Coming out in Second Life

Posted on | January 24, 2007 | Comments Off

I caught an item on Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 Live programme this afternoon in which Chris Vallance plonked himself somewhere in Second Life and reported live about his experience there (Chris also has a BBC blog – pods&blogs). While Mayo spoke to a few people about the phenomenon of Second Life generally, Chris, in the guise of ‘journo lumpen’ – his avatar – soon had a throng of Second Lifers around him chatting away. I went into Second Life and lurked on the edge of the group to see what was going on – it is an interesting experience to see a group interacting in the virtual world while listening to someone in the broadcast media talking live about the experience.

Mayo received the usual noisesome bouquet of emails and texts imploring the virtual explorers to ‘get a 1st life!’ – all too predictable and uninformed, I guess. But Mayo, in his signature style – intelligent, light-touch, sympathetic, humorous – managed to fit quite a lot of interesting chat around the piece. He even managed to get the real life people behind a couple of the avatars milling around ‘journo’ Vallance to speak to him on the phone as they were interacting with the group.

Mayo chatted to Jim Purbrick, a Nottingham programmer currently working for Linden Labs as a senior software engineer. Purbrick gave us a succinct and factual description of what Second Life is, how it looks to someone in the world, its open-endedness, and the attractiveness of Second Life to so many companies. One of the companies that now has a presence in Second Life is, of course, Cisco – they have built Cisco Island, with places for meetings, lectures, workshops and so on. Purbrick also mentioned the fact that Linden are dipping their toes into the open source stream, opening up the source for the viewer application that users have to download to their computers. They do have plans to extend their experiment with open source, though.

He also had a few words with Tim Guest who is publishing a book soon called ‘Second Lives’ on the virtual world. Guest explained a little about the Second Life economy and the nature of the various interactions that can happen there. There was also some interesting chat about the possibility of 1st life politics making its way onto the virtual stage – already Jean-Marie le Pen, the French far-right politician has tried to set up an office in Second Life and has met with more than a little resistance to the move from other Second Lifers.

I guess now would be a good time to ‘come out’ as a resident of Second Life – my avatar’s name is Jonn Jya, and as you can see, I have made it easy for anyone I bump into there to recognise what part of the world I come from! To date, I have spent the odd moments I have been there simply wandering this strange and diverse environment. I can see the possibilities of this alternative world, but Second Life, at the moment, still has a way to go to become the world it could be. That will come, though, I have no doubt.

It is undoubtedly an intriguing and engaging ‘place’ and most definitely points the way towards how such immersive environments could develop along multifarious routes over the next few years. One of the Mayo interviewees pointed out – in response to someone who texted to say they simply could not see the point of such open-ended worlds, as opposed, for instance, to online game environments with structure and ‘rules’ – that similar technology is being used to create environments designed to help people suffering from schizophrenia or Aspergers.

I will continue to explore Second Life and may occasionally present some thoughts here on its potential, especially for education and training. I don’t go into the environment very often but when I do you are likely, for obvious reasons, to find me somewhere on Cisco Island – unless I’m off elsewhere exploring! Find me and say hello if you’re ever in Second Life at the same time as me.

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