Some call Second Life home. Others call it a market.

I attended a text chat presentation today with the catchy title: "Are people in virtual worlds normal?" It was given by Pebbles Hannya (aka Mary Ellen Gordon, PhD), managing director of Market Truths. She discussed her company's recent Psychographic Segments and Media Consumption report.

The bottom line (which is what counts, right?) was that Second Life participants fit nicely into some of the same segments that normal people are grouped within. Ideally, marketers won't have to reinvent the wheel to design advertising that appeals to us avatars. As usual, I have a few thoughts on the fringes of the main question. I'll share two for now:

• The environment and culture of Second Life is so unique that I doubt it makes sense to port meatspace marketing. The first wave of corporate marketers are pulling out because the tried and true methods don't cut it.
  

• Second Life is so data-rich that marketing can be almost completely personalized. I recently saw a poster that pulls the image from a nearby avatar's profile and displays it. No good reason that it couldn't pull other info from the profile, picks, etc. and create a completely customized message.

For the low, low price of $25,000 Lindens, you can purchase the complete report. Maybe I should make a career move?

The Cult of Wit

In meatspace they say, "You never have a second chance to make a first impression." In the hyper-short attention span environment of Second Life I think the bar is set even higher. Many SLers give you about two lines after receiving an introductory "hi" before they make the decision whether to blow you off or engage.

In my brief experience, it seems that wit is one of the key measures of worthiness. This extends beyond introductions into general social conversation. We sit back poised to pounce on the opportunity to throw out a killer one-liner. It can be fun, fun, fun.

Unfortunately, this cult of wit doesn't make much space for those without lightning-fast snarky reflexes. It tends to keep conversations on the shallow end of the pool. And it doesn't value slow and thoughtful thinking.

Hmmm. Is there any other dimension that pervades SL????

A first riff on "The Physical World As Virtual Reality"

I Twittered reading "The Physical World As Virtual Reality" by Brian Whitworth yesterday. As he describes it: "This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world."

He asks, "Suppose ... some Sims within the simulation began to “think”. Could they deduce that their world was a virtual world...?"

It got me thinking...

In Second LIfe, it is impossible to escape the idea that one's experienced world is simulated. The beings I interact with live in "real life" and talk about it quite a bit. If I don't believe such farfetched ideas, I can see a video feed or read a website that is beamed in directly from meatspace.

Now I think his question assumes no exposure to direct information about RL and no blabbing humans running around. If that's the case, the Sims would need at least the relevant conceptual knowledge base that reason would operate upon. (If someone gave you milk and you knew nothing of lactating animals, could you ever deduce a cow?) If the smart Sims have no conception of a computer, how can they make the jump to understanding their world as a simulation?

This begs the question of whether deduction is the only path to awareness. For instance, some Buddhist teachings are consistent with the idea that the world is a simulation. Their conclusions are not based upon logic or sensory experience, but upon awareness brought back from meditative states.

Finally, I think it is useful to differentiate between "thinking" and "self-awareness." Whitworth asks if the data available to thinking Sims would be sufficient to suggest a virtual world. I want to know what would make them independently ask the question in the first place. Is awareness something created by complexity, or does awareness project itself into a universe when there is sufficient complexity to house it?

Beats me. Where's the party tonight?

Synthetic character studying for Turing test

Monday, the news of an AI with the predictive ability of a four year old was a big deal. Yesterday, Slashdot picked up the story that the same research group is creating a supercomputer-based synthetic character that might be able to pass for an adult human. They plan to test their creation this fall in Second Life.

Part 2 on coping with being communicationally challenged

I was hoping to come up some brilliant solution to the communication problem I described in the last post. I almost gave up. I was feeling kinda low. But then a friend uttered something brilliant (she said it was okay to quote her):

Christy Seelowe: disconnections
Christy Seelowe: and crashing
Christy Seelowe: thats a communication problem...

No matter how lame online communication is, it's better than not being able to communicate at all with those you would otherwise never meet.

Maybe the meat-realm idea of authenticity is too limited for the purely virtual. Perhaps humans would be better off if they thought of their time on SL as collaborative improvisational fiction. Enjoy the company and the spectacle. Keep the drama in the context of the theatrical, rather than the chaotically emotional. Leave your baggage behind when you jump into the realm of pixels.

Ah, but that's easy for me to say, isn't it?

SLex, trust and emoticons. Part 1

Before I get into what sucks most about being an avatar, let's reflect upon what rocks about it compared to mere flesh and blood. Most of the advantages of SL are related to the elimination of the constraints of time, distance and physicality:

• We can teleport instantly across any distance and fly over any obstacle.
• In a matter of moments we can change our clothes, shape, skin, gender and even species.
• We can meet, fall in love with, fuck, partner, grow tired of and finally abandon people from all over the world, all in one day. (Okay, slight exaggeration.)
  

The problem is that communicating in SL is like playing a Mozart string quartet on a tin whistle. Sure, it can sound pretty, but 90% of the content is missing.

Mere words account for a fraction of meaningful content in face-to-face human communication. According to one researcher:

• 7% happens in spoken words.
• 38% happens through voice tone.
• 55% happens via general body language.

The problem isn't only that we have just a bit-mapped palette to express a sunset. The other side of the virtual coin is that we try to replace the largely subconscious cues of body language, shifts in tonality, eye-contact, breath rate, etc. with intentional signals such as emoticons, lol's, animations, gestures, /me statements and emote HUDs.

The intentionality factor has a lot to do with the problem of trust in SL. Gone are the unconscious communication channels that are more genuine than words. If two people talk face to face, and one person fakes a laugh, it's easy to spot. How can you discern a bogus :) ? You can't.

That's all for now. More to come.

SLGOGP offers Botgirl hope of future offworld vacations

The Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol first draft was published today. It's Linden Lab's take on a strategy to allow avatars and their possessions to move between Second Life and other grids.