island in SL: Image Peace Tower Island (SLURL).  Opening event approximately 6:30pm EST, Friday, October 9, 2009. Happy Birthday, John.

Simulacrum reversed

The Javits Center interior is a polygon mesh, appropriately enough for a conference on virtual worlds.

Now with Extra Introversion

I was thinking SL is for extraverts, with its 3D chatroom aspects, virtual clubbing, and other, well, social activities.  Because what else is there to do in there, except fly around and look at stuff?  The repetitive visual fatigue of the new gets old pretty quickly.  Of course you can build, which treats SL as another media to work with, like paint or textiles.  But for the regular user, SL means socializing, chatting, connecting.  If you're an extravert, that's meat and potatoes - the more new people, the more energy!  But if you're an introvert, it's exhausting and annoying, worse even than a cocktail party where you know no one.  So you log out.

But then I had to take my other avatar, the one that is not "me," clubbing, to get some relevant photos for her Facebook page.  She's the Cautionary Tale, albeit a fairly mild one.  So she had to get dressed in her digital Burning Man finest and troll for events, live music and DJs.  I bought her a series of dance animations, one of which, disconcertingly enough, looked pretty much like how I dance in RL.  At first we went to live folk and country streams, in digital cafes and beaches, until she got pretty frustrated with it.  Steve Forbert covers, but they couldn't remember all the verses!  A song with a chorus, "she thinks my tractor is sexy" (which I do not think was in iambic pentameter).  And Sea chanteys.  Twice!  Of course I love this stuff.  But she didn't.

So then we had to go to actual clubs, with LED floors and stripper poles and particle effects.  80s night, samba, classic rock, Goa trance.  And lots of other avatars. 

So I set her to dancing and let the audio stream, and I realized - SL is perfect for introverts.  Dangerously so.

I was caught up in the dancing, not noticing the time going by, listening to the music and watching the particles and other avatars, and dancing around my living room, just a little, and I realized that SL just contributes more material to the already probably over-rich imaginal landscape where introverts live and thrive - in their own heads.  I was having a relatively fun evening, when what I was actually doing was sitting on a folding chair at the computer in an empty apartment that would look exactly like the office if it had any furniture in it at all.  I was also drinking absinthe, which helped.  But "the green" is about sharing, and I was by myself.  I wasn't even having the avatar talk to people digitally, just dancing weird by herself, like I always do.

I am resident in the castle of Beauty's "Beast," imprisoned there no less than he by an absent fairy who tells tales more compelling than reality.  The more fantastical and elaborate the elements of the dreamscape, the more enticing and imprisoning it all is.  The only way out is true connection, true love, just like in the fairy tale, tales which entwine hard truths in their storytelling webs.  But truth has to break in, or out.  Breaking hurts, even if it's to reset something correctly.  I'm not making (nor looking to make) any true connections in SL, nor is any other introvert.  I'm just putting angels in the architecture.  And they didn't fall down to Earth for that.

The Being and Becoming of Second Life

Second Life is not what it might become, not yet.  Right now, like all new media and new forms, it is drawing heavily from previous forms, some very recent, some much older.  It draws from the chat rooms and fan communities of the early Net.  It draws from film, and video games.  It draws from the pre-Enclosure experience of "the commons," where a natural park-like area was left in the middle of the town or village, owned by no one, maintained in common, where everyone could graze their cattle, wander about, and meet others in unscripted and spontaneous ways.

But SL is not yet greater than the sum of these parts; right now it is actually smaller. Its art and social forms are derivative, as is natural at first.  It is a less compelling film experience than film, a less compelling game experience than the current sophisticated video games, a less compelling social experience than hanging out in RL, less compelling than the actual experience of Burning Man (the communal creative chaos of which inspired it), and, even less compelling than text-based chatting like IM, which contains pauses and non-visual components that allow for composition and narrative shaping to a much greater degree than 3D meetings, which offer "too much information" to make good stories.

Where virtual worlds might be going is not yet determined, but it will not be determined by interaction on their most superficial top level, inhabiting the world as an avatar, nor on their next level down, building and scripting using the in-world tools.

The new meaning of virtual worlds will be determined by something much deeper, by a creativity constructed by and embedded in its application code and hardware composition.  The visual and social forms that will appear on top of those layers will have the potential to be new in interesting ways, because the theory and structure that underlie them will be new in interesting ways.  At that point the graphics may still be simplistic and the interaction laggy, and the form may take awhile to catch up and elaborate on the structure, but it will be going in a new direction and inhabiting a new conceptual landscape, and so will we.  That is the potential of this new media, and that is what will be worth experiencing.