Expansion of SL: Vertical or Horizontal!!!

Don't forget 'box on head'.

Actually THAT would make a better thesis topic in the sense that it's something that, perhaps, a majority of SL Residents will have experienced and will have feelings about. (Unlike 'Linden sandboxes'.)



As for the terminology: it's fairly common in academese for the word "mediates" to be substituted for the clearer "affects."

It just sounds more impressive, or as we might [though shouldn't] say in academia, "employment of that particular ideophone enhances the erudition quotient and confers hierarchical utility in relation to advantaged standing among potential competitors."



(I'm not mocking the OP. I don't believe that person is guilty of lazy attempts to exploit Forumites, as has been alleged. But there's no denying: the belief that a relatively small number of hours spent inside SL is sufficient to provide the background needed for scholarly work, is far too widespread. [I blame the professors.])

For a moment I forgot the reality that Lindeners are Governors and I have to take everything for granted. Thanks for reminding!!

Most sandboxes are privately owned by residents, I think, in case that matters to your paper.

Yeah. I'm getting the sense that some of the confusion here is a focus on "Linden-owned Sandboxes" or anything SL residents would call a "Sandbox". Indeed, in the way game designers seem to be using the term, all of SL is a sandbox.

And yet, in SL, that kind of sandbox is just not a subject anybody even thinks about. Everybody just understands that this is the whole damned point of the place: a platform (or, if you must, a "sandbox" from which emerges an infinite bedazzling array of games and narratives and businesses and art forms and clever tricks and dastardly scams and new rituals and joyous or broken hearts.

There may well be something to study about SL and the platform/sandbox that's of value to "spatial planning and communications" (whatever that is), but it's very unlikely that anything is to be learned from studying Linden-owned Sandboxes except perhaps in the discipline of criminology.

You are being generous to me by giving the blame to professor!!! So kind of you...

But I wonder if we are in the judgment day and we necessarily need to find someone guilty!!

would you please mention the source?...

Go inworld, search for "sandbox". TP to each one and look at who owns the land it is on. You'll find soon that Melita is right.

On this forum, unfortunately, there are many who come asking for information (usually with the explanation that they are writing a paper or thesis), and frequently these people are given a negative reception.

So yes, it would be nice to put aside questions of blame and guilt. But as long as professors do approve of (or suggest) plans for students to make a Second Life account to study some question---in circumstances in which the student will be spending only a few dozen hours inside SL---then people in this forum will continue to react negatively to requests for information.

In any case, I do wish you luck with your research.

Why must you or would you want to take everything for granted?

I would think a person would mean to say "I need to be careful not take things for granted", or some such. The opposite of what was actually typed.

Also, the Linden Research, Inc. employees are called "Lindens", not Lindeners.

Did you mention what school you are going to?

You mean to say that Linden-owned Sandboxes are places for sub-culture or counter-culture...

You mean to say that the list of private owned sandbox is long enough.

Even if I consider the in-world definition of 'sandbox', I haven't found any privately owned region entirely working as 'sandbox'. Volume of land should or shouldn't become a factor? Rather the 'sandbox' term is being used as an 'army badge' which can attract people, appear in the search list and so on.

High maintenance, freebies, nice land marks are few of the attributes of private sandbox areas which is sufficient enough to attract users and working in parallel to linden owned public sandboxes. But any private sandbox might disappear anytime but Linden lab can't remove public sandbox areas even if they don't want them...

"the Second Life environment (the "Viewer", application program interfaces provided by Linden Lab to you for use with Second Life (the "APIs", and access to the websites and services available from the domain and subdomains of http://secondlife.com (the "Websites". The Servers, Viewer, APIs, Websites and any other Linden Software collectively constitute the "Service" as used in this Agreement.

spending all the time in SL in-world is not the only and sufficient condition of researching SL. I mean to say that it depends on the research topic and methodology which differs case to case.

If someone wants to study roman civilization s/he could visit Rome physically and collect enough relevant information from other sources.

Hypothetically, if someone wants to study SL in-world between 2004-2006, how would s/he do that only based on 'in-world'? Any suggestion!!

I'm really having a hard time understanding the fascination with sandbox parcels or regions within Second Life. There's nothing magical or mystical about them. They are places where those who don't have land of their own can experiment with the in-world building tools. Publicly-accessible lands with rezzing rights enabled are also popular places for griefers, both because of the relatively high concentration of newbies present and because of the public rez rights. It's a bit like trying to do a study on the cultural background of the alley behind Joe's Bar and Grill.

I accept that I don't know a hell of a lot, but I have to say I find the OP's perspective and this thread very interesting. Certainly not as obvious a palm/forehead situation as might be portrayed by some here.

I accept that the OP is being a little opaque in his enquiries and in his explanations of their purpose, but contrary to what many think, this is a pretty straightforward research strategy and may well be exactly the way he wants to interact with and observe the subsequent reactions of his "guinea pigs".

However, it may also simply be that english his not his first language.

Maybe I'm completely off the track here, but it may be that by introducing the concept of diegesis into this thread, the OP gives an insight into the direction he's taking his research.

My understanding is that the diegetic aspect of SL would be the collection and taxonomy of our combined in-world narratives. We all do create our own stories and narratives within SL, it certainly does correspond to the perspective of the "world being a stage, and each person only players".

I'm guessing there are several ways that the OP could investigate SL from the diegetic aspect. First would be to observe how we play out our narratives inworld, the second would be to interact with us outside the "game play" environment ans see how we perceive it from our RL stance.

As far as the interest in the topology of SL. This would (I again guess) represent a major non-diegetic system/infrastructure element within which the narrative of our second lives must play out.

If I undertand the OP correctly, the Lindens are the set designers and creators of the stage in which we must all play our part.

It is true that a systems model which represents space as a set of loosely connected surface points doesn't have to be euclidean , and in fact may display a slight lack of imagination by the Lindens and ourselves for that matter.

See here for an interesting (albeit possibly drug fueled) perspective on this:

http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/06/metaverse_20.html

Finally, given this analysis of interplay between the diegetic and non-diegetic within SL, the "sandbox" as we know it does actually represent a very good control environment, another type of area worth looking into from the OP's perspective would be welcome areas in my opinion.

ALthough using the metaphor/model of the sandbox will allow him to draw interesting parallels with SL as a cultural "sandbox" of sorts.

Either way, I'm not sure how good a student the OP is, or how well defined the scope of his research, but this area of investigation isn't as open to ridicule as you might think.. well not to me anyway...!

Well, perhaps, to the extent that isolated serial killers can be termed a "counter-culture" in real life. I'm not aware of there being any ad hoc, emergent "subculture" of public Sandbox misbehavior.

There emphatically *are* "alternative subcultures" for whom a defining criterion of membership is to make non-members' process of creation as unpleasant an experience as possible. That's some of what you'd find at Linden Sandboxes, too, but mostly by loners--or at least on different alt accounts than those griefer groups.

So the behavior in public sandboxes isn't representative of much of anything about SL, really, but that's not the important point here. What's important to realize is that of all the creation performed in SL, by any measure, less that 1/10 of 1% is done in a Sandbox of any kind, and of that tiny amount, probably less than 1% is done in a public Linden Sandbox. Hence, trying to draw any useful conclusions about the "sandbox" functionality of SL as I think you mean to study is like trying to understand human physiology by examining somebody's hangnail.

I disagree. We are all the set designers and creators. The Lindens are the architects of the theatre, but the sets and characters are all built by the users rather than the Lab. The limitations of Second Life itself are not the limitations of the set, but rather the stage. The lack of a third dimension must be seen as an architectural limit, like the ways the sails of the Sydney Opera House limit the size and quality of the stages.

These are rare, for the simple reason that this land has to be PAID for by the residents. So of course they set only aside part of the region for the sandbox area in most cases, while the rest of the region tries to recover the costs.



Totally wrong. LL can remodel and reshape their land any way they want, and if they feel this or that sandbox doesn't fit into what they want the place to be like, they'll take it out in a heartbeat. There is nothing to stop them because they own the servers.

What does "diegetically" mean btw? I was quite serious when I said my (enormous) dictionary didn't hold an entry on that. One of the rare cases where I as a non-native speaker run into problems.

I agree to your point that LL can remodel and reshape their land and in that process they might remove any public sandbox areas or rename it. But it would be very unlikely that there would be no public sandbox in SL.

While creating the account, LL mentions (see the footnote in the account creation page) the existence of public and private sandbox in SL so it might be a violation of agreement if they ever plan to do so.

I haven't found any private sandbox as old as public sandboxes. If you have encountered any private sandbox as old as the following then pls mention.

Public Sandbox areas Date created Area
Sandbox Weapon testing 30/6/2004 64272
Sandbox Goguen 30/6/2004 65120
Wanderton 30/6/2004 64496
Sandbox Island 30/6/2004 64880
Sandbox Island Extension 30/6/2004 64880
Sandbox Newcomb 30/6/2004 63872
Sandbox Cordova 18/11/2003 61792

The idea of having private (or group) sandbox areas accessible to the public got popular after the public sandbox areas. No matter how we feel about public sandbox areas, their existence has been persistent and it would remain so for many known and unknown reasons.

It's a word that different people use evocatively in different ways. In classical poetry I think it generally refers to narrative rather than emotional works. In theatre it means, loosely, the narrative as opposed to the set and setting. In film it's used to refer to effects that are part of the visible story (the voice of the actors, sound effects, music playing on-set) as opposed to meta-narrative (mood music and (ironically) the voice of the narrator). It's one of those words that clues you in that you're talking to an in-group member, but unless you know the in-group you have to guess at the meaning.

That was not what you said and what I remarked upon. You said they can't get rid of them even if they wanted to. And that's simply wrong.

Unlikely they'll get rid of them, yes. But with the new management, who knows what's gonna happen next year. The visionary crowd has left the building, after all.

Argent, thanks a lot for taking the time to explain that word. It does make sense now.

would you pls explain a bit or give reference to any link

Honestly if you spent time in world none of the statements people make here would be any surprise.

No, you can search for these references yourself. Almost all of the founding staff, including "the" big visionary behind it all, Phil Rosedale, have gone elsewhere and left the marketing field to people like M Linden, who is more of a marketing man - and it does seem that marketing has become the most importan fact of LL lately. Yes, technically Rosedale is still working with LL, but has said himself that he has a new project in the making.

Oh, they can pretty much do what they like, as has been shown over the last year or so (Open Spaces, Adult Content). What's your point about the age of sandboxes? Land changes hands - it's part of what keeps the economy ticking over. What might be interesting to think about is that the Lindens don't seem to be creating new ones (to my knowledge).

You seem to somehow disapprove of private sandboxes and I am not sure why. Given the problems of managing areas where any resident can build and script, I have tremendous admiration for anybody who allows their land to be used in this way. Occasionally, I prefer to be sociable and build in a sandbox instead of shutting myself away on my own land. I would never use a Linden public sandbox for this though - too much aggro (although I have found the vehicle sandbox sims useful, just for the amount of space available - I am a bad driver). If I want company while I build, I go to Skidz or NCI.