After reading about various interesting events that had taken place in virtual venues within the world of Second Life, it finally sunk in. This might have a potential as a civic space, where I could talk to people all over the world about the idea of dignity as a human right.
Second Life is a massive virtual reality environment. It’s not so much a game as a global conference call that takes place in fantastic imaginary settings. All sorts of activists could set up kiosks around the virtual public square. People with common interests could meet and coordinate for political action. One day there might even be ways to facilitate voter registration. Enthralled by the vision of cyber-democracy, I set up an account.
It was very easy for me to get started with Second Life because I have some experience with 3D apps. These skills are more common to people under 30, so I’m sure that for the present participation will skew fairly young. I spent a few minutes twiddling with my character – here she is wearing a “Fight Rankism” t-shirt!
When I did my initial recon, I was a bit disappointed. A lot of the development of Second Life has been commercial, which makes much of the world resemble MYST: The Sleazy Vegas Edition. It didn’t take me long to figure out why a world of virtual casinos was inevitable – in fact it’s necessitated by the game’s economic model.
The number one obstacle to developing civic space within Second Life is its exploitative economic model.
The first thing I wanted to do in Second Life was build a landmark to stand for the cause of dignity while my character was offline. You can’t do that in Second Life unless you own land. Unfortunately land is very expensive within the terms of the game. If you don’t want to indenture yourself to labor some established character, your main option is to collect cash from Money Trees (largesse from the wealthier denizens of Second Life). It took me a few hours to collect $100: this isn’t a fraction of what I would need to buy land: definitely not worth it.
I did try just building a few small objects with a note about dignity attached, to leave on tables and benches. Apparently this is regarded as the equivalent of littering in Second Life, and my objects were quickly returned to my character’s inventory. Suddenly I understood why there are whole sweatshops devoted to farming for game money for online games: since the primary activity of the game (building) costs money, the players themselves enforce a money economy within the game so they can pass on their costs to the next person who comes along.
While Second Life is a really cool idea, I think the business model is questionable. People can get game cash to buy land by paying a subscription fee to Linden Labs (the owners of Second Life). This means that people are paying to contribute their creativity and labor to develop an attractive game space for the profit of Linden Labs. This is worse than Wikipedia, where people just donate their time to the crowdsource the greater glory of Jimmy Wales. Also, you lose the fruits of your investment and efforts if you are banned for any reason (serious legal thought has been devoted to this issue).
If anyone from Linden Labs reads this, my tip would be to subsidize people who want to build. Just make people pay to buy prefab objects, when they want to be conspicuous consumers instead of producers. From the level of advertising that already infests second life, Linden Labs will be able to find plenty of marketing departments willing to play for bling.
My gripe about the exploitative economic model aside, there is potential for Second Life civic space. I’m certainly not the first person to think of it. After searching through the Second Life group listing, I discovered that adventurous students at New York Law School have been developing Democracy Island. I’m not sure what activities they have in mind, but I joined the group just for the heck of it.
I couldn’t find any other obvious political fora, but it could be that I just didn’t hit upon the right keywords. There’s no question there’s room for much, much more development around the concept.
Despite the proliferation of cheesy casinos, there are lots of places within Second Life where you can almost feel the love poured into the landscape. Some of the creations are as sophisticated as any professionally designed game (in fact Second Life might actually serve as a proving ground for designers). There were all sorts of geeky in-jokes from working stargates to the occasional Tardis to a wreck of the Enterprise.
I probably won’t do very much with Second Life for the time being. As mentioned above, I’m not about to pay Linden Labs to develop their product for them. I do think there’s a lot of potential for community-building and fostering civic discourse (on a global scale) within Second Life, though. I am going to wander around a bit more tonight just to see what’s where – if anyone wants to join me, I’m the one wearing the “Fight Rankism” t-shirt. 🙂
