Why do people build in Second Life?

I'm writing a paper for a university class about why people build such complex living spaces for their avatars in Second Life.

Avatars can't eat, don't need to rest, don't really need to sit - so why do people make food, houses/apartments, bed, chairs?

I'd love to hear opinions!

...because they can!

Context. We're used to these clues in the real world, and use our environment for activities. And I think this gets translated to SL. I.E. using an SL bedroom for relaxing and living room or deck for entertaining, even though both rooms might be otherwise identical. The things we don't really need like kitchen cabinets are there to give context, and make it feel familar.

For others some of these things may be a symbol of an aspiration, or just a contrast to what they have in RL.

Plan RL houses in SL.

it gives me something to do besides sit mostly afk "dancing" or camping or (name any dull every 30 min same ol crap event here)

The human side to our avatars... we have a desire and need to "nest" Its a human complusion that shows up in SL

Why do people build model ships and cars, and model railroads, and intricate dollhouses? They can't be used at all.

SL provides the "modeller" hobbyist a playground where ideas can be realized quickly and stored in the virtual realm, with no mess. Many "modeller" types these days just don't have the time or space to spend hours with a block of wood and a Dremel tool. Or at the very least, they have to pick some ideas and put others on the back burner.

SL makes it easy for creators to take something from a mind's eye and show it to others. Plus the benefit of actually using their creations, in a sense.

Building is actually the main reason that I joined SL and bought land. If all I wanted to do was enjoy the social aspect of the game, I'd have stuck with a freebie account.

I've been playing Sims Online for 2½ years, right from the start many players expected EA to follow through on their promise that custom content - the thing that made the offline Sims series so popular - would come. Yet it still hasn't, for reasons unknown to anyone, even though it was part of Will Wright's original vision for the online game.

So... I come here to build. I come up with ideas, I plan them through, I construct, I swear a bit, I move things, I flip them round, I figure out what went wrong, I redo it, and I make.

So far, I have a club, a store, and I'm working on a small house - and almost every 2-3 days I rebuild some part of what I have, as I strive to not only make it look more realistic, but I'm never happy, as I know I can do better.

I can get a lot of entertainment a month for the cost of a CD which I'd probably listen to 2-3 times then put back on the shelf for months on end. Not only can I enjoy what I do, I can enjoy what others do - I have great neighbours as well, and I can look at some of the huge builds and dream of "if only" as far as my budget would allow.

I guess part of the 'realism' is that you can live your dream life in game, and there's nothing to stop you. You might live in a grotty apartment on the 18th floor in first life, but in second life you can look out of your mansion across the perfectly manicured lawn to the boating lake any time you wish - instead of the gasworks.

Lewis

Presently, SL is purely educational fun for me. I'm enjoying learning about all manner of different architecture which I can then re-create in SL. I've also learned a great deal about creating textures, and how textures wrap onto surfaces.

I guess I just like learning, and this is a new medium full of experiences I haven't had yet..

More interesting to me would be why you think people need to build to replicate RL.
Please post a link to your paper

yes. I did mine mostly as a "ghost in the machine" monument to the RL architect and the house, but also as a visualization tool for planning out ideas before we remodel, paint or buy furniture or whatever. Its really been invaluable for that!

Thanks to everyone for responding!! It's great to have so much feedback.

Here is a link to the class website for those who are interested:

http://trumpy.cs.elon.edu/metaverse/

So far I've gathered that there are several reasons why people build in SL - it's fun, it's free, it makes SL more "real," it provides a sense of escape, it's something to do.

This is all very interesting to me because, having detested building a chair (as an assignment), none of these reasons apply to me! It occurs to me that perhaps in order to enjoy building, you've got to like detail-oriented work.

Because in RL if I wanted to put an elevator in my house, it would cost me thousands of dollars... plus I'd have to build a second story for the elevator to go to. And I couldn't have a teleporter in my house that crunches me painlessly into a ball and freezes me in a block of ice and hurls me half a kilometer into the air and unpacks me, good as new, in a floating wire cage where I can climb on an unregistered flying wing and launch myself willy-nilly across the sky...

And I couldn't do any of that if I didn't build, even in SL...

Building isn't everyone's cup of tea anymore than football is. Furthermore, mapping in their mind from a 2D screen to the 3D object is a rather unnatural task for humans and often takes people time to learn. Finally, SL's building tools are rather simple and clunky so don't blame yourself.

Your original question is indeed interesting but the answers above speak to it very well. Good luck with your project.

As Tya mentioned, humans are like most animals and "nest" by instinct. What might make a more interesting study would be the huge variety of "nests" that are created in SL where people have a wide open creative palette available to them and can defy gravity, building codes, architectural sensibilities, suburbia traditions, planned communities and realism altogether if they choose.

As my favorite artist has said, "a home is a sculpture you can live in," and this is more true in SL than anyplace else you will ever find.

My thoughts:

1) Build for buildings sake - Building is fun, recreational and challenging. Building is also art/craft etc. Even if the buildings serve no purpose at all (and many "builds" are not about housing), there would still be people who build them.

2) Conversations - SL is in one sense a glorified chat room. People get together and talk and most buildings (especially houses) are 3d chat facilitators. Settings for avatars to talk and to display themselves or interact with other avatars. Conversation pits and stages.

Buildings and houses may be simple replications of RL houses and to the degree that they are, they are not always very usefull as you have already described, but this is not always the case. Many houses in SL are either altered from RL, or wholy re-created in order to reflect the morphology of avatars and the virtual world. (think bird-houses)

My Companion and I have established a rather elaborate home. We commissioned a builder to design and build it for us, to the theme that we desired, and we have carefully decorated it. Our home in SL serves as a setting for roleplay with our friends, as a meeting place for various groups, and helps to 'set the tone' for our own involvement in SL.

A lot of what I build myself are items I can't get anywhere else, or can't afford to pay someone to make. For example, our home has a late Edo-period Japanese theme. I wanted an appropriate looking wood stove for the kitchen, a tile-covered 'Kamado'. Of course, such a thing does not exist from any merchant in SL. So I made my own. I researched what they looked like, made my own textures in Photoshop, and designed a fairly low prim reproduction that looks very nice. Frequently, when we get new visitors who see our home and want to see what it is like inside, the first stop is to show them the kitchen, and I invite them to kneel at the table, which I made, on the Japanese kneeling cushions, that I made, and enjoy a cup of tea as we talk (using a lovely animated tea set made by another merchant). The Kamado, the period-style chests along the wall, and the other decorations set the mood quite well, and seldom fail to impress our visitors. And of course, I am dressed for the role, in a Japanese kimono.

Sure, I could just meet people at the Welcome area or other public spaces to socialize. But it is so much more fun to have an elegant space of our own to entertain guests.

It's model building just as if I were building a miniature house or a toy boat/train in rl. In SL though the difference isn't size, it's just degree of physical presence. I prefer sl because while I can't really walk around an rl model or an sl one, at least in sl I can fake it in a way that feels closer to the real thing .

it's meditative for me. i notice myself whiling away the hours, not thinking about RL problems if i'm building something. i sleep much better afterwards.

Heh, I may sleep better afterwords, but then again I frequently forget to sleep.

Building is fun stuff. Great for SL experience but also RL experience. It also helps shape ideas and features for the future of SL by seeing the imaginative work of other folks thus developing itself into something greater like an...

EVIL EMPIRE FOR PHILIP LINDEN!

Of course my avatar has to eat! How else can she maintain her girlish figure?

I think so far, Dianne's description of it being a backdrop for social interaction is a good one. Furniture, mood, setting and the posture of avatars helps create the tone of the interaction that occurs. In which case, we actually require different spaces for these things but do leave out redundant rooms like toilets, closets and boiler rooms (strike this out if you partake in boiler room sexual fantasies).

However, it's hard to explain the other extreme, which involve people setting up their houses with elaborate kitchens filled with utensils which seldom partake in most of the social interactions we have in SL. For example, while it seems almost natural for people to buy furniture here, some people find places like Kitchen Korner disturbing (not to mention the bowl of jelly there cost too much ). Its almost similar to a child's early learning development stages where children get involved in creative social representational play. Playing with dollhouses and teasets and using the dolls to represent themselves or characters within their mind. I'll even say that those who do this tends to be of lower mentality and are more childlike in nature than the more highbrow folks here in the forums who enjoy slinging turd at each other.

When I have built spaces for personal rather than public interactions (my first and 2nd spaces were more or less houses) they still tended to exclude rooms having anything to do with one's digestive tract. I had in my first house a tower, a garden, a hottub room and livingroom. My second house had a skyloft on stilts with a play space (literally a place to do competitions of a particular sort) and a private space. To this I built an extended satellite (a store space) and never looked back. Since then, all of the spaces I've owned or built have tended to be public spaces.

I too have written a paper on this topic so please forgive me for rambling a little I can summerize most of the paper.

i build for many reasons. But mostly so that I can create great spaces that i can occupy. Afterall, that is mostly all we can do here in SL. Occupy it Interaction with other people is secondary. The aspect of occupying SL is why it was created in the First place. Interaction accross distances has been available in much more convenient ways for decades.

That being said, I am mostly building for SL using techniques i think are specific to SL. In other words, I dont' build kitchens or bathrooms for myself. They are not places I would normally hang out when living rooms are available. My home is all livingroom (hangout space) and i never see my clients ever entering the bathroom I've built for them. Context and clues? probably only on a very rudimentry level. I think it is mostly a matter of emulation. Model building. The Sims and SL can be used for emulating our meatspace. It is a good reason to build.

The short version: I build because there is alot to build and certain ways to build it. It makes me part of a growing world and that is pretty darn interesting to me (not to mention complicated and larger than me.) This all makes for a great hobby. There are things to consider, limits imposed and all of this makes it a real experience. It is not CAD, where the only limits are rendering speeds. This is a world where ideas and projects meet some interesting issues with people, technique and rules. Average camera distance and height, average field of view, most interesting (worth the prims) most important visual signals (worth the prims) least amount of navigation needed (easy stairs, no useless walls,) no claustrophobia, no agoraphobia (feeling a space too large,) neighborly input, fitting for an envoronment, logical (or illogical?) rez speeds, particle count, texture load time, etc. etc. etc.

It all makes for an interesting evening!

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The long version? well, it's a few forum topics long but a summery that I've been gathering is evolving and is long. Long i tell ya.

~Lefty