Monday, July 14, 2008--Thoughts and Notes from I, Avatar by Mark Stephen Meadows

 

For the time being, I have an official stance on the book--I like it.  At first, I wasn't so sure.  I couldn't figure out if it was truly a commentary/phenomenology of what it means to live through an avatar, or just one person's ego-trip.  But Meadows rescues himself somewhere around the mid-way point, pulling it from a self-obsessed virtual memoir into a study on the larger issue of living as virtual humans in virtual worlds--and what it means for the real (physical) world. 

 

The following are some of the sections I tabbed from the book, for future reference...

 

p.13--"An avatar is a literary device.  It's a protagonist that is used for interactive narratives."

 

p.14--..."Maxis, the producers of [The Sims], paid for research to find out why it sold mor ethan 25 million units.  The results broke users into eight categories.  They found that half of the players were female (a first in a video game) and they found out that despite the even division of gender, people fell evenly into four categories...

• The Conformers: First were the people that played the game as it was intended to be played, following the rules and working to generate healthy, happy Sims.
• The Death Dealers: Second group were the people that did just the opposite and killed everyone off or set fires or tried to kill their Sims.
• The Reality Television Viewers: Third were the people who were interested in teh strife and drama among the characters--watching the game more than interacting.
• The Doll Housers: Fourth were the materialists who collected furnishings."

 

p.25--"Second Life offers something the others do not: the ability for users to create their own narratives from the ground up.  By virtue of being metaphor-free...it allows us to see a rawer psychology regarding what drives avatars."

 

p.50--"In 1996 Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, two Stanford University professors, wrote a book called The Media Equation.  The media equation, simply put, is an equals sign: Media experiences equal real-life experiences. They argued that this is true not just for interactive media, but for all media....our media has out-evolved our brains, and so fiction registers, on a subconscious level, as fact."

 

p.51--"Back in the 1960s, Stanley Milgrom, at Yale, conducted a series of tests on authority and murder.  In 2006, a collection of researchers in Europe imported Milgrom's experiments into virtual worlds.  At the Department of Computer Science, University College London, researchers used avatar actors to induce a broad range of responses in human subjects.  By monitoring the speed and variability of heart rate, skin conductance responses, and the speed and tone of verbal responses, they concluded that avatars can substitute for real humans when studying responses in humans."

 

p.66--"An avatar has a different psychographic than its human driver; an avatar has different interests, because the avatar has different needs.  Avatars don't use the same media and they don't watch the same television shows. People behave differently as their avatar and have different desires, different wants, and generally express a different persona."

 

p.70--"Avatars are affecting families. Family-law experts are seeing an increasing number of marriages dissolve over virtual infidelity. Officially, legally, online flings don't count as adultery until they cross over into the real world, but these virtual romps are being cited as grounds for divorce."

 

p.82--"It's a potentially dangerous decision, and many arguments warn against, shall we say, going native. Avatars present a danger of isolation from not only the real world, but from ourselves. If an avatar is used too much, it can remove us from our real-world society. We lose touch with reality."

 

p.82--"When we make an avatar, we invent a personality. In some cases, it may be the same personality, or a similar one, that we spend most of our days being. But often the alternative personality--the personality of the avatar--can become quite powerful. Part of the danger lies in how we control our avatar and how our avatar controls us. As people become more involved in the roles and rules of their avatar, they can also lose control of their alternative personality they have invented for that system. The alternative personality can become predominant and begin to take over the primary, daily one. This is the situation that most concerns parents."

 

Be back later with more...

 

 

 

 

Monday, July 7, 2008--More Notes from the Making of Second Life book

 

Yeah, I know.  I was supposed to enter this "the next day," but you know how that goes.  At least I've got my trusty confetti-esque Post-it flags throughout the book.  I could never remember all this stuff without them.

 

pp.132-133--The Copy Revolt.  Au writes of the boycott of many of the SL residents due to Linden Lab's original stance on the use of the CopyBot program.  Eventually, Linden was forced to reverse its decision and outlaw the CopyBots.

 

p.136--"In May of 2004, shortly after Linden Lab had instituted their new land and IP rights policies, Philip Rosedale told technology reporter Daniel Terdiman an extraordinary thing: 'I'm not building a game,' he announced. 'I'm building a new country.'  The statement has dogged him since, for being either unsupportable hyperbole or a goal that was genuine in some substantial way."

 

p.136--"(Toward the end of 2006, the Linden team estimated that the content already existing in-world would have required, had it been done professionally, a 7,700-person development staff at a burn rate of $800 million a year.)"

 

p.137--"Looking over the retention rates, Rosedale once remarked, 'If they stay more than four hours, they stay forever.'"

 

pp.142-143--"It's difficult not to see a parallel to the early years of the United States and its first century encapsulated in the space of a year.  In Second Life's first few months, the world was an unsettled country, inhabited by nomadic, close-knit communities.  When discovered by the public, the natives clashed with subsequent waves of frontiersmen, many of them aggressive and territorial, and in that struggle, communal utopia gave way to a property-centric, libertarian society.  As that society took shape, disenchantment with taxation in particular and a lack of ownership in general led to open revolt.  This, in turn, pushed the company to redesign the social contract with a kind of Declaration of (intellectual property) Independence and coin an official currency that had a universal market value within its borders and outside its territory...."

 

p.166--Au writes of the "metaverse big three" companies who first set up shop in SL--Rivers Run Red, The Electric Sheep Company, and Millions of Us.

 

p.167--"In early 2007, Tristan Louis, a programmer with financial giant HSBC, crunched the in-world economic numbers published by Linden and came back with the astounding results that Residents were spending, on average, the U.S. dollar equivalent of $50 to $60 in Linden Dollars per week."

 

p.168--"The early results from Komjuniti were not encouraging: 72 percent of their two hundred respondents said they were disappointed with real-world company activities in Second Life; just over 40 percent considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last; while fully a third weren't even aware the companies were there to begin with."

 

p.172--"In 2003, Professor Ann Schlosser from the University of Washington ran a fascinating study in which she described the features of a digital camera to two subject groups through two media channels: on the one hand, static images or video, and on the other, an interactive, virtual-world simulation of the camera.  By and large, the participants who learned about the camera virtually retained far more memory of its features, and a much greater interest in purchasing it."

 

p.173--Au writes of Rivers Run Red's SL recreation of the film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the Walt Disney Corporation.

 

p.177--"Despite the ability to easily purchase Linden Dollars with cash and credit, the currency retains an ethereal quality; they're seen as having special value over and above their real-world worth. With that in mind, it's important not to discount the value of Linden Dollar handouts and prizes as a way of insuring attention."

 

p.178--"'Well,' [Jenna Fairplay] explains,'I go by Maslow's Hierarchy.' In Abraham Maslow's model, human need is shaped like Jenna's pyramid nightclub, with the base representing the fundamental requirements for survival; the second layer, safety and security; and the pyramid's apex, self-actualization."

 

pp.183-185--Au writes of the SL entry of the Front National movement, an ultra-conservative party in France, and the subsequent uproar that they're SL setup caused.

 

p.185--"So, while America slept, the battle against extremism raged on thus in Europe. (And in a final irony, much of this went on during Martin Luther King Jr. day, which Linden Lab celebrated by literally inserting a digitized image of the reverend's face in Second Life's sun, inviting you to wonder what he'd make of this racially charged fracas in a world he never could have imagined.)"

 

p.188--"...Linden Lab finally reversed its hands-off policy in early June 2007 and explicitly forbade sexual age play everywhere in-world."

 

p.190--Au writes of his in-world interview with Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and author of Not a Suicide Pact.  Posner suspects that terrorists may be using SL or other software such as SL for training purposes, and also the laundering of money through Linden Dollar exchanges.  He theorizes that it might someday be possible to have undercover FBI agents in Second Life, attempting to infiltrate such crimes.

 

p.191--"A June 2007 Linden database report indicated that the most active SL users by country were based not in the United States or the European Union but...the Cayman Islands."

 

p.194--"When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 loomed, a cermony was planned around the memorial someone had built, a scale model of the World Trade Center in lit crystal.  But rumors were spreading that someone was planning to crash the service--by slamming a jet plane into the towers.  Which is why, on that day in September, the Twin Tower memorial was guarded on all sides by the Green Lantern Core."

 

p.197--"In early 2007, nearly four years after Second Life began, Linden Lab announced that the company would finally build voice software into its architecture."

 

pp.198-199--"In early 2004, a Boston mental health nonprofit called BrainTalk Communities opened up Brigadoon, a private Second Life island, as a secluded virtual therapy retreat. Using avatars as instructional reference, the project aimed to teach people with Asperger's to learn the social rules of personal space, person-to-person communication, and all the other real-world interactions that demand a tango of unwritten cures and gestures that most of us subconsiously absorb by adulthood..."

 

p.202--Au anecdotally estimates that 5 to 15 percent of the active population in-world have an infirmity or condition that keeps them from being as active in their real world lives.

 

pp.202-203--Au discusses Wilde Cunningham, an avatar actually made up of nine individuals in a care center in Massachusetts.  Their caregiver acts as an intermediary for them to access and interact in-world.

 

pp.208-212--Au writes about the Virtual Hallucinations building sponsored by UC Davis' Medical department.  It basically tries to simulate the schizophrenic mind--"At minimum, its effectiveness as an educational tool was established by a short survey wating for visitors at the hospital exit.  Nearly 70 percent of those who took it said the simulation had improved their understanding of the illness."

 

p.215--"In 2005, a group of Second Life's most dedicated residents launched the first real-world community convention in downtown New York, and Philip Rosedale gave the keynote speech."

 

p.218--"By May 2007, nearly ninety thousand residents were paying Linden for land, nearly 300,000 were using Linden Dollars, and the company itself was turning a profit."

 

p.224--"According to a 2007 projection from Merrill Lynch, Nintendo's console [Wii] will be owned by some one in three U.S. households by 2011, and still greater numbers in Japan."  This stat was mentioned in relation to the possibility that Second Life will eventually be integrated into Wii technology or vice versa.

 

p.225--"By early 2007 (according to Linden Lab's publicly released data), the SL population lost its status as an American-dominated world, internationalizing to such a high degree that U.S. citizens, at least 80 percent of the residents in the early years, fell to only 30 percent of the total polity."

 

pp.232-233--Au's interview with Rosedale in which the Linden boss theorizes that, someday, perhaps, SL could be used to actually upload people (consciousness) so that people could live on after dead as their avatars.

 

p.239--"In July 2007, with little warning, Linden Lab suddenly announced that gambling for Linden Dollars would no longer be permitted; within days, casinos were shuttered throughout the world (though Reuters' Second Life bureau reported that many of them simply went underground, accessible only by word of mouth)."

 

p.240--"A month before that, in May 2007, Linden Lab announced a plan to introduce a third-party identity verification system so residents could independently validate their age, real name, and other crucial real-life details to other users."  This was mainly done as a way to reassure those companies doing business through SL.

 

p.242--The American Bar Association announced that they would have a stake/committee in SL (according to a September 2007 announcement).

 

p.242--"In August [2007], USA Today reported that three hundred universities were using SL as a teaching platform, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Duke, Polytechnic, the University of Southern California, University of Edinburgh, UT-Austin, Vassar, and Virginia Tech."

 

p.244--"By the end of 2007, there were at least seventeen systems launched, reported, or announced, all of which were positioned as user-created worlds/platforms or cited Second Life as an inspiration."

 

p.245--"In August of 2007, terrorism expert Dr. Rohan Gunaratna...began reporting to the mainstream press that Al Qaeda terrorist elements were secretly using SL as a planning platform."

 

p.246--Au lists the top ten corporate sites in SL (as of September 10, 2007)

• The Pond (owned by Australian telecom Telstra)
• IBM
• The L Word
• Pontiac
• Greenies
• The Weather Channel
• Nissan
• Virtual Holland
• Playboy
• ABC Island (Australian Broadcast Company)

 

p.247--"In the summer of 2007, a fifteen-year-old-member of Teen Second Life, driven by little more than 'boredom, wanting to talk to people,' padded over to her Mac and changed Second Life forever.  Since she couldn't access SL from her school, she began playing with SL's open source code, and very shortly launched AjaxLife, a way of accessing selected Second Life functions via the Web, including Instant Message/Chat, Map, and Teleport."

 

 

 

 

Friday, July 4, 2008--Finishing up Au's Making of Second Life book

 

I don't know, I think its quite fitting that I finished up Au's book on Independence Day, considering Second Life, on paper, is trying to recreate democracy virtually.  The book shows just how tricky the journey has been--not that the trip for our real world country has been that easy either.

 

But enough of that--here's the points that I flagged (and there are a LOT of them--the book looks like its sprouting confetti).

 

• p. 14--I can't help but read into Au's description of Rosedale that he genuinely likes the man.  Au describes Rosedale as "tall and lanky, with a triathelete's build and the cheeky, boyish good looks usually associated with Hollywood teen idols." 
• p. 20--The Linden team abadoned an earlier project to concentrate on this virtual "thing" they'd just begun to create--"even though it was, at that point, just an untrammeled ocean that moved between two servers. (In the beginning, all was without form and void.)"
• p.27--The flying idea for avatars came out of sheer necessity--"'We didn't want to do the animations for climbing,' explains Meadows, 'It was all [about] cutting corners, getting things up fast.'"
• p.28--"As a practical matter, streaqming meant Linden Lab could create a program that required little memory to install--about 25 megabytes, roughly the size of a Web browser. (For this reason, too, the Lindens colloquially refer to their software as a 'viewer,' since it was basically a 3-D browser.)"
• p.28--"...the Lindens' world was a single network of servers, where each server represented a sixteen-acre cube of 'reality,' with all servers geographically linked togehter so avatars could seamlessly move from one region to another."
• p.29--"Linden's streaming architecture made anotehr feature possible:  dynamic, collaborative creation.  This was a realization of Rosedale's vision of an avatar in the darkness with a tool belt.  Onscreen, it's portrayed as a kind of magic: your avatar stretches out a hand, rays of light trail out of your fingertips, and a wooden sphere, cube, or other basic building block (called a "prim," for "primative") emerges from the world with a rumble."
• p.32--First SL objects built by the public--"Somehow overnight, Steller had created not just a thatched-roof home, but a narrative, and a game.  The object, she announced in a sign she'd left at the beanstalk's base, was to get to the top--not by flying, but by hopping from leaf to leaf.  At the top, Steller had created a Cloud 9, her miniature version of heaven for those with the patience and ability to make it there."
• p.55--Linden folks realized that if they wanted their invention to be like the real world, "they had to compress two million years of human evolution into about five."
• p.57--Linden workers were surprised at citizen choices in their new world.  "Where one might expect airborne societies of people frolicking in the clouds, the overwhelming majority of Residents insist on remaining earthbound for most of their time."..."'They immediately started building--homes!' And not even fantastic, otherworldly homes, but realistic houses for the most part, fully appointed McMansions with utilities of no conceivable necessity....But that kind of artificial realism was the preference of the majority (and still is)."
• p.59--Au discusses the idea of ratings that SL had put into effect.  "Neg rates" became a type of virtual muggings, with mobs of avatars selecting one virtual victim and "gang rating" them with negative ratings points.  
• p.60--In the same vein, avatars having high ratings in their profiles were often considered "ratings whores," having exchanged "something" in order to get the positive ratings.
• p.61--Au discusses the SL phenomenon of landowners actually paying avatars to come to their property and sit.  The idea is that, the more avatars who sit, the more green dots show up on the map, drawing even more people to visit.
• p.63--The "green dot effect"--clumps of dots on the map draw even more people to visit.
• p.74--"By anecdotal evidence, some 70 to 80 percent of the Resident population stay within the human register."
• p.75--"By one estimate in mid-2007 (derived by the number of avatar costumes sold at retail), furries comprised some 6 percent of SL's active community but include some of the most recognized and talented content creators."
• p.79--"(Unsurprisingly, one of the most common ethical dilemmas in Second Life is whether a gender cross-dresser should feel obligated to reveal his or her real-life sex to a virtual world romantic partner--and if so, when.)"
• p.83--"The Internet is being repopulated by alternate identities.  Consider the Gartner Consultancy's projection of 80 percetn active Net users in an online world (and by definition, with an avatar) by 2011..."
• pp.95-96--"Second Life was the first online world where I interacted with female avatars that seemed to cross the Uncanny Valley, the term robotics engineers and computer graphics animators use to describe a simulated human that looks real, but somehow, creepily off.  Not so in this world.  Here, the women were distinct from the generic female avatars of fantasy games; they seemed distinctive enough to have, for lack of a better word, soul."
• p.104--"Second Life was born in a time of war, so it's not surprising that armed conflict would be part of its early days.  But to fully understand the concept of the magic circle, an expression attributed to Dutch culture theorist Johan Huizinga.  It is the self-contained world that people step into when they play games, taking on roles...and engaging in behavior...that would be antisocial or impossible or both, outside its boundaries."
• pp.122-124--Au discusses the Americana Tax Revolt that occurred in the Summer of 2003.  It was Second Life's version of the Boston Tea Party.  Because of the way SL was structured at the time, avatars were allowed a specific amount of "space" to create--if they went over their limit, they'd be fined Linden$.  Upon building the Americana area, the builders went over their allotted space and were continually fined, resulting in a revolt against Linden's system and piles of virtual tea crates clogging up many SL locations.

 

 

I'll have to post my remaining notes tomorrow (hand cramp--it happens).