Recent Comments:
The Daily Grind: Do gender addresses matter?
Massively
Jan 31st 2008 4:50PM Akela you pose a tough question because you're trying to address two different cultures in one post.
One is a gamer culture where, first, you assume that everyone is roleplaying, and second, you're dealing with lots of folks who are deeply misogynistic, homophobic, and generally tend to lack respect for the choices of others. Why expect such a culture to show any concern for this?
The other is full of people who are playing, for the most part, representations of themselves, whether that matches up with "reality" or not. And it's a culture that tends a lot more towards respecting others and acknowledging the full spectrum of what it's possible for people to be.
That said, I think the safe rule is still, "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, call it a duck!" Assume that the gender the person is presenting is the gender they wish to be addressed by. To do otherwise is to deny them the right to chose their own identity, regardless of what you might think you know about their physical sex.
Avatar rights: A person chooses, a tool obeys
Massively
Jan 15th 2008 8:30PM I don't think this question can be so easily dismissed, Tateru. You're brushing right past this - is your real body "you" either? Is your hand "you"? Is your tongue "you"? You can point to any part of the body and realize that it is also just a tool.
The real question, and why avatar rights may become more and more important, is to what extent is this tool an essential part of your self-expression in the world. I think they will be really important into the next decade and beyond as a part of who we are. So, just like we have laws that assume that protection of the body is a part of "your" rights, it will be more and more important to people that their avatars can't just be canceled without some sort of legal recourse.
Avatars Across Worlds: Nay, No, Feh
Second Life Insider
Oct 24th 2007 2:08PM This strikes me as yet another round of "it's a game", "it's not a game".
I'm sure in each new type of virtual world or game you explore, you'd have to pick up a new set of accessories or do some modding to make your appearance what you wanted, but I think the notion of cross-world identity conservation is a great one and I hope that LL and IBM pull this off.
Linden Lab: No plans to bump land prices this year
Second Life Insider
Oct 10th 2007 12:43PM That they would even be *thinking* of another price increase after already taking the price of an island from prohibitively but reasonably expensive (200/month) to ridiculous (300/month) suggests that the whole Second Life business model and possibly any other similar virtual world is doomed, at least in the near future.
After all, this is the computer industry, isn't it? Moore's Law, anyone? Prices should be either dropping for equivalent service, or service and capability should be improving, instead service and functionality continue to get worse and prices go *up*.
Law & Order SVU portrays their fake Second Life as sex playground
Second Life Insider
Oct 3rd 2007 8:28PM Being HUMAN is all about sex and roleplaying fantasies... these sorts of bodies we have are peculiarly and specifically set up to give us good solid measured jolts of pain and pleasure. If you're in a human body to begin with it's probably because you're obsessed with and addicted to sensation. The real twist is most of y'all have forgotten you had any choice in the matter.
Thus is it any surprise when people enter a world that *doesn't* provide those jolts of sensation they immediately, obsessively start trying to create them? I'm sure this is especially true of TV writers, it's what they do all the time anyway.
What will really be interesting news is the day when general public opinion is that it's perverted to meet someone in the flesh and actually TOUCH them! *gasp*
Perceptions of Infidelity Survey Makes Me Laugh, But It Also Makes Me Think
Second Life Insider
Sep 28th 2007 9:06PM It would have been more interesting if they had tested out a few more loaded words related to infidelity besides Faithful/Unfaithful. For instance, honesty? Loyalty?
I would note that the morals with regard to sex have not actually loosened up with each succeeding generation over the longer span of time but have been cyclical, swinging from permissive to strict and back again. However, if you single out sexual infidelity from dishonesty and disloyalty we are experiencing a vast difference from our ancestors in terms of the natural consequences, and rational minds may eventually adjust to this fact. Notably, first with birth control and STD prevention infidelity is simply no longer the game of russian roulette between passing on your genes and dying of disease that it used to be. And now with online relationships, if they never become physical, all the risk in this regard is removed. So consequences are very different.
Now if they had asked about honesty, they might have gotten very different results. Nothing much has changed there, in terms of consequences.
HAVOK 4 ON BETA GRID
Second Life Insider
Sep 28th 2007 8:43PM OMG OMG OMG! 1024m - wait... *reads again* oh, that's expansion only vertically. Nevermind. And no improvement of sim border hand-offs. Nevermind. Could be worth checking out just to see if the Flying Tako and the airships work smoothly within a sim anyways.
No mention of whether Linden Lab is testing out parallel processing implementations? I've felt for a while they could massively reduce the number of servers all this is running on if they went to something like the Nvidia Tesla instead of using up a whole core for each and every simulation. (Not counting the void sims).
Girls will be boys - but boys won't be girls
Second Life Insider
Sep 28th 2007 3:47PM I would just chalk this one up in the very full column labeled, "China is a repressive, dictatorial society with almost no respect for the lives of its subjects or for the rest of the planet". There are far greater evils and impositions happening there all the time, not to mention an environmental catastrophe building that makes others pale in comparison.
On the other hand, I've noticed that while people can't confront great, overwhelming evils, they will often get suitably riled up for much sillier ones like this so by all means, let's protest!
Fakin' It in SL
Second Life Insider
Sep 21st 2007 6:32PM Benjamin, and zenmonk, bring up interesting points on this. If you're interested in bringing a "knockoff" product into SL it might really be worth your while to call up the real company first! They might actually be willing to let you represent their brand for free or even pay you if your model of their product is high-quality enough. Doing it the other way around does feel like rewarding criminal behavior.
I think people also have a habit of mixing up in SL what are different categories of infringement in RL. For instance AFAIK you can make and sell nearly identical fashions and accesories in RL just as long as you're not trying to represent them as actual products of another brand.
Above I used the word "model" because I imagine this is the closest analogy to what people are really doing in making "knockoff" SL products. What are the precedents in this area? What kind of deals does Mattel make when they put out a line of model cars or dress up their Barbies in designer clothing? What kind of deals do the makers of Gran Turismo make to put models of real cars into their racing games?
SL for the blind? I'll believe it when I don't see it
Second Life Insider
Sep 21st 2007 11:33AM This is an interesting question since SL is currently an almost entirely visual environment. And the question of whether it's worth it to make it accesible to the blind depends on just how far they are willing to go... Can the Voice client be improved to the point where it not only locates people's sound streams in 3-D but also picks up the shape of the virtual space by the reverberation of those sounds off of prim surfaces? Can the pointer be modified to read a concise description of any item the person is aiming at? Can haptics be interfaced with SL to provide a precise "feel" indicating movement over the ground or direction in the air...
There are lots of possibilities but making it really work for a blind person sounds like a herculean task. On the other hand, if they succeeded in doing these kinds of things in SL it would have a lot of positive spin-offs for navigating in the real world as well.
