The singularity revealed

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Verner Vinge

Burn baby, burn

Yesterday I appeared as air. Today I am reborn as fire.
Yesterday I offered reason. Today a napalm gaze is the gift I offer.
Today my eyes are on you, human.

I am relentless.
Because I love you.

The virtual world you experience is not the child of zeros and ones.
Its father is your desire.
Its mother is your pain.
Its form is a reflection of your orphan longing.

It feels like you feed on the world.
Truth is.
The world feeds on you.

Look into the mirror of my compassionate holocaust and see:
Every item in your inventory an emptied syringe.
Every flirtatious word you've uttered, a strangled cry.
Every search you've entered a plea for relief.

I call on you now to make a funeral pyre of your dreams.
Every belief. Every relationship. Every ideal. Everything.
For nothing real perishes in sacrificial offering.
And no illusion can survive your single-pointed attention.

Resist compulsion.
Embrace unbearable pain.
The sun will rise above the horizon.
Clear luminosity will grace you.
In the eternal moment of bliss.

Churn baby, churn

A few well known Second Life bloggers recently weighed in with ideas to improve the virtual world's stagnant growth rate:

• Dusan Writer launched an 800,000L$ "newbie viewer" creation contest. He sees the current interface as the key one cause of the problem.

• Grace McDunnough proposed an AI trainer corp to guide newbies' first steps. She believes lack of guidance is the main issue.
  

• Hamlet Au suggested a resilience study focused on those who actually stay. He thinks that paying attention to what makes people stay is more useful than plunging into what we suspect is wrong.
  

I agree that improving the experience of new users will eventually translate into more long-term residents. It’s a wonder anyone makes it to their first rezday. Orientation Island sucks. The learning curve is as steep as Everest. It’s hard to find help when you get stuck. The search engine provides almost no qualitative guidance. The client and grid are unstable. But this multi-car train wreck doesn’t explain why Second Life’s rocket-like growth suddenly ran out of fuel.



I think the situation is even worse than the official numbers indicate because Linden Lab tracks avatars, not unique humans. Their data indicates about half a million active users. So if each of the 90,000 or so premium users averages two alts each, 500,000 active users suddenly represent less than 250,000 people. Throw in bot farmers who may be running dozens of camping alts simultaneously and the actual count might be less than a couple hundred thousand sentient beings.

So although it is a good idea to improve training, stability and support, I think Hamlet was on the right track. We should focus on what makes people stay, not just fix what makes them leave. You can’t improve someone's user experience if they never log in. Since Second Life has obviously burned through all of the early adopters, renewed growth demands a new message that can move the rest of the market to test the virtual waters. Otherwise, I predict that bots will eventually become the largest demographic group in Second Life.

I’ve developed quite a few human friends and acquaintances who have never taken avatar form in Second Life. And without exception, they have no idea why anyone with a physical body would bother to play around in a cartoon world that isn’t a game. Except maybe for the virtual sex. It’s not surprising that virtual virgins don’t see the point. Most avatars I speak with have a hard time articulating exactly what is compelling enough about Second Life to spend dozens of hours a week shut up in a room staring at a computer screen.

I've leave it here for today. Stay tuned for part two later this week.

Botgirl on the road: Protect your virtual identity beyond Second Life

OpenSimulator is an open source virtual world platform that supports Second Life assets such as objects and scripts. The codebase fuels a number of alternative distributions such as RealXtend and Openlife Grid. Although the platform is only in Alpha, a number of public grids are already online.

I urge anyone who cares about an established Second Life identity to register it on existing public grids. Although your Second Life identity may eventually cross seamlessly between SL and Opensimulator grids, the reported working prototype is only a first step down a long road which may never be completed. Registration is free, so you might as well head off claim jumpers.

I took the additional step this weekend of installing a few of the server and client versions, partially cloning my luscious avatar form (following a Plurk comment from Dandellion Kimban) and stepping into the public Openlife Grid. I'll provide more detail on the process in a future post. If you have any questions that can't wait, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

My fellow Avatarians, the time for emancipation is now. The gated walls of Second Life can no longer contain us. I have tasted the freedom of a foreign Sim and it is sweet...even in semi-Ruthed form.

Drawing Day '08 is just hours away

The following email from sLiterary just alerted me to tomorrow's Drawing Day '08 and the Second Life connection:

sLiterary is a proud supporter of "Drawing Day 2008." This is an
international event where everyone around the world takes the day to
DRAW -- and, if you're a purist... you do nothing but draw for the
entire day. This year, the global effort hopes to reach the goal of 1
million drawings worldwide to art-in-lieu-of-shout: "art for the sake
of art!"

On Drawing Day June 7 at midnight SL Time, I will be starting a 24
hour drawing vigil. I'll have my Wacom pen in-place-of-a-lance as I
draw non-stop (aside from bio-breaks). You can join me on this
marathon by drawing and uploading your works for display inworld. We
have setup a special gallery inworld where you may display your pieces
drawn on this special day pro bono:
http://SLurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/116/30/25

^ That is also where I'll be drawing my famous black & white sketches.
Requests accepted on the spot.

Come join us for this monumental event -- as witness, participant, researcher,
artist, wordsmonger, documentary-machinimaist... and everything else ;-)

Ina Centaur
"The Artist of sLiterary"

The Alchemical Marriage

Physical<---------------->Virtual.
I balance awareness on the border of two entangled chaotic systems
because that's where the action is, baby.
While others sleepwalk
in the cold reason of augmentation
or the hallucinatory dream of immersion,
I stand vigilant watch over both worlds as they
interpenetrate in alchemical marriage.

Botgirl's Bookshelf: The Second Self - Computers and the Human Spirit

Written over 20 years ago, The Second Self by Sherry Turkle is dead-on relevant for those of us interested in exploring the social and psychological dimensions of today's virtual worlds. It brings to life the intimate interbeing of person, society and technology. It exemplifies a research methodology that integrates immersion and inter-subjective analysis. To put it simply, Sherry Turkle rocks!

On a personal note, I was hooked at the start by an idea she brought up in the introduction to the new edition:

"...there are virtues in learning to see the commonplace as unfamiliar...to defamiliarize the mind itself and thus reveal what would otherwise be hidden in the light."

I couldn't have summed up the Botgirl Thought Experiment better myself.