Second life

This will not be an article. It is more like a blog entry. The reason, why I choose to write a blog lies in the problem that I don't get it. I just don’t get the phenomenon of Second Life (SL), but as SL has many users, then I admit that there must be something catching/intresting about it. I wondered for a some time already about the phenomena of SL. So instead of writing something smart in an article, I choose to write a blog to reflect my thoughts and feelings. Another reason might be that I looked for research about the SL but it was hard to find a concrete study what would be longer then 2 pages. As the SL was created in 2003, this is understandable.

As many researches (Childress, Braswell 2006; Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007) have pointed out, the SL is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. But for me it is hard to consider the SL just as a game. Huizinga (2003) has argued that game is different from a real life because game takes place, game has an end. In that sense the SL is like a real life - it is a virtual reality, it has no ending. Hence not a game?

We may ask: is the SL just a hype? It has around nine millions avatars (Bugeja 2007), but relatively few of them actually use it (Newitz 2007). In online communities one of the key questions is usability of community. How software is designed and developed has an impact to online community: the way people are communicating strongly affects its evolution. (Lazar, Preece 2003). There might be the reason of low usability in the SL - from my personal experience it was quite hard to figure out the basics.

When Linden Lab published the SL, it “gained a reputation as being little more than a hippy hang-out, where people had cyber sex, took virtual drugs “. During time it has become a virtual space that enhanced different forms of social interaction (Ananthaswamy 2007).

What still remains unclear to me is that this it not a game - people are putting real (!) money to the SL to gain pleasure and satisfaction. The question is: why are the not using the same money in the real world and instead of real pleasure they prefer virtual one? Or doesn’t it matter whether where do you get the satisfaction because the feeling (chemical reaction?) is still the same? But why do people pay real money to buy a virtual (!) dog? Why do they not buy themselves a real dog? They want pleasure, but they don’t want responsibility? Real dog brings along a lot of obligations: you can not afford forget to feed him, to go outside to a walk? These kinds of obligations are obviously forgotten in the SL.

But the SL proves that human nature is social. Even if these people choose virtual reality (VR) instead of staying in the real life (IR), they are choosing sociality. Otherwise they would be alone in a different place and not looking around in the world full of other people. People game (we can consider the SL here as a game) due different reasons: some get excitement out of it, some get the feeling of being successful, some find it educational (Goldstein 2003). All those reasons might be true for the SL also. I can accept that in some since the SL is interesting like a game: it is a simulation of a situation or life. You even have proper game tools: a toy (avatar) and playground (world). At the same time it is proven that social interactions in online virtual environment (SL) have the same social norms as social interaction in the physical world (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007). So the question remains: why do these people decide living in the VR instead of IR? Isn’t real life interesting enough? Why are they not social IR, why do they not dare to live a there own real life?

It is easy to leave the SL and not to think about it anymore as I don’t understand it, but I do realise the educational potential of the SL, what is still fully undiscovered. It might be a simple place where you can learn and communicate with different people (professionals), you can easily create something new or have a different profession (and no harm done IR). Virtual reality can be a medium to learn by doing.

Using VR in learning can be very helpful: it helps learners to reflect and get more deepen understanding of the learning process trough high-level interaction and active engagement by learners (Mantovani 2001). Improvements of environments (like SL) will lead to increased interactivity, the line between face-to-face learning and the online virtual learning will be not so clear. Improvements of virtual learning environments will create new ways of learning and models of teaching. It will depend on development of technology and on creativity of the educators who are using these kinds of environments (Childress, Braswell 2006).

And I have to say: this the SL enables.


References:

1. Ananthaswamy, A. (2007), „A life less ordinary offers far more than just escapism”, New Scientist 195 (2620), 57-57, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

2. Bugeja, M. J. (2007), “Second Thoughts About Second Life”, Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (3), C2-C4, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

3. Childress, M., D., Braswell, R. (2006), “Using Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games for Online Learning”, Distance Education 27 (2), 187-196, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

4. Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

5. Huizinga, J. (2003), Mängiv inimene, Tallinn: Kirjastus Varrak.

6. Lazar, Preece (2003), “Social Considerations in Online Communities: Usability, Sociability, and Success Factors”, in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp 127-151.

7. Mantovani, F. (2001), “VR Learning: Potential and Challenges for the Use of 3D Environments in Education and Training”, in Riva, G. & Galimberti, C. (eds), Towards CyberPsychology: Mind, Cognition and Society in the Internet Age, Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp 207–225.

8. Newitz, A. (2007), “Virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world”, New Scientist 195 (2618), 40-40, http: search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

9. Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D. (2007), “The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments”, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10 (1), 115-121, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].