[-empyre-] AR musings in Leonardo Electronic Almanac

[Alan Sondheim]

You have a way different experience/trajectory of SL than I do. Suburbia?
I've been to dozens of sims with interesting stuff; I can't affect your
virtual rush of course, but there's a lot more experimentation than
sandboxes and the gallery. SL has sifted down demographically of course -
it's not suburbia but its sexual underbelly that drives a lot. But there's
an enormous amount of creative energy beyond Odyssey. - Alan

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:

> On 25/04/11 08:13, Alan Sondheim wrote:
> >
> > Hi - The Leonardo article is excellent; the reason SL faded, however, is
> > that it didn't fulfill the dream of virtual life - most people are used
> to
> > games, and SL has no teleology at all.
>
> Virtual Reality was infinite blackness with a few fascinating spaces and
> objects around 0.0, 0.0, 0.0. Second Life is simulacral suburbia.
>
> The only regions of Second Life that give me that old virtual rush are
> the sandboxes with their glitch aesthetic and the Odyssey gallery.
>
> Stray more than a few dozen metres from the origin in VR and you fall
> forever. Stray more than a few dozen metres from anywhere in SL and
> you're in a strip mall.
>
> The teleology of VR was immanent to its form: VR was there to be
> experienced. The architecture and socialising of games are [more
> directly] instrumentalized: they are there for you to hack and slash
> around.
>
> Second Life lacks the teleology of either. It's there to be normalized
> and made unproblematic.
>
> Our best hope is that browser 3D + WebSockets + JavaScript break the
> stifling conformity of Second Life's unified grid and give some more
> interesting destinations and destinatees the space to bloom around their
> own co-ordinate systems.
>
> - Rob.
>
>
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