Thoughts of a Fool: Reality Shift.

Thoughts of a Fool: Reality Shift.

First, let me start by saying I’m truly zapped on flu medication, so if this makes no sense, then please assume I’m utterly mad and have be shot on sight.

Ahem…

Reality Shift? What am I talking about? Simple: Reality Shift is a term for when the basic rules of a reality ‘shift gears’ in some way to change how the universe works.

Let me give you an example: reality/god/insert_your_favorite decides that fire has problems, and decides to remove it. With some work, reality 1.0.0.0.1 us uploaded, and fire no longer happens. You still can get heat by chemical reactions and electrical power, you can still force wood to charcoal, you can do most the things that you could before. You just cannot start a self-maintaining fire any longer. The effect stops as soon as energy is no longer being applied.

Picture the chaos as things stopped working from that.

Luckily, it wouldn’t last long. The sun would go out.

Or would it? Is the fusion reaction of the sun ‘fire’? I would think so, going by the levels of matter I know of: Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma (energized matter). So, the only difference between Solar Plasma and fire is a matter of degrees… (ouch. I swear that I didn’t see that coming until I typed it.)

So, overall, Reality Shift could be said to be a bad thing, right?

Well, yes! Yes it is! The problem is, in SL, it’s also currently needed. Now, I’ll be honest: I have NO idea how the system works. Before SL, I would have looked at the number of things that SL can do and laughed. I humbly bow to Linden Labs technical achievements in that area alone.

I can’t even imagine the complexity of the server for a SIM. But the SIM is the reality we ‘live’ in, in Second Life.

So, Second Life is a lot like Real Life: We don’t understand why a lot of things work, but we know they do, or at least they do most of the time.

Except, with Second life, Reality Shifts. What works one day may not work later. These changes may break things, like losing ‘joints’ that cause wind-chimes to stop working. They may offer new features not existing before, like adding moving attachments to avatars. They may convert things so that they work differently, such as the way media playback on land has changed.

Now, let’s be honest: Linden Labs is not changing things just to tick us off. They are trying to just repair and improve SL to the best of their ability. The problem with this is based on the above examples, though: SL is so complex, that changing/fixing any one system affects dozens/hundreds of others. Any fixes to those have a similar effect.

SL is not a branching tree of systems, it’s a spider web, with every system linking to several others.

So, the question is, how can they change the system without having a potentially devastating effect?

They can’t. The best they can do is the same things they have been doing: the Preview grid as warning/testing, advising of the KNOWN changes in the version log, and noting the effects when people scream at them for breaking something.

Either that, or stop changing SL. I think that would probably not make people happy either.