Politics of creation?

Pursuant this post I made at aLife, I'm curious to discuss what everyone thinks in a more general sense --

Basically it's a psuedo-essay about how SL seems to be dividing itself up based on a perceived unobstructable sense of property.

I think everyone is familiar with the whole, "No -- don't build/script/create that -- it'll lag me" argument.

I'm not saying there is a direct anti-creation movement. But I do wonder what people feel the politics of creation in SL are.

I just feel like there's a growing notion that the more we create the more our personal perceived property diminishes. While not everyone is affected, some people are greatly offended by this perceived tresspass or invasion. IMO it seems to be creating an isolationist thinking where every possible resource will be squabbled down to the penny and eventually we should truly get what we pay for -- and only what we pay for.

If you can spare a moment, read the article and tell me what you think. I'm interested in ideas.

In a very real sense we are paying for the resources we use. Anyone who buys land to build on has paid for the use of a set amount of resources in land area and primitives. Given that, how is it in any way surprising that people might be offended when people start using those resources without permission? It might be a minor or non-issue for people with a lot of land and thus a lot of extra resources to spare but for someone with a small amount of land who uses every last prim they're entitled to it can be a major issue.

While I think in theory free roaming artificial life experiments are compelling and cool, I don't think they can work in this kind of situation. To expect everyone to be cool with other people's experiments randomly using resources they haven't paid for is a bit too much of an entitlement attitude for my taste.

I like to leave build enabled on my land so that people who are visiting aren't limited in the way they can amuse themselves, but with the amount of crap that gets left around by people too lazy to clean up after themselves I often think about turning it off completely. In an average week in Aqua I end up having to return literally hundreds of prims. That pisses me off. Does that make me political? Does it make me selfish? Or does it just make me someone who wishes people would exercise more courtesy?

Edit: Here's an additional thought... If we look at land and resources as analogous to renting server space for a website, how would you feel about other people's webpages randomly becoming a part of your site as they just wander through?

Just a niggling bit, but why not set autoreturn to some high amount? like, 2 hours?

Exactly what I do. 2 hours even gives someone enought time to use my land as a sandbox.

Strong follow up on the property issue --

And I wholly agree that what we have now is akin to this esoteric street; where there is a single space that exists, and the boundaries between bubbles change and move, but you're not allowed to influence anything beyond your bubble.

So how do you govern fair use of bubbles? Where are the boundaries? Are the boundaries worth the restrictions?

The politics of creation.
The politics of mmmm feeling good.

~Ulrika~

I'd love to, and that was the original plan, but people who were invited to set up shop there weren't too good about making sure they set their items to group. Auto return would return hundreds of objects that are supposed to be there.

Hmmm... well if I get followed by one of these parasites, prepare to get abuse reported. If it follows me to my land, expect it to be deleted as well.

-Ghoti

My feelings on "resource hogs" probably mirror Flipper's anti-lag bandwidth hogging philosophy because 1) I hear him ranting about it from time to time and 2) he actually takes the time to explain to me how different things affect sim/client resources whereas I normally would have been oblivious.

However, the quandry lies in creating art no matter what the cost (poorly written laggy scripts, huge textures, bling, whatever) versus creating art without having to suck up extra resources in the process. I don't know what the solution is at this point. I guess I think we should be conscious of how excessive primming, some scripts, huge textures etc effect everyones resources.

That being said, when it comes to land, there are certain scripters I am glad that I do not live in the same SIM with, I am glad that there are no laggy builds (clubs, tringo arenas etc) in Indigo.

I think it is a normal reaction that if you pay for something, you wish to have some degree of control over it. What's more, the idea of others 'freeloading' upon resources that you pay for - without your consent, is distasteful to many.

Allow me to share a story, that I think may have some relevance here...

In RL, I live off a canal that feeds into a large inland lake, with no public access. The lake itself - the water - is public. While I have a small easement out into the water for my dock, I don't control the right-of-way, or the water itself.

Wednesday night I was out tubing with some buddies (which consumes a ton of fuel on my 1976 Aluminum barge). I wasn't paying attention, and ran myself out of gas. It was a weeknight, so the lake was empty. I couldn't hail another boater to help me out & give me a tow, and my house was a good 2-mile swim away. So, I was pretty much screwed.

Where the boat died was about 500' off shore, and in scanning it - I noticed a small private beach off a road. The water was just shallow enough where I could swim-tow the boat there, and I could wade the tank through the water the rest of the way and get on land.

As I towed closer, I saw the signs pasted everywhere "Private Property - No Tresspassing under any circumstances". Further up the beach, I saw a locked iron gate, 10' tall - preventing access to the road. Hoo boy, this was going to be fun.

I ended up pounding on someone's door, and asked them if they'd be kind enough to open the gate for me, so I could walk up to the gas station for some fuel. They looked at me, shirtless... looked at my floating hunk of metal out in the water - and came up with a lame excuse that they had no key and shut the door in my face.

Bummed & pissed, I walked back over to the gate to see if there was someplace I could scale it. I realized I could probably get out - but there'd be no way for me to get back in carrying a full aluminum gas tank.

Another one of the neighbors came out, and saw me there, obviously trying to get over the fence. I explained to him what happened, and he was kind enough to unlock the gate, and leave it ajar for me so I could get back. I thanked him, made the trek up to the gas station & back - and I was able to get myself home just in time to log on to SL for a 6PM Event at my place.

Ok - here's the relevance...

That's a private beach there. Those people that live there easily paid 10x what I paid for my home for the luxury of having it. Should they have the right to restrict access? Say they couldn't restrict access - say there was no private beach. Would that affect their land values?

I understand the desire for a private beach. The next lake over has public access, and its a freaking mess. Trash everywhere, people not taking care of their pets. The homes adjacent to the public access area are nowhere as nice as the one's adjoining this private spot.

In Second Life folks own and pay for property, and have a certain right to keep it private - along with their share of resources (like a private beach) that go along with it.

Also, we have public land in Second Life that are for everyone - (like my lake) - the Linden Land, the flight-paths over parcels. Its not right for a individual to control those public resources that are meant for everyone.

I think if you had a bot that roamed the grid, many folks would be like that first person that refused to open that iron gate for me. But it's their right to choose to be that way. Plenty others, would happily allow you egress on their land, providing it was clear that you weren't harming anything - like the kind fellow that opened the gate for me.

And I think that's ok.

Good story, Travis. I'd be one to open the gate as long as someone was polite enough to ask. I'd probably be less charitable if I came outside and found your boat pulled up in front of my house and no one around. That probably wouldn't bother me either, at least at first. If it was still there the next day, and the day after that, then I'd be quite annoyed.

Good post Travis -- I'm trying to pull the analogy into the context of SL. If it were literal, then I'd say sure -- but SL is starting to generate a "no public place" feel. Every parcel is sucked up and individual and property.

Now for efficiency's sake, aren't there better ways to have divided up the SL space? Why did LL go through all the trouble of making a single land-mass and not make any continuous public resources/parcels?

To take Chip's analogy of owning land in SL being like renting web-space... if it were really that way, why not make islands of various sizes connect by portals? That would make it more like an Internet scenario.

I'm not passing judgement on anything here, just to be clear. I'm just engaging in discussion about the politics of creation in SL -- like my parasites. I'll probably never be able to fully experiment with their movement on a large-scale. Or pollen-creating plants -- same thing.

There are probably many projects that might never be without a continuous shared space.

Would SL benefit from say, multi-sim public places? Would it detriment (since obviously they would be LL supported and not making any money for them) SL?

My own opinion on this is a strong yes. But in a sense, don't we have this already with the void sims? Off my home sim of Isabel, there's a huge lake - one of the biggest mainland lakes in SL, with a couple void islands in the middle. Just from memory, I think that's at least 10 void sims bunched together - maybe more.

Possibly the land/build permissions are currently such that you couldn't use them for the purposes you envision. But that'd sure be an easy fix

To equate it to RL - that void area could be like a large national park - and public. It could make an interesting habitat for some virtual creatures

No clubs in INDIGO....

Quite right --

But I'm not only thinking of what I envision in this discussion, Travis.

In general though, with property lines being drawn and perceived property being disputed -- aren't there pre-compiled notions and unspoken 'rules' as to what we create and what we don't?

(I know, I ask a lot of questions.

hehe - this is a good discussion

Yes, I think there are some pre-compiled notions and rules as to what we create and what we don't - and importantly, where.

I'm assuming that an example that would fit into this discussion, is PF's grid-wide drones a while back. The forum community whipped their pitchforks out over that one. And I'm not sure we ever knew for sure what those were - or if the backlash was truly justified in the end. I guess we'll never know

One issue I see, is that while SL is a 3-dimensional world, when we parcel land or set permissions on it, folks tend to think of that in a 2-dimensional way. The 3rd dimension, is just assumed. Many new residents don't even know about the height restrictions of parcel tools, and are shocked when they find them out. In the mean time, assumptions are made (that the height of land ownership extends to infinity).

Linden doesn't help this situation, because there are many things in place that tend to perpetuate the idea of "infinite ownership altitude". When you hover over a parcel at 20,000m - it still says the name of the parcel in About Land. When folks set land settings, such as a Music/Video URL, or set an autoreturn value - its done in a 2-dimensional way (Not a 3-D bounding box), yet its effective to infinity. What about ejecting someone from a parcel at 20000m? The TOS violation there would be grey if you were 'over' your own parcel. There are many other examples.

If it became common knowledge that land ownership extended to say, 768m (or some other reasonable value) and that land above that was considered "Public" - I think it may change the way some folks think about those unwritten rules over what we can/can't create, and where.

If every sim had a set percentage of resources dedicated to "public" use, I'd hope that any segmenting off of individual resources in an ownership sort of way, would not inhibit the public variety of creation.

Bravo!

It is fascinating to see how an expansive 3-Dimension is pocketed and seperated. It does become rather 2-dimensional.. and beyond that, even less real.

Obviously there are politics surrounding everything -- and perhaps the politics of open sharing did fail entirely in SL following the prim-hogging. Everyone, LL to the residents responded to the plight and now we have fully parcelled and limited resource land. The question then of completely parcelled land is it's use in freedom of creation.

Certainly in the real-world there aren't such things as permissions -- there are just rules and penalties. But I can walk outside to the street and throw a paper-airplane or go to the park with a bunch of friends and play ultimate frisbee. If there were strict permissions and every parcel of land was owne by a single individual -- would there be parks or paper airplanes?

And regarding computational cycles of a sim -- we pay for access, correct? Our ownership does not extend to the server resources themselves. We only own the copyrights on the content we create, but the cycles and memory those objects rest in are not ours.

So where is the sense of entitlement? Is the word 'property' really fitting for SL?

Hey Icon, if you could just give me the ftp login for your webserver? I have some stuff I'd like to pass through there. I'm sure you won't mind

Clever chip, and I do see your point. Honestly.

But there is a whole facet of this discussion taking place that has moved beyond that point.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we've already covered how SL has no openly script/build land in large enough tracts to support public experimentation. There are a slew of possbilities there and to me at least, the SL topography seemed to be painstakingly designed to allow a sort of "community" feel.

If SL was basically just a series of websites -- why go through the painstaking technical hurdles of making sims into a single landmass? SL could've been created with far less RL resources had it literally taken on the website paradigm and made sims purchasable and simply "hyperlinked" to other sims.

Considering the amazing things that get built and scripted daily in the sandbox sims I have to disagree that SL doesn't support public experimentation.



If SL had been designed as disconnected places linked only by some kind of portals it wouldn't have the community feel that it does and it would be a lot less compelling to explore. You'd only be able to see the place you were at and there'd be nothing in the distance to entice you to keep exploring. That doesn't change the fact that the individual places are leased space paid for by individual owners. You already know that though.

Are you trying to suggest that SL falls short of being a community because it doesn't allow for the free roaming A-life experiments that you'd like to do? Who says that kind of thing can't be done or that it doesn't allow for large scale public experimentation? You'd just have to go through the added step of actually asking for permission from willing land or sim owners and then make sure you confine your experiments to parcels where you've been granted permission. Does having to ask first somehow make it impossible?

I'm sorry Chip. You're right.

I don't think SL has failed in any way or am arguing that the current dispersement of resources and ownership as wrong (or right). One possible point of discussion here has been merely how the dispersement of resources and the levels of ownership people feel entitled to affect what we create.

I'm not discussing my aLife experiments or aspirations in particular either -- this discussion just happened to be spawned from such experiments.

I don't want this to become personal.. so again accept my apologies that I can't argue with you.

I guess we should just let this thread die. sigh.

Apologies Icon. I wasn't trying to be argumentative. I just don't quite understand the assertion that large scale public experimentation isn't possible because of the resource ownership model being used. I think it adds an extra layer of complication but that it's not insurmountable.

Yes, it does I'd imagine and it's a good idea to do so for those of us interested in taking up such projects... and it will add another layer of politics to the whole thing.

But even on a small scale -- I wonder if there are any other factors (political or otherwise) that affect what we as a whole create. There are many obvious ones, and some not-so-obvious I'm sure.

Thanks for understanding, Chip.

Cheers.