Jun
19
A Second Life for Deadwood
Filed Under Uncategorized
I love HBO’s “Deadwood”. It’s not only one of the best-written dramas to come along in years, but more interesting to me is the detail with which they’ve recreated the texture (both physical and psychological) of the historical time and place. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and ugly world where characters play out their dreams and desires, unfettered by rule or constraint.
Second Life is a lot like Deadwood. Just go there. Wander around. Thankfully (unlike the historical Deadwood, S.D.) there’s no chance of being shot in the street, but if you look long and hard enough you’ll find all of the other elements: gambling, sex, and all other manner of lawless capitalism at work.
Second Life is not a game. There’s nothing to win or lose. There aren’t really even any laws in Second Life. Sure, the creators of the world (Linden Labs) have created a basic set of rules and limitations, but it’s a place largely regulated (or unregulated) by its inhabitants. It’s a place where people can go to recreate themselves, in whatever image or manner they want. Physical barriers disappear- your appearance and abilities are bounded only by your imagination.
Yes, there’s a huge (and very real) economy at play. Land and property are created, sold and resold by inhabitants. So are services (like virtual sex) and even new physical personas. Do you want to be a 60-foot-tall marshmallow man? You can, for a price. Casinos are everywhere, and are a wildly popular (and profitable) part of the world.
This is not funny money- people are making and spending hundreds of thousands of real dollars there every day. There are people who earn livings off what they make in this virtual place.
Even though this place exists only as digital information on a bunch of servers, it’s a mistake to write it off as a digital game, or an (unhealthy?) obsession for a small group of dedicated users. The real and virtual worlds are not simply running in parallel, they’re begging to merge and weave into each other. What will it mean when an environment like Second Life starts to play out on top of other environments, say like Google Earth? What if you can be virtually present in a real physical location? It may sound like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s here today.
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