New Babbage in the Snow
I have been really enjoying further investigating Second Life, usually late in the evening.
I rescind all my former slander about Second Life, (and have amended my previous post on the subject accordingly.) All the technology works smoothly now I have successfully installed the viewer on Windows 8 (either they did some work on it- the download instructions did change slightly or my computer was not working because I looked at it the wrong way- quite normal). Moreover was left with the general impression that the people running it did care about it very much indeed,
Second Life is a huge world with lots and lots of people doing things- there are a lot of different styles of posters and little niche worlds, full of people with interesting things to say. It must be enormously fun to run such a world, rather like playing God, and the place is a perfect goldfish bowl for studying psychology, including marketing psychology; a ready made focus group. This could be seen as a cynical marketing tool, at its worst, because once you know a lot about people you can target marketing to meet their niche preferences, but, at best, you could call it perfect customer service.
The world I explored last night suited my personal tastes exactly. For instance I saw a little hut from which loud chatter was emerging, and when I entered there were posters giving you a short biog of various jazz musicians. There seem to be libraries popping up in my search box, illuminated manuscripts, classical music, Irish folk related material, jazz, and, of course, steampunk. Well, the steampunk had a solid pre-existance, in the part of the world I have taken to exploring, which is called Caledon and New Babbage, and I did get the impression that stereotyped Irish idylls were pretty hot in Second Life too, and when I bought some clothes in a Second Life shop once the credit card transaction came from real life Ireland (tax haven of course too). But, rightly or wrongly, I got the impression that the music I was hearing was related to my personal tastes. (This sounds a bit paranoid, but on the other hand, it is what Amazon and Google do all the time.)
Signs occasionally flashed up on my screen telling me about exciting new things that were exactly what I was interested in- an illumination library, an induction group for learners, a poetry reading, but these were not intrusive, on the contrary, they disappeared too quickly for me to absorb or capture. [Aside-they should have included something you could click on and keep. Maybe I will learn more about that. I tried to go to the things they advertised by it was hard to navigate to them. When I tried to find the illuminated library again in the general search box I couldn't. In fact either the general search box needs improving a lot or else most of the things and people I looked for had an ephemeral existance. I suspect the former.]
When I went to Second Life some time ago I was rather horrified by all the young folk in gyrating in bikinis. I know this sounds an old fashioned thing to say and normally I would not say it. However that is the thing about Second Life: as in writing, you develop a sort of persona there and, in my case, in Caledon, it seems to be a persona that I like. In Caledon signs, designed in steampunk style, tell you that you have to be polite to people, you are encouraged to dress in period dress (which assumes modesty) and even to refer to people as 'Mr. or Mrs.' I realised that Frances Obolensky does not approve of gyrating bikinis, and I have found a corner of Second Life where I, as she, can feel comfortable.
When the Internet was new there was a lot of bad publicity about it, mostly relating to sexual practices, and the Internet was avoided by some who feared it was primarily a haven for criminal deviants and sexual preditors to communicate and thrive in private, or worse, a channel for them to insidiously invade your family life from the very heart of your home. And to some extent that is true, of course, there is a lot of sex on the Internet. But at its heart the Internet is only a medium for real life people to express themselves, and it mirrors the real world. Don't blame the medium, goes the argument, fairly convincinly. These days, with good email and browser filters and more user training, we are subjected to far fewer horrifying pop-ups, emails offering dubious products etc, on the web itself, and I think these arguments are true for Second Life too. There may be lots and lots of places where you can gyrate in a bikini, fair enough, but if there are libraries where I can be illuminated, (how? how intriguing) beautifully designed buildings relating to designs of Italian architects, a place where I can fly with my skirts flapping in the wind and survey a world of technology glowing in the sunset, a place where I can feel at home and, moreover, feel like I can be some good version of myself, then that is something worth investing in.
Ah yes, money. I seem to have inherited £2,000 Linden Dollars from my former self of five to six years ago. I bought some money because I chose to buy my nice Irish girl clothes. I also have a business woman suit (apparently- nice but not something I'd be seen dead in in real life. But I always have this problem when looking at real life business suits too. Perhaps if I ditched the handbag?) Also I found I'd bought a pretty cool female Goth outfit. Five to six years later I am still pleased with the dress I bought, which you can't say about many fashion acquisitions. I have no idea how much £2,000 Linden Dollars is: it sounds like a fortune but I am a pretty mean woman so I don't imagine I really spent much at all- probably twenty quid at most, some of it even now still burning a hole in my virtual pocket. Nobody ever asks me for money there for anything, although there are lots of shops. There are lots of bargain basement places full of free clothes, I remember, and most events are free. So mainly you pay to buy clothes or to buy land, if you want to build. You build if you like architecture, want a place to sell things, want to put up signs telling people about things, or want your own pad to hang out in with your real-life friends, but most people don't seem to hang out much in their own joints (there are lifeless avatars snoozing about the place while the users are offline). Building them is an end in itself, I suspect.
I don't think I am interested in buying land at the moment- I would rather investigate other people's places, and I may show my real life daughter about the place if I can persuade her, and I will probably donate to bar owners, etc. instead, once I've figured out how the money works (haven't reached that part of the tutorial yet.) A person could exist perfectly happily (if they were ruthless) without spending any money at all ever: I felt under no pressure to spend any money at all, indeed, I got the impression that most people who designed or ran the places I've visited recently have been generous, successful and avuncular.
Caledon really is beautiful. Port Babbage is too, but emptier- wandering around the little cobbled streets and old fashioned shops reminded me of Victorian London, of course, but there is also something of Medieval Ravenna about the place at close quarters, whereas when seen from above it seems industrial and futuristic. Caledon and New Babbage seemed to cater to all the things I liked: it was rather like the surprise I got when I looked into the book "the nation's favourite poems" and was a little surprised to discover that the whole nation's favourite poems were exactly the same as my own supposedly niche and cultured tastes.
I had worried that there were aspects of Second Life that amounted to pyramid selling. One gets the impression that people buy land and set up shop as a serious money making enterprise. Like any business, Second Life businesses depend on attracting enough passers by, and if the game is now less popular than it was then businesses are liable to suffer. However, I think this is no less the case in Second Life than anywhere else: all businesses depend on passing trade, and there are quite a few people passing through Second Life shops. A second life shop does not need staff, (indeed you can even leave a few animated avitars twitching about the place if you like) or overheads except rent, and sub-letting property is an even easier business to run but dependent on all the usual marketing strategies that first life businessmen need to use to attract users. Indeed, many parts of Second Life mirror First Life organisations: museums, libraries, businesses. Just another branch reaching out to a different segment of the population. Paying monthly rent is quite a high commitment (although I have not investigated prices recently). Whether or not any of these activities provide a good return is not my place to speculate on but people are welcome to try, and, moreover, doing so is fun and allows users to model running a business in a low budget controlled environment that, at worse, distracts them from losing their money elsewhere and probably teaches them a lot of useful transferable technical design skills, and, who knows, many may be turning over a nifty profit.
Internet users are getting older and much has been made of the rising generation of 'silver surfers' -people who are rich in time and often financially secure too. People of all ages often have a lot of time on their hands now, or only work part time, like myself. New Babbage and Caledon are ideal places to attract this huge market and although the initial bubble may have subsided (do bubbles subside? Pop sounds rather harsh and final in this instance) I think the Second Life world, and New Babbage with it, will still survive in some form or other into the twenty second century and beyond, so all Mosseveno Tanks and Aleous Cleanslates out there can rest assured that their legacy is fairly secure. Or, as Frances Obolensky might say, my grateful Irish blessings be upon all the good ladies and gentlemen of Caledon for facilitating such good craic.
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