- make us believe -

Teaching building and play in Second Life

2010-02-13T15:34:00.175Z

Recently first year students of Sculpture and Environmental Art [SEA] at The Glasgow School of Art were introduced to Second Life. The virtual world of Second Life is just one site of exploration in larger self-directed, five week project titled "Site-Place-Context". Lead by Paul Cosgrove, head of the SEA Department, the project was shepherded by artist Chery Feild and myself. What follows are some observations of the student work from across the project and snapshots of works and experiments created at the GSA inWorldStudio.

As could be expected, some took to working in Second Life while others chose different aspects of the project to focus on. The avenues of approach, to the project in addition to Second Life, included the world famous Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh Building, and Glasgow's historic Bellahouston Park, two rather precise locations with significant contemporary and historic presences. A description of the project can be found here on the project's blog.

What may or may not be immediately obvious if you've never ventured into Second Life is that it, in comparison to the other sites presented requires rather a high bar of computer and technical literacy before one can engage with with the environment in any sophisticated way.

Practically the project began with inductions to each of the locations which aimed to provide the students with a working knowledge of the sites, their use and historical context. The induction sessions to Second Life, differed in the amount of exposure needed to introduce the tools was significant and risked out weighing, context of the situation, the 'why'.

What is remarkable is that it was possible at all to take a group of 30, most complete novices, from creating an avatar, learning to navigate, and communicate and onto beginning stages of building things, in under four hours. In all this are the various frustrations with technology - Surl links that dont work, group permissions which don't aggregate as expected, computer foibles and the rest. In fact, with little surprise, it was these instances of technical foibles, that seemed to put students off the experience the most.

Complications aside, group activities like scavenger hunts, and competitions to create the oddest looking avatar were very useful tools to keep people (relatively) focused and engaged with the environment. Also regardless of the virtual space they occupied, the fact they were in the room together made the group learning experience more enjoyable. An overview of what we covered in the introduction can be found here and the induction handout here.

I feel that given the current approach, there is little to be done about the imbalance of technical overview vs contextual dialogue. Not surprisingly the vast majority of students found significant frustrations with the first two hours or so with the induction. I attribute this mostly to difficulties engaging the interface, and there is a lot of conversation in the Second Life community about improving this critical window in new users' experience.

As people began to reach their saturation point, after about two hours or so - I introduced a 30 minute version Another Perfect World, a documentary about digital utopias, produced by Submarine and originally aired on the BBC. The film is a great way to offset fatigue and is excellent primer for discussion with which to wind down the session and put the potential of the island into a broader context.

On the whole I found that students who sat in on additional sessions really began to feel more comfortable with the interface and environment. So as an overall estimate, about seven to eight hours of contact time seemed to be the 'tipping point' for real confidence - though there was a pretty high 'burnout' rate and most chose to come for a session scheduled on another day. When approaching this kind of project again I would consider breaking up the activities into two, four hour sessions, on consecutive days. The first session to introduce them to the interface and the second more directed to actual building and a tour of other engaging projects.

It struck me that even though for many Second Life wasn't chosen as a site of exploration, the issues and concerns many projects dealt with seemed to reflect the inclusion of Second Life in the discussion. I find this in a way surprising, because in comparison to Bellahouston Park and the Mackintosh Building, Second life resist specific, lasting histories, at least as we are accustom to thinking of it in an archeological sense - history just needs to be unearthed.

Overall within the dialogue of the student work there existed dead interesting struggles with space, its layering, physical presence and perception, in addition to thoughts of simulacrum and reproduction. On more then one occasion during tutorials and critiques Cheryl and I pointed students to the works of people such as Joseph Kosuth and his "One and Three Chairs", and thinkers such Marshall McLuhan, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Not quite halfway through their first year, many of these students had yet to be introduced Kosuth and McLuhan and I cant help but think that inclusion of Second Life as a site for exploration and a tool for experimentation, contributed to the prevalence of these discussions within their work.

entropy, rebellion & griefing in the wild west. . .

2010-02-11T16:32:00.195Z

I keep trying to grasp the advent, depth and nature of the massive multi-player on line roal playing games (mmorpg), such as World of Warcraft, and in many ways Second Life. In trying to do so I tend to see at the hart of these games, as virtual worlds, more or less defined by the rules and conditions of the game. Now this is not a ground breaking realisation but, its the seeded conditions of these games, the rules (if only very loose), technical limitations, objectives ex-cetera, that lead me to think of the games as social experiments. Perhaps with these kinds of systems, we can start to reveal how humans behave, interact, and analyse what players try to achieve as a result of the rules and limitations of the game. Far from a Newtonian universe these games often lead to surprising, unpredictable behaviour –– such as Chinese firms hiring players to mine and resell for a profit, virtual gold, the currency of the game World of Warcraft.

This post is in part a response to Ellie Harrison's earlier entry In a world without consequences which reminded me of ideas we'd included in our early discussions (found in the post "Almost twenty questions"). Ellie in her project ran up against a wall I'll call 'negative-motivation' in her persuit of radical extremism in SL, stating "there is no pressing need to change the status quo". And I thought to myself, and agreed, sure Second Life seems to be Utopic. But what was the nature of that void she ran into? - was it really there? -- surely an urge subvert, manipulate, even to overthrow "the system" is rather pervasive? Perhaps the conditions those urges needed to manifest had been omitted from the game? Or perhaps those urges had just morphed into something else and we were looking in the wrong place? What was the nature of that urge in the first place?

If thought about as a social experiment, I begin to see all games of these types as huge systems where the results of peoples behaivior are a combination of the rules of the game and our own humanity. Of course as soon as we start talking about systems I begin to wonder about the rules that govern them –– and what light might the laws that govern other systems suggest about our behaviour in SL? How about the Second Law of Thermodynamics for example?

Now I'm not an expert in systems or thermodynamics, so please forgive me if it seems I'm engaging in a bit of low level sophistry –– but I cant help but try it on for size and see if there's something to be gained in this thought experiment, even if its faulty.

The laws of thermodynamics talk about closed versus open systems. A loop of pipe that closes back in on it self could be a closed system. A hot area of water, or a concentration of salt in one area of this closed system would eventually equalise itself with all areas with in the system. That behavior is known as entropy, and its describes the phenomenon of a cup of salt and a cup of pepper to become inextricably mixed in a bag. Its the force of randomisation which mixes things back into their lowest energy state - stasis. It's entropy, among other forces which omits the possibility of perpetual motion machines and the like.

With an open system, instead of a loop one might consider a river with many streams feeding in on it. This is just a matter of perspective of course –– step back 600 kilometres into space and the Earth begins to look like one massive closed system, but then we'd be forgetting the influence of the massive burning star behind us, feeding energy into the earth. One can step back and repeat this process –– ad infinitum. As near as I can tell the concept of a truly closed system is just that - a concept.

But we're talking about social experiment here and as a tool to look at how people behave and interact, I find Second Life is a compelling example. But honestly it didn't take the advent of Second Life to put the tools of free and accessible social experimentation into the hands of the masses - A form of these has been around since the paleolithic period –– storytelling. Storytelling has been the tool of choice for conveying information too complex to be passed from generation to generation by biologic methods like DNA. Think morality tales - short 'what-if' scenarios passed from parent to child that put you mentally in a situation where A] the protagonist (potentially you) is screwed by their own doing and B] their chances for survival or finding a mate are especially slim. "You don't want to end up like that person do you Son?"

Stories, especially fiction, but most especially science fiction (i.m.h.o.), excel as a kind of complex thought experiment. As readers we are swept into the framework of the story and world is made real for us. The more true and plausible the author's leaps of reason, the more we can begin to believe, even empathise with the characters and their impossible circumstances. If the secinaro or rather the character's reactions are too far fetched, alarm bells go off in the reader's mind - and we start to question the whole premise. The author has stumbled against a limitation in either his or her own craft - or perhaps the limits of what we socially and inheriently believe to be human nature. To me it also seems, in these fictions, there lies a potenttial to expand our concepts of who we are as people. The more we suspend our disbelief, the more we accept the currency of the narrative, and in that exchange, what is possible for us as individuals, and as culture in real life –– expand ever so slightly.

There has been a lot of writing arround these areas, specifically the possibilities of narrative within new digital environments. One notable is Marie-Laure Ryan and her book Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Here Ryan among other things draws comparison between our imagination and its ability to visualise the world constructed in a work of fiction, and the digital worlds of these massive an immersive games, among others thing. Suffice it to say, narrative delivered on printed pages of book, is a static system - closed yes like our thermodynamic closed system before, but they are more then just 'closed'. There is in most cases no movement possible within it these narratives. The story remains as the author has written it, and we though can bring new insights and understanding to it, generally we cannot change it. There exists social structures to prevent such changes as well. For examplethe more sacred the text, the greater the effort to preserve its authenticity over time - ie protect it from the forces of entropy. Copyright laws are also created to preserve the status and authority of the mortal author as well.

As Ellie discovered in the process of her own work - there is apparently little to rebel against in Second Life. It seems that radical extremism is rendered impotent in the face of Utopia. Everyone has whatever they want and there are few real consequences. Wait, no consequences? Well on a scale, relatively minor. If a player gets expelled for bad behaviour, he or she can generally create a new avatar, a new character and be more careful about getting caught in the future. There are examples of characters permanently ban from games, forfeiting significant amounts of invested time and intellectual property, they are uncommon and so this is as close to mortal peril as one can get. Also the greatest damage one can generally inflict is on 'property' and though there may be a modicum of embarrassment, the time it takes to rebuild and restore virtual property back to its original state, is generally quiet short. So given all this, as Ellie discovered, the efforts to rebel seem to fail pathetically or apathetically. Perhaps its a world without that particular friction, a world that resists that particular plot.

Someone famous once said "put a gun into a plot and its got be used...." I'd love to know who that famous person was. . .

Apathy is what happens when people give up, no one cares. To me it seems the onset of decay, and apathy cuts two ways. The inherent of lack of concern over impotent terrorism, is equal to the inherent lack of interest in what anybody is doing as well. This can be seen an increased commentary in some journalism on Second Life which observes how little in going on in many areas of Second Life - where once there seemed a hum of activity. In our game as system analogy, and taking from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we would immediately suspect this might be seen as evidence of the forces of entropy. But what happens if apathy grows a spine, gets some brass knockers, gets (quasi) organized - and wants to show off? Well I believe its been around since Second Life's inception, and its called greifing.

The Patriotic Nigras (PN) are perhaps one of the best known example of successful anti-establishment popular movements within Second Life. Their motto? "Ruining Your Second Life since 2006". The group's attacks are known as 'griefing', the practice of being a nuisance and general annoyance by creating disturbances that run counter to the rules of the game environment. And it just so happens that greifing is one of causes I've often see listed for the decline of Second Life's popularity.

In general greifing attacks do not cause any lasting damage, though there have been exceptions - for example there was an instance of a viral, self-replicating object which shut down the entire network of Second Life servers in 2005 (see gray goo link below). But this was more a prank - or a scripting experiment which was way more successful then anticipated then a forceful attack and safeguards to prevent such objects have been put in place.

As we've mentioned, in Second Life there are no rules per-say, so any event staged that deliberately inhibits the experience of others tends to fall under this blanket category. To my mind greifing is delightfully close to Dada, Fluxsist, Surrealist and absurdist concepts of intervention, performance, happenings etc. At the same time however greifing tactics also remind me of a playground bully named Biff –– mean, ugly and with an inferiority complex the size of truck.

Highly technically accomplished, the PN have developed an independent version, several generations in development, of the Second Life client software called Thuglyfe. The Thuglyfe client sidesteps the hardware & software measures implemented by Lindin Labs to deter griefing, as well as introducing several genuine innovations to their user community. The Patriotic Nigras websits acts as an active community portal and bulletin board and the PN's wiki is very much the Second Life equivalent to the Anarchist's Cookbook / terrorist training camp all rolled into one. The Wiki offers anyone, n00bs (new users) included, complete weapons, techniques, scripts, and community discussions on methods the tools for griefing. How many government agencies are/aught to be paying attention to this? The mind boggles –– Biff just got his hands on a cannon.

Looking at The Patriotic Nigras' attacks they seem generally uncoordinated and lack the political ambitions, at least ones you might attribute to groups like The Weathermen, circa 1960 United States, which had overt revolutionary objectives. That said, elements within the group have a tendency to target the Lindens (employees of Lindin Labs, the creators of Second Life) and have taken responsibility for highly public griefing attacks on virtual representations of real-world entities, such as corporations and politicians –– including the virtual encampment of Democrat US Presidential hopeful, Jonathan Edwards in 2007. Here the group defaced virtual buildings with virtual poo, graffiti and generally inflammatory images, all the while their invading avatars waved BUSH'08 propaganda. The group claims the attack wasn't politically driven - more for the kicks - just because they could.
In reflection the event seems sort of a reverse wammy - deface the extreme Right wing conservative Republicans by posing as rabid versions of the same Republicans defacing a liberal Democratic candidate - perversely genius?

These kinds of attacks generally seem to be the exception rather then the rule. Looking through their material you'll notice that they are aggressively anti 'politically correct' with sardonic slurs peppered though out their online material and its this sardonic spirit which most embodies and emboldens their actions. Even the group's name tap-dances on racial sensitivities, and their attacks are flamboyantly posted on youtube.com as videos scored to catchy music. These films seem to be more gleefully irreverent then genuinely hateful and a quick search for them on youtube.com comes up with almost two hundred videos documenting attacks, pranks, and weapons demos. Clearly they like showing off their skillz. Is this asocial behaviour? Wide scope - possibly - but clearly they are more interested in impressing their own community then they are playing nice in yours (if you happen to be on the receiving end). So again its a perspective, from there view - they are actually community building activities.

In a system that is real (if only virtual) as well as ideological, as Second Life aims to be Utopian, the Patriotic Nigras could be understood to have taken Anarchy as their de facto ideological position (though collectively they might even object to this). Here hedonism becomes the motivating force, the engine of activity in place of real political will, as does competition and showmanship between the griefer communities –– of which The Patriotic Nigras are only one of many.

from Cnet - Images: Griefing in 'Second Life'

Dead-obviously an individual's actions can be a generative or destructive influence. But in terms of our understanding of these games as systems, I suspect griefing may be an expression of entropy and perhaps predetermined to appear, or inherent in these worlds. But while entropy and order are always at odds with each other, what is notable is that within the pranks and interference of the PN's activities one can tell that these people are seriously testing the limits of the system, its technology and our own social interactions in very particular, though perhaps unfocused ways.

In the end its the group's inventiveness and humor that, with a little surprise, keeps me from being completely dismissive –– This said, I've yet to fall victim to an attack, and perhaps my view would change. Is this too much of an invitation?

Entropy - wikipedia
Second Law of Thermodynamics - wikipedia
Grey Goo - esacpistmagazine.com - The day the Grid Disappeared
Cnet -Second Life griefers claim responsibility for Edwards vandalism
Cnet - Images: Griefing in 'Second Life'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotic_Nigras
http://www.thuglyfe.org/about
http://wiki.patrioticnigras.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.patrioticnigras.org/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search_query=patriotic+nigras

The intro photo was taken from CNet.com (link above) and is a snapshot of the vandalism of the Second Life campaign headquarters of US presidential hopeful Jonathan Edwards in 2007.

Almost Twenty Questions . . .

2010-02-11T12:47:00.005Z

This post comes out of a swath of questions that came up during our group discussions. They representing our general interests and many of these ideas have and will become enlarged on the site.

After much consideration, a lot of pushing around and a some casual editorial sight of hand, I've narrowed our original ideas into several broad groupings:
Observations & Phenomenological, Story Telling & Memory, Ethics, Gender & Body, Identity and Economics.

Observations & Phenomenology:
Chaotic (Anti)Social behaviour:  When the InWorld Studio was purchased it was unlocked and quickly invaded and became a chaotic mess in short order. What real world parallels could be drawn? Would it have stopped? or been forgotten about?
 
 A. Each participant of SL sees the world through their own viewer. My afternoon sunset is not the same as that of any other player, even if they are in the same virtual location. What does this do to subjectivity/Phenomenology? Shared experience?

B . This is clearly a choice of linden labs (the world's author)What does this say about them? How is this different or similar to other games etc?
(Each SL player/Participant is able to set their own 'environmental controls')
Corporations in SL - (also identity politics, and economics).  Why such strange behaviour with Mega Corps making monuments to themselves in Second Life? They have nothing really to offer in most cases, as the first life products don't make any sense in a virtual world, and in most cases (if not all) do not offer anything interesting or unique to users in a virtual environment. In many ways it seem more like territorial expansionism - and like what we might expect from government empires –– "We claim this swath of land for the country of Nissan cars!"
Has this behaviour subsided in recent years - if so why? 
Story Telling & Memory
Is there social 'oral history' or folk history/narrative in SL? If so what would/could it look like?  
Continuity of individual experience:  How does the idea of a 'Personal Narrative' translate in SL and dovetail into one's won identity and one's identification with/as an avatar. 
Wandering in SL the derive & the arm chair Flâneur:
The organisation of space in SL is very confused. Most often the landscape is fractured, and its hard to get any continuity to one's experience in exploring SL because you can teleport instantly from place to place. This has implications the users notions of place, memory and a narrative of self - in addition to the politics of multiple avatars. 
Flâneur - wikipedia 
Walter Benjamin - wikipedia
Ethics
Are normal real life moral codes compromised or redundant in the virtual world? 
The development of taboo within Second life.  In a world where 'anything is possible' what constitutes taboo - are there any taboos that are unique, or intrinsic to virtual worlds and game play - or do they all have direct correlations to real life belief systems and moral codes.
Original Sin - Can virtual world type games be compared to a human desire to create a utopic societies? If so can their failure or success be seen as a way to test our own capacities as humans? For example can they test our understanding of equality, consequences individual of choices etc.
Can the development of virtual worlds be compared to a skewed form of expansionism and empire? Compare against western expansion - as a cultural urge to seek a biblical Eden, ie post colonial theory, American 19th C. Manifest Destiny.
Loss of self  - Can one become a 'new person' in SL and do things that you would not normally do or be able to get away with in real life?
Gender & Body
These articles mention different topics like gender play, "cross dressing" online, transgender, the relation between real gender and virtual gender and ethics in relation to playing another gender. 
The Power of Real-World Gender Roles in Second Life 
On line discussion - https://blogs.secondlife.com 
Gender Verification in Virtual Worlds - - commented
Gender and Sexuality in Virtual Worlds - commented 
Exploring Gender Play in the Second Life Virtual World.pdf
Life Across Boundaries: Design, Identity, and Gender in Second Life .pdf 
Second identity in Second Life? Authorship/Identity/Body politics  
Who is the Author when its common to hear people speak of the avatar as 'other' - what is it when the 'other' is an element of self? –– Multiple personae 
Unnecessary reproduction of the 'real'. . . 
Second Life is a digital world - you don't have a body, yet we are represented by one which we can infinitely modify. - It is not a physical universe, however people "rent", buy and build all the trappings of the physical body & world –– Apartments with kitchen, bathrooms –– What's the drive / where is the satisfaction found in reproducing all these real world 'things'?  
What role does the avatar body play in the creation of identity in Second Life? 
What is the nature of the relationship between our dealings in "Second life" vs. "Real life"? 
How do we deal with virtual and real life both taking place online?
Economics:  Market & Trade in Second Life
What is money? What is a virtual currency?  Linden Labs have developed a currency in SL which can be exchanged with dollars, pounds or almost any other currency.
See also:
US Gold Standard - wikipedia 
Virtual world theft heads to real life court
A Virtual Bank With Real Woes - New York Times
Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality? 
Anshe Chung Becomes First Virtual World Millionaire  
UK panel urges real-life treatment for virtual cash
The Digital Divide - Those who cannot access / second class, Second Life citizens? 
Scarcity economics made it viable for gold digging 'shops' based in China to appear in World of Warcraft. Is there a SL equivalent? - if not (because of a lack of commerce 'scarcity'?) are commercial entities in SL using 'blue collar digital miners' or is there perhaps an absence of disadvantaged players ( as a real world ) economic class in SL? In these bizarre cases were people who might not ever had access to the 'game', because of economic disadvantage given a form of access, though clearly limited, where they would not have otherwise?

Second Life

2010-01-20T21:27:00.006Z

I was introduced to Second Life when we started working on this project during the spring 2009. I had read about Second Life and snapped up some bits of information about the virtual reality from mainstream media before we started. Logging on to Second Life and creating an avatar was a bit like and role-playing game. As I moved into the world I learned to find free stuff, got myself some hair some clothes and started making myself "a home".
I don't know why I found it necessary to make a home base, but it made sense at the time. As we continued working I learned to construct forms and build stuff, but what really got me going was when I learnt how to actually change and modify the landscape itself! I thought it would be incredibly useful and played around making mountains and valleys for several hours. However in the end I did tire of it. What was the point of it? Why did I want it to exist? Because of its visual effect? It just isn't enough to be able to see it and experience a visual effect when it has no implications on your physical being - you could just as well be looking at a photograph.
Second Life as a place to meet people is a bit like a 3D chatroom, though it allows for more signifiers and symbols to build your identity. It's quite interesting to see how people build up their avatars and how they talk about them. Some talk about them as if it is them in the avatar - their virtual self, others talk of their avatar in the third person as someone else, someone they have invented. To me I found it weirdly uninspiring to be in a world where almost anything goes and anything is expected, nothing surprises anyone, nothing matters, because it isn't real. So I struggle with the virtual and with understanding its meaning to people. I wasn't seduced by it. I was disappointed. I haven't quite figured out why yet.
As a venue to make art I think it could be incredibly exciting and incredibly difficult to gather an audience, and even more difficult to make something impressive within Second Life. Lots of the galleries in Second Life are like Real life galleries with images on walls within houses - I must admit I have trouble getting it. One of the really wonderful things though is that you can make things hover - no need for plinths or threads to keep you work off the ground. And its easier for the audience to see work from above. However, again, a lot of these things which would be impressive within Real World just looses me in Second Life - I am not impressed and not fascinated. The artworks, though to scale, has no impact on my body, and I find it hard to relate to the artwork through the screen.
But Second Life fulfills a function and is a meeting place and thriving economy. Obviously a lot of people use it and I am curious about them and fascinated about how they navigate their real life and second life.

Virtual or Real

2010-01-20T21:26:00.007Z

I find it hard to understand what people mean when they say a virtual world. Do they mean the internet, because so many things on the internet are real. Maybe not physical, but real in the world. When I move my money from one account to the other, that is real. When I chat to people online through msn it is real, even if we don't meet in the physical world and the names we use are not our own names, and the stories we tell about ourselves are lies, the meeting is real.

Within Second Life, there is huge potential to build up a life and a reality parallell to the one your body lives in. You can make friends and build a house. Is it real? I think yes - yet it is not physical - it is in a virtual world. So being virtual doesn't mean that something isn't real, maybe it means that something isn't physical? However the money you earn within Second Life you earn them in Linden Dollars, which you can change into US Dollars or for the matter British Pound Sterling if you prefer. The virtual money becomes real money.
People also meet eachother online and build relationships. There are examples of people meeting online in virtual worlds like Second Life, get to know each other, decide to meet, meet in the physical world and some times they even get married. The relationship moves from the virtual world into the physical world. The relationship has been real all the time?
Some articles I have read on the subject can be found here: http://delicious.com/thirdlife_chitchat/realworld

Gender Roles

2010-01-20T21:25:00.004Z

Gender and sex are two different things. Gender is social and sex is physical. Where I grew up, and many other places, there are two genders, male and female. Most will be brought up and socialised according to one or the other.
During the past decades there has been quite big changes to the female gender role, however one can question whether the same is the case for the male gender role. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen by the University of Oslo published a book called Modern Girls a couple of years ago, where she concluded that over the past three generations the gender roles are becoming wider and almost meeting in the middle, however the point farthest apart is further apart than it used to be. I think this is very positive as it increases the individuals options in terms of choosing a life of their own. Why are gender roles negative? Because they decrease each individuals opportunities and possibilities in making their own life.
One can question whether is makes sense to speak about sex in a virtual environment. You obviously have no physical body within the virtual environment, in part that is why we like it, so maybe it becomes a bit strange to talk of sex, which is physical gender, within a virtual environment? However when making a character in Second Life I have to choose a gender (sex) for my character very early on, and the alternatives are only male/female. In a world which should open up possibilities to humans, we are limited to being either male or female, a limitation which doesn't exists in the real world, physically we are all a little bit of both.
Trying to move this on. I have come across several discussions on whether or not you are obliged to say your real world sex in a virtual world community. I don't think so. You wouldn't have to tell your neighbours would you? Virtual worlds as an arena for playing with gender, identity and sexuality is both incredibly tempting and to me little bit frightening. To some it is very negative to find out that the person they have been speaking to is not what they thought they were. We make assumptions based on peoples gender and expect people to act accordingly. It is not necessarily immoral to break these assumptions and question why we have them. Some moral codes and boundaries must exist. At what stage would you be obliged to tell your gender to the person you are together with?
Within Second Life I note to myself that I wanted my body to look like it doesn't in the real world. I died my hair blond with a purple sheen, I became thinner and stronger, and was very worried about getting my boobs right. I play on stereotypes of what kind of female I would like to be.. not what kind of human I would want to be. Had I gotten a male body I suspect I would have been less concerned with how he looked, because he was never going to be a representation of me or a perfect version of me. even in Second Life a lot of the notions of how a woman "should" look is perfected by the avatars, or rather, the people behind the avatars.
Second Life offers opportunities to explore and play with gender, though set within the frame of male/female. The frame is easier to manipulate (the look of your body, your clothes etc) through different signifiers of identity. A conflict can arise when you are another gender in Second Life, than what you are in Real Life. Should one need to tell people about ones real gender? Does real gender has any significance in the relationships that are built within Second Life? Are there other rules in Second Life? After the ethical questions are answered, what is gender, what does it mean to you to be a male/female, would you change your gender in second life, would it make you behave differently?
Some of the articles I have read on the subject are posted on http://delicious.com/thirdlife_chitchat/gender

Second Identity in Second Life?

2010-01-20T21:24:00.004Z

How does the creation of a "new identity" in Second Life relate to your "real life" identity? What kind of experiments do we do with our avatars. Do we move the borders, if yes, does moving the borders in Second Life make it easier to transgress the same borders in Real Life?
In Second Life you don't have a body - it is not a physical universe. You can change and manipulate the avatar you rent at will and buy all the surroundings of your avatar. You rent your avatar, what in real world would be the core of your identity, and you own all the accessories, the clothes, the hair, the house etc. What role does the (real life) body play in the creation of an avatar and ultimately of an identity in Second Life?
The users talk of their avatars in different ways. Some talk of them as the virtual version of them, and insist it is them. Some insist the avat is another person, although with many communal traits, as if they have authored a personae. What is the difference between the two? They both give an edited version of themselves, as we also do when we present ourselves to our friends and family. Can we compare how the users talk of their avatars with how authors talk of the main character in a book they write?

In a world without consequences

2010-01-18T21:40:00.013Z

It wasn’t until the end of 2008 that the idea of using Second Life (SL) as an alternative space for producing, exhibiting and experiencing art ever crossed my mind. Despite having heard about SL in passing, as a refuge for internet geeks and lonely souls alike, I had never thought it relevant to venture into this parallel universe myself.

It was only when Paul Cosgrove told me about GSA’s SL island that I began to consider it a possibility, and an urgent one at that. He explained his vision for the island as an ‘alternative studio’, a place where students could try out elaborate three-dimensional ideas without space restrictions or material costs. It could operate as a ‘virtual studio’ where health and safety is no longer an issue and no holds are barred.

I promptly decided to set aside some time to create my own avatar and to familiarise myself with this new world of possibilities. Rather than an interest in replicating physical objects, my curiosity was tweaked by the wider ethical structure of a virtual world such as SL and implications this may have on the avatar behaviour and responsibility.

As far as I am aware, SL is a place where you cannot die and certainly cannot be physically hurt. You encounter little or no policing, law or order. Sat in the safety of your desk chair, you can enter a world where you have little worry about the consequences of your actions. My question was, once liberated from the constraints of mortality, does anything go?

Inspired by the release of The Baader Meinhof Complex, I began to think about the notion of ‘terrorism’ in this new virtual world. Without a fear of pain or death, ‘terror’ as we know it, ceases to exist. There is a pivotal moment in the film where you witness Ulrike Meinhof’s decision to choose the renegade path. The scene is constructed in such a way so as the audience grasps the consequences of either choice; to stay put in her ‘normal’ family life or to go on the run with the gang of fellow ideologues.

When creating my avatar in SL, I drew some (somewhat frivolous) parallels to this moment in Meinhof’s life. I was choosing a new life for myself – I could choose the ‘wrong’ path, without having to face any of the terrifying consequences that she did. So, after grappling with the technicalities of actually making my avatar, I created Ulrike Oller – my virtual homage to Meinhof.

Initially I had planned to create my own virtual terrorist faction (SLAF as it was to be known). With a group of artists or other interested people, we would start regular ‘in world’ meetings in order to discuss ideas relating the notion of ‘virtual terror’, and to plan activities, events, missions of attacks.

I quickly discovered however that this exercise was self-defeating. The very conditions which allowed for such an organisation to openly exist – a lack of moral, civil or legal boundaries – were simultaneously what caused it to have no reason to exist. SLAF did not have a cause to fight for. It existed solely because it could and not because it saw a great injustice which it hoped to put right. The problem with a ‘free world’ is that is creates a motivational deficit – there is no pressing need to change the status quo.

After reaching this conclusion, I decided to research whether there had been any other instances of terrorism in SL. I found a few interesting references. An article published in The Times in 2007 exclaims ‘Virtual jihad hits Second Life’, by scaremongering about the danger of jihadist groups using the virtual space to meet and plan ‘real world’ attacks. As though there are not many more subtle and covert ways of communicating?! The same piece also makes reference to the ‘Second Life Liberation Army’ a virtually ‘armed’ faction which has found political cause for concern with in SL – fighting for the liberation of avatars from what it sees as the tyrannical rule of Linden Labs (SL’s creators).

Whatever the case, it now seems clear to me that the only logical way of conducting a meaningful attack on Linden Labs, or whatever else is your cause for concern within SL, is by using techniques akin to computer hacking. By creating a scripted intervention that affects the very fabric of the virtual society. Alas, for someone who has only just about grasped the basics of walking in a straight line, this seems a far off and remote possibility and something I will be forced to leave up to those who really care.

References:
Second Life’s in-world terrorism and the struggle for digital rights

Virtual jihad hits Second Life website

Second Life Liberation Army

Second Life Left Unity