Is Resistance Futile?
I’ve made a promise to both my boss and my husband to not enter Second Life. They fear that they will lose me forever to the interface. Their fears are just. I am prone towards virtual obsession. I almost gave in today… I started to fill out the registration but literally backed out before the payment information screen. It’s not time yet.
When I first discovered Sim City, I would spend hours constructing and managing big cities. One thing noted in that though… the running of a successful Sim City is not nearly as stimulating as the running of one that’s falling apart.
After a computer upgrade, I started fooling around with The Sims. I even went so far in that I was downloading objects and outfits and new avatars to play with, grabbing cheats off messageboards. The Sims entertained me, but playing with yourself will only take you so far. I never ventured into The Sims Online, and the fad passed.
I enjoyed the subversive humour of the Sims. My favorite example being the brand “Soma” on the electronics that you could purchase. Soma is also the name of the braincandy dispensed like Advil in Brave New World…”a gramme in time saves nine”
Virtual Worlds like Second Life intrique me. The notion of recreating your self as a walking, talking, three dimensional being is exciting to me. Perhaps the crux of reflexive self-expression. Not necessarily who you are… but who you would ideally like to be. That it is set in a world that is socially and economically structured like the real world is dissapointing though. Community participation may be highly participatory, but with the same social structures and institutions in place, it seems more like a world that is trying to replace this one.
Entropia, the virtual world with a growing buzz around it, recently sold a whack of pawn shop licenses to the tune of $404,000. It is in the process of tendering 5 bank licenses as well, the first one being awarded for a cool ninety grand. People believe in Entropia…
Entropy is a term used in physics that is the “measure of the disorganization or degredation of the universe, resulting in a decrease in available energy” (Oxford Dictionary of Current English 2nd Edition, paper version, p 290). So I wonder if Entropia is responding to or creating the degredation. At this stage in the game, it’s difficult to say.
For now, unless I can secure a grant to conduct research in a virtual world, I think I’ll opt for less personal abstraction than more. Though the more my brain thinks about it from the outside, the more it wants to engage it on the inside.
