Do You Live in the World?

I sense that to a certain extent, disagreements and differences in perception in Second Life hinge upon the time or the degree to which you actually "live in the world." By that I mean inside the towns on the servers in the game, not that larger "Second Life" which is an amalgam of "in world" and "the forums" and "the RL coverage of SL" and "the blogosphere about SL" and "my RL connections to SL people" and "Linden Labs the company" and so on.

I mean simply how much time do you spend decorating a house, living in a house, hanging out in a house, doing things around a house -- or workshop -- or hangout.

When I attended the SL Future Salon yesterday, I was struck by the varying levels to which those in the audience lived in the world or didn't. Some had newbie t-shirts on, but were unaware even of the connotation of newbie shirts for in-worlders. Some were posing for screenshots and impressing the devs with jargon terms like "datastores" or "whiteboards", playing out a tape in their internal vision of sandbox heaven, complete with really nifty looking gear on your feet LOL. Others have elaborate, decorated homes IW where they not only hang out but create items and sell them.

There was quite a disconnect between the organizers, who decided to do voice-over presentations, and the audience, some of whom either couldn't get their sound to work on the game right or were disconcerted at the intrusion of the regular RL human voice into the game (Richard Bartle has written about how having voice on will interrupt the immersiveness of worlds.)

Some people in the audience -- or av alphabet soup perched around Chinatown LOL -- were openly bolloxed by the seemingly disembodied voice of the presenter coming in, without being able to see if he/she had a visible avatar. Whether there was so much lag and nametag soup that you couldn't tell, or whether they had not thought to supply that presenter with an IW av, I'm not sure. But so hard do those conventions die that people kept looking around for the speaker and muttering to themselves that they felt it was weird, like phantom limb pain.

While the presenters were nattering on, those IW were free to keep up a running line of chat, and of course IM each other privately and, if they are like a lot of gamers, talk on Yahoo and the RL cell phones too LOL. You don't know how well they seque in and out of these streams, if at all. When room chat can scroll on without the speaker seeing it, you begin to feel a little bit like the bad kids in the back of Mrs. Brady's Fifth Grade class, guffawing and writing nasty notes in the slam books.

I found myself speaking in nearly-capital letters to a Linden, to the effect: "Well sit at your desk in here! Feel the lag! I ask you! Look at the FPS!" etc. I think it's great that now some Lindens have set up shop IW but they must be driven nuts by being on duty to do firehouse runs plus get zillions of IMs plus probably do their other RL jobs in the other window somewhere.

During the Salon meeting, there was a discussion about "the virtual office". It was widely admitted that bosses didn't like the concept because it would mean screwing off on their time. I began to have fantasies of my "work" av that I could park in boring meetings in boring conference calls and appear to nod intelligently, and my "fun av" that I'd work maybe on another machine, who would be off clubbing and doing Tringo while somebody laboured through the annual report. Fun!

I gather companies talking to SL about the business or government or education applications of the SL thingie (we could just call it "newview.exe" have to convince them that the data will store and stream and crunch and stuff like it would in RL. I mean, you gotta wonder if they can't keep all my t-shirts saved in my inventory along with all my house parts from blow-up's of Ingrid's stuff on sim seams, how are they going to keep straight some military industrial complex missile? You start thinking to yourself, when imagining how you're going to get in your fashion and your Tringo AND your spreadsheets and sales reports from your RL job....it's like the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco...do you think those things *go* together?! Should they be kept apart?!

But before we talk about what I believe Babbage Linden described as the "thin border" between SL and RL (I wish it were thicker, and for me it broke right through, unfortunately )...let's try to first figure out what we mean by living in the world.

I wanted to respond, but I feel that more than one response is appropriate. I have my home and hangar in Grant, where I spend a lot of time building. I also spend a lot of time in the sandboxes, seeing what other people are working on. I'd say the split is nearly 50/50 over the time I've been here. I enjoy both lifestyles. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to go home and work on my permanent structure or to build in peace and quiet alone or with a couple of other close builders. On the other hand, it's sometimes enjoyable to go to the sandbox and just shoot the breeze with the creative geniuses who seem to thrive in the sandbox.

It is hard to respond because the choices aren't mutually exclusive.

I have a "home" in world, but I keep building new ones and moving. I'm mainly building for fun.

i mean, like, newview.exe is so totally 1.5 ...

This is a segmentation of the demographic that I find very interesting. There may be a very widely disparate set of goals and habits that in turn drive wildly divergent perceptions and perspectives.

Interesting ...

Well, that's the point. I agree it would be better to mix and match the options. But you can't change a poll features once it starts. So I may come back and repeat it later.

No, I just live here in the forums.

I don't fit in any of those categories. I log into SL every now and then, build on my land or maybe talk to someone or explore. I don't really go to any big social events anymore and I rarely change my avatar's appearance. I also troll the boards while I'm at work.

Heheheh that should have been one of the options.

In your case, you must be joking -- because you'd never be able to get those land deals you do unless you've been able to program everything to run remote lol?

I reluctantly voted "Yes, I shop, decorate my avatar and my home, and live in a house alone or with a partner. "
Reluctantly, because I hardly spend enough time in SL to consider myself 'living there', the way I used to in the Dark Age of Camelot mmorpg.

Why do you think that is?

I guess I live in SL, when I'm actually logged in. I'm a bit of a vagrant, though- quite homeless, I putter about in my flying machines and explore the higher altitudes of the grid.
Shame on you people. Shame, shame. There's so much litter up in the sky, in some places, that it's like navigating an asteroid field.

I've never copleted a real "home". I've tried a few times, but have always abandoned the project in favor of something else. My two reasons:

1. Practicality- what good would a house do me* in SL? It's not like I'm going to get rained on. I don't need to sleep or shower in SL. I don't do anything that requires privacy. My possesions are stored via my inventory folder.
   
   
2. SL limitations- the default view makes it tricky to look around in small rooms. I tried to build a 1900's style bungalow (using an authentic floorplan), but gave up when I found I couldn't really expirience it as a virtual house. I was forever zooming in and out to find the room I was supposed to be in. (another limitation that doomed the bungalow was the fact that that building style is a prim hog). I suppose I could have scaled the build into something bigger (a humungalow?), but I just went on to other projects.
   
   

Well, if you're like me, you can't see all that litter. Not being able to see very far in SL is definitely a blessing sometimes.

coco

I'm not a very social person, not patient enough to spend endless hours learning to build or script (though I do dabble with it), not involved with the business aspect of the world. So, I run out of things I wish to do in-world.
The hamster wheel otherwise known as levelling can be very addictive, even when you are hating it. I don't miss it at all in Second Life, but the lack of it does leave me thinking 'what now?' sometimes.

Well, I don't live in it, but I don't laugh at people who wanna, so I can't vote. Actually, I haven't logged in this week. Hmm. I should prolly do that, if only cuz I pay a shitload of money to be there.

*logs in*

*looks around*

*crashes*

*goes to play something else*

I didn't read anything else in this thread... but HAW. 3 Points Invect!

BTW I sometimes live in world, sometimes don't, depends on what I feel like. (if I feel like an Almond Joy or Mounds)

Well, you really need a house in SL, because your avatar can catch pneumonia from all the torential downpour in the tropical/temperate areas. Since your avatar can die of hypothermia, you definately don't want to be caught without a warm place to stay in the snow sims.

Not really, we need houses to hide our L$10,000 worth of sex balls so we can set up our radars and security scripts to feed our delusions that there's privacy in SL, and to justify making life miserable for everybody around us, all for the sake of a perpetually unattended house we pay $60 USD a month for but never use!

It's common to expound on the commonplace that you don't need a house in SL because there are no elements.

But you wouldn't want to be common, would you?

Obviously people find other reasons to want a house. They love houses. They build them, buy them, live in them. decorate them, move them around, put gardens around them. It's a very human thing. Those who scorn this so severely don't get it.

What's interesting here is that even with our forum demographics of 20-something computer tekkies (as we know from a whole host of polls, whatever their different results and divisions of questions) the *overwhelming majority* say they live in a house.

Don't forget that your unattended sexbox needs to be a plywood cube floating 500m in the air.

I understand the need to "play house", but it just seems so darn expensive for what you get. I don't understand the fun of trying to model a virtual home in a world of 15 fps, ghosting, lag, etc. SL's lack of technical asthetics is depressing, and the fact that the very concepts of private property and ownership are either totally lacking or taken to extremes makes the world lack "immersion" for me.

That's funny, in a poll you created, 57% of respondants were over 30...

snickers n walks out of the thread

And that while the largest single group was techies, that the majority of the forum was not...

25 percent were 20 somethings.

Respondents are one thing, posters are another.

Of those, some declared their age and are among the most prolific posters here, and we saw they are 20-somethings.

If some technically reached the age of 30, they still behave like 20-somethings

FALSE.