Why the heck would you pay for virtual goods, virtual land and all of that guff? Because it isn't what it appears to be.
That might seem odd, but it cuts to the core of what Second Life actually is - and most people don't consciously 'get it'. Second Life - virtual environments - aren't what they appear to be, and that's sort of the point. It isn't, perhaps, quite the point that it's made out to be, though.
Second Life is, as we have said, a communications platform and asset publishing system that presents as a 3D environment. A virtual world, if you will. It's a communications system, layered with data. Assorted systems handle resource allocation, assets, object creation, and a bewildering variety of communication tasks. What you would see if you visited the server rooms at the colocation facility is thousands of servers humming away in racks.
That's not much help.
What you'd see if you looked in the databases or examined the network traffic is a whole lot of data, changing moment by moment.
That's like looking at those green waterfall displays in The Matrix. That's not much help either.
Instead, what you see is a 3D space. A representation. A visual metaphor. Something that allows you to manipulate data in ways you can understand. In a sense Second Life is like the desktop on your computer, allowing you to perform tasks in ways that make more intuitive sense. It's certainly a step up from giving instructions to a computer by successively flicking banks and banks of switches.
Double-click on an icon, drag a file to a folder; or drop it on an application. The desktop isn't an ideal metaphor (ask Aunt Tilley) but it's not an awful one, either.
A virtual world is a metaphor for a different kind of data, and a different set of tasks to the kind you have on your computer. As we said, this is a communications platform and asset publishing system. It's also a whole lot more multi-user than your computer.
The thing we call virtual land isn't real land. It's not even supposed to represent real land. It represents something else - several something elses. One of the things it represents is system resources. Storage space, CPU-cycles, memory, and all of that guff. The amount of land is a measure of your share of the system resources, and represents the boundaries and constraints of that use. Exactly the same sort of hosting you'd pay for for a web-site off of one of the big hosting providers, but put to a different purpose.
Another thing land represents is space, and that's where our 3D visual metaphor connects with the intuitive faculties of the user. We intuitively understand 3D spaces. We live in them all our lives. We know about insides, outsides, in-front-of, behind, over, under and through. Any child who's watched a month of Sesame Street can rattle off the basic concepts - and we all grasp simple issues like proximity. Those ideas and how they relate to communication are natural to us.
That 3D world is the User Interface.
The only problem is that we need a user-interface for the user-interface - and that's one of two points where things get sticky.
The virtual world is the interface, but we need another interface to actually use it. That's probably not going to change any time soon.
Where you get into trouble is when you take a metaphor for one thing, and then try to compare that metaphor to the real thing which it resembles - you're going to find it deficient. Virtual land isn't a metaphor for real land. It's a metaphor for data and computational resources.
"This 'desktop' metaphor is no good. I can't put my coffee and papers on it!"
That, of course, is because it's not representative of your desk. It's a metaphor for a set of data, operations and tasks.
Virtual environments are metaphors too, making enormous amounts of data and underlying concepts visible to us in ways that we can use and manipulate, without having to confront incomprehensible walls of data in order to talk with a person on the other side of the world, or share an image or experience.
It only starts to get silly when people lose sight of the metaphor, and mistake it for something else. A lack of sophistication maybe? Remember the famous, early film of a steam train chugging towards the screen? Panicked cinema patrons scrambling out of the way of an image that would not deceive a six-year old of present times.
And, yet, at some level some of us still look at the metaphor of virtual land, and think that we can treat it the same way as real land. Is the metaphor so convincing? Or others look at it and see.. nothing. Smoke and fog. They're missing the metaphor - but why?
1. >>They're missing the metaphor - but why?
This is a measure of success to achieve immersiveness, rather than any deficiency! A simulator is designed to trick our brains, so that skill acquisition and training using it can be effective. Watch this then rethink your post: ftp://ftp1.entropiauniverse.com/movies/cryengine2.wmv - this engine will power Entropia Virtual World before June 2008! (Read press release at: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=754668 - and it allows real-time editing/sandboxing of the world and its objects)
Posted at 11:50AM on Aug 14th 2007 by Louis Pasteur