Why Second Life Cannot Be Taken Seriously
I read this on BoingBoing yesterday:
After France’s extreme right, anti-immigrant Front National opened an official HQ in Second Life, it was swarmed protests– which quickly devolved into open war conducted with surreal weapons…
machine guns, sirens, police cars, “rez cages” (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids’ TV characters
Wow, that’s just great. Second Life is trying to be people’s, well, Second Life, and if we needed more proof that it will never work as a second world for regular people, this is it. There’s no accountability in these virtual worlds, worse than in chat rooms or message boards. Incidents like this and the “flying penis” incident, just prove to me that as long as people can interrupt public forums without fear of consequence, then the Second Life world can never offer significant real-world value beyond that of entertainment.
You can’t hold political discourse, because someone could drop a giant virtual poop on your stage. You can’t run a business, because if a group doesn’t like you, they can just throw up pictures of porn stars around your workplace. You can’t rely on anything legitimately serious, because your neighborhood is populated with the same adolescent idiots that populate every non-moderated discussion forum on the internet, and this time, they don’t even need to be able to type to ruin your day!
And I say this assuming the party being attacked was a hatemongering Nazi-loving political party. It doesn’t matter, and if you don’t understand why, you don’t understand democracy.
All interesting points.
In Second Life, you need to own the land in order to build and ensure that what you create remains “persistent” (read, stays there after you log out). As the land owner, you can also control whether others (like protesters, etc.) are allowed to build objects or run scripts on your land. You can also control how public your land is by making it completely private, having a guest list, banning troublemakers or leaving it completely opne. Hence incidents such as the Front National one are preventable.
Ultimately however, the lure of Second Life is its openness. Moreover, there are elements of the experience that will never be “controllable” such as chat — you just can’t control what people say.
In order to make definitive judgements about its viability its important to weigh SL against Real Life where people can (and do) protest against all manner of things. Granted, in Real Life its harder to show one’s disdain so dramatically or escape long-term consequences for antisocial behavior, but that’s simply a function of the medium at the moment.
What’s provably unscalable is creating some sort of Linden-administered central governmment. The real question then becomes, how can citizen government and enforcement of laws be created and flourish. It’s a question that’s taken a few thousand years to get marginally right in Real Life so my guess is it’ll take a while in Second Life as well.
Reuben
Comment by reuben steiger | January 17, 2007
Excellent reply Reuben
Comment by Bluetiger | January 18, 2007
[…] Read an article that had my blood pressure rising, by Nathan Weinberg on why Second Life can’t be taken seriously. His argument, to save you reading the article, seems to be that because it is possible to protest and interrupt “without accountability” it can never offer significant real-world value beyond entertainment. […]
Pingback by Why Second Life CAN be taken seriously » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality | January 19, 2007
No accountability in SL at all; It’s great, isn’t it? That’s why people love it. They don’t have to face the prospect of being revealed to the world as a sexual deviant who likes to pretend they’re a giant anthropomorphic fox, or an 8-year-old.
Comment by Crotchton Sinclair | January 20, 2007