Discombobulating

I'm not the type to settle myself in front of the computer and just whip out a topic because I feel the need to write. Instead I contemplate the idea for some time and let it mature before putting it to paper. For this reason, you will find my following three points very disconnected.

First, I know the complaining is common everytime there's a new version, but for the love of all things good and dear in the world, fix the log-in! I get in just long enough to take a few steps, say hello, then it freezes.. FRUSTERATION! I won't go on about it, because I know all will be fixed soon enough, but I had to take the time to whine

Second. I have been watching images of the new sims here and finally got around to getting out and traveling around them. I saw the stretches of open oceans, the deserts, the grand refinery, but there was no question where the creativity stopped and greed started. Like a brick wall, the beautiful open land and intricate builds ended and gaudy colored shops began. It got me thinking...
Are we such a commerce driven society, that when given the opportunity to do ANYTHING we want with our world, the only thing we can come up with are tracts and tracts of stores? Are we so stuck in the hunger for money that our creativity does not move outside of that?
Money, in it's most basic sense, should be used to buy things one needs to live, after that, it is to be used to make life more enjoyable. Here, we don't NEED anything, so it all turns to what we want. This world would go on just fine in it's main purpose (to bring $ to Linden Labs) without the buying and selling of crap, and yet, we are so single minded that our creativity floats around the best way to draw new customers.
Now, before you say it, yes, I realize there are a few out there that have amazing, non-money driven builds, and obviously I am not talking to you, but even some of the most amazing builds are starting to remind me of Notre Dame.. yes... it's beautiful and awe-inspiring... but who decided to tuck the gift shop in the corner?

Finally.... So.. what if life is nothing more than a giant Second Life game? What if we are just Avitars to a far more advanced group who logs in each morning when we wake up, strolls around our little world, then logs off at night? ...I wonder what the goal of that game is and how do we know if and when we've won?

So, there you have it, three different thoughts that were bounding in my head and needed to be released to hard copy.

Of course. Both in-world and RL, it's mosty about money these days. Even true art and creativity seems for the most part to be either start out as a money making thing, or to become one with popularity.

I don't think the unpleasantness is because of commercialism, I think it's because of chaos. In RL, I live in a quite commercial area of a thoroughly commercial society, and it's not an unpleasant place to be. The businesses generally try to look nice to attract customers, the government plants flowers in the medians and trees along the roads, the residential area is seperate from the main commerical strip, etc. SL is the ultimate laissez-faire capitalist free market, and I guess the results are not that surprising. It's a boom time. The problem is that no one is in charge. The Lindens aren't in charge, and the players don't seem to have the ability to be in charge.

But nothing's free either. Either players make the money to support the servers that host their content, or the Lindens charge us all more directly. And a lot of SL's best development is being driven by money. There are a lot of other things talented people could be doing.

Believe me, I'm sympathetic. Telehubs are unpleasant places.

A lot of us don't have the money RL to own all the space we could want to create beauty and we have to find ways of subsidising our fun. SL costs a lot more to play than say Everquest or the Sims Online. If I could afford an entire sim I sure as heck wouldn't make a mall, and the commerce in SL keeps it going. People wouldn't sink huge sums of money into SL if they didn't think they'd get some of it back.

I depend on the selling of what you're referring to as "crap" to pay for the land on which my "amazing, non-money driven build" sits. I know many, many, many other people in the same situation. Just what exactly is so wrong with that?

...And by the way, I must take issue with your use of the word "crap". I have yet to meet anyone who sells anything in SL who didn't put his or her heart and soul into its creation. Now obviously there are people who are more talented than others, but art is art, and in the end I believe it's the creative process that's important for the growth of a human being, not necessarily the end result. Calling any of it "crap" is insulting beyond belief, and resounds loudly and clearly as the language of one who spends his time criticizing what he cannot create. (I don't know if that last part is acurate or not, but I'd bet even money that it is. My experience is that even the most arrogant of creative people tend to refrain from insulting the works of others outright. They tend to offer critique, not criticism.)

Now, if one is able to find a means of generating income as a benefit of the creative process, that is a wonderful thing which should be encouraged and congratulated, not stepped on and demeaned. Do you know how many of the world's artists are not able to find work as artists in the real world, or for that matter how many people are not able to do anything creative in their jobs at all? It's well over 99.99%. If some of these people are able to create artistic jobs for themselves in SL, again that should be applauded, not crticized.



You should probably see The Never Ending Story (the original movie, not any of those retchid sequals or that god-awful series) if you haven't already. The point the movie makes is pretty much exactly what you're talking about here. As the boy in the movie reads a fantastical book, his state of awareness, his consciousness, becomes engulfed in the story (the same thing that happens to each of us when we read a book, watch a movie, play SL, etc.). Towards the end of the movie a comment is made that just as this boy has been sharing in the adventures contained within the book, "others" (meaning us, the audience) have been sharing in the adventures of the boy, and perhaps still others are sharing in our adventures, etc., etc., etc. In other words, everything in the book exists in the imagination the boy reading it, everything in the movie exists in the imagination of the audience, perhaps we only exist in the imaginations of whomever may be watching us... Thus the title, "Never Ending Story".

I think Maeve hit the nail on the head. Or at least one of the big nails in this issue.

Maybe LL could consider holding some sort of artistic contest similar to the Game competition that is currently running.


fen-

Chosen,
First and foremost, I ASSURE you and I can and do build very.. very.. very well. Jukitude (Junkieism?) will do that to you.
Second, can you tell I like lists.
Third, very well, I retract the word "crap". It was not meant to degrade any particular item/clothing/script and obviously distracted you from the real purpose of my rant. I hearby change the word "crap" to "things".
However, this is where I find your disagreement interesting. You point out that you need to find a way to make money. This "need" is what I am focusing this little rant on. Does anyone "need" to own an entire sim? Does anyone "need' to own land bigger than 1026 so they can desing their floating castle? Does anyone "need" to have 500,000L in order to create great art? I submit you do not.
I take a step further and say that our current form of education is what drives this thought. We are no longer educated, but rather, given job training. We are churned out to work, not to think. Long gone are the days of thought and crativity and we are pushed now into filling the cog spot int he great machine of commercialism.
All I am trying to say is that I find it interesting that when given the unlimitless, we box ourselves up and slap a pricetag on it.

Before I begin, thanks for clarifying your definition of "crap". I hereby retract my statements about it being insulting.

Now that that's out of the way, let's adress this question of "need". I'll answer your questions in the order they were asked:


No, and no one "needs" to play SL at all either. For that matter, no one "needs" to eat steak when bread & water will sustain life just fine. One must question though whether the quality of such a bread & water life would be worth living.


If the castle is bigger than that, then logically the answer is yes. Your real question then becomes does anyone "need" such a castle. Well, let's draw a RL comparison here. I assume you live in a house or an apartment. All you really "need" is ground under your feet and some sort of roof over your head. You could certainly live in a cave or under a tree, but you choose to live in a house or in an apartment because you're happier there than you would be in a cave or a tree. That means the ultimate question is do you "need" to be happy. This calls into question the very definition of the word "need".

The dictionary defines it as a condition in which something is required or wanted, a requisite. I believe that definition is somewhat incomplete though, as there is no sense of purpose behind the words. "Need" is a relative, subjective term (or else we would not be able to discuss it as we are), and such a dry definition does not provide for relativity. In other words, the question must be asked, a condition in which something is required or wanted for what?

I would therefore complete the definition by calling it that which is required in order to achieve a given goal. It is only in reference to a goal that the degree of requirement, the "need", can be discussed inteligently.

If your goal is merely to be alive, then all you "need" is oxygen, basic metabolic nourishment, water, and temperature. That's it. (Conversely, if your goal is not to be alive, then you don't "need" anything.) However, if your goal is to enjoy life, then you "need" the presence of whatever it is that makes you happy. The list is obviously infinitely variable and endless for what must be present in that regard, and is completely different for each and every one of us (many of us don't even know what's on our own list). Now, if for someone that list happens to include a 1027 meter floating castle, then yes, that person "needs" more land than 1026.

Speaking of 1026, I'm not sure where you're getting this arbitrary number, but I think your point is you believe everyone should be content with their own little pre-sized cubicle and be perfectly happy to live within those confines. Putting aside the obvious question of who the hell are you to decide what anyone else should or shouldn't have, I must point out that the Russians used to have a word for that kind of mentality; they called it communism. If you recall, it didn't work very well, and it didn't last very long.

I would submit that to be fully alive as human beings we very much do in fact "need" to be able to attain more than we "need".

So then, does anyone even "need" to be alive? Well, that's a bigger question than I think we can tackle here, so I'll just leave that one alone for now.


This is the only goal-oriented "need" question you've asked. I would say the answer depends largely on the definition of "great art". If your project requires 50,000 texture uploads, then yes, you'd absolutely need L$500,000. If your project is large and requires a lot of land to support it, then you might "need" that kind of money in order to be able to confidently expect that you can sustain the project financially. I could go on forever naming scenerios, but I think you get the point. You can't dictate what is and what isn't a reasonable amount of money to spend in the process of making whatever it is you consider to be "great art". I could make a scultpure out of twigs, which would cost nothing, or I could make it out of gold and jewels, which would cost a fortune. Which one I "need" to use is, again, entirely dependant on what the goal of the project is.


Wow, that's quite a cospiracy theory you've got there. Iresponse I'll say I don't know about you, but I do consider myself to be a pretty well educated person. Some of that education has to do with job skills (which I believe I have in abundance) but most of it has to do with things that are far more abstract than that. I'll agree with you that there is certainly no shortage of bad teachers these days, but that's a far cry from saying that creative thought is no longer nurtured in our schools or in our society. George Bush and his friends may fit into that category, as well as the entire employment roster of Fox News, but I'd hardly go so far as to say that's the norm.

While the unfortunate statistic holds that stupid people are having far more children than intelligent people, so our species is in a sense de-evolving, I don't think we're quite where you think we are yet. We're still for the most part a vibrant, intelligent, creatively driven people and will be for some time.


I find it interesting that you see it that way. I firmly believe we all see whatever we expect to see when we look at the world. Our perceptions have far more to do with our own internal belief systems than whatever may actually be happening externally.

To me, the majority of SL is the kinds of things you'd find on Higbee's parks registry (my place is on it too). I see interesting textures, scultpures, and people every place I go. Admittedly, some more appealing than others, but they're all there, plain as day. To those who actively play the land market, the world probably looks like little mroe than a bunch of for-sale and not-for-sale signs. For some, it's probably just one big shopping mall full of nice things to buy. For others, it's probably what a chat room might look like if chat rooms had actual rooms. For you, it's apparently a place where people haven't lived up to your expectations of what you think they should have done and almost all that exists are people trying every which way to prostitute their talents. If that's truly the way you see it, then I feel sorry for you because you are missing a lot.

For my own part, I would rephrase your last sentence as, "Given the unlimitless, people have done some pretty amazing things. As far as the eye can see there is artwork, countless examples of creative programming, conversation between people from all sorts of different backgrounds, thousands of friendships that might otherwise be impossible, anything and everything one could think of, and yes there is even commerce too. What a world."

I'm sorry that the commerce is all you see, and I'm saddened that you can only think of it as something to complain about. I hope one day you're able to open your eyes a little wider and notice everything else. There sure is a lot to see.