Desert of the Real

2005-12-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If real is simply that which you can taste, smell, touch... then "real" is merely electrical signals being interpreted by your brain.

Then what is Second Life? No one can tell you what Second Life is... you have to see it for yourself...

But often when bewildered newbies find themselves in the Welcome Area, the world rezzing around them, they do not understand. And, even after they have gone through basic SL training, and customized their Av to their liking, they still do not understand. They play Tringo, they stop by a discussion group, a game of primptionary, a nightclub, they stumble upon homes and sex dens and castles, furry forests and whatnot, and though they might have fun with an occasional game, the overwhelming question of WHY to the rest of it baffles them. Tringo and Slingo and slot machines are simple enough... but why pay for land? Why have relationships? It's not REAL! Right?

But what is real? Every time someone tells me that SL is not real (usually people who have only brief or no actual experience with it), I ask them: then what is? From a functional standpoint, what can you not do in SL (or similar online communities/platforms) that you can do in "real" life? Well... you cannot eat... that must be done in RL, nor can you really sleep, per se... nor can you have actual physical contact. You can't smell or taste things either, but then, few of us really value the sense of smell much anyway in RL. So essentially what it comes down to is this: you can't complete the most fundamental requirements of survival and reproduction in SL. Since of course it is a given that everyone in SL must eat and drink and sleep (otherwise they would obviously die...) in RL, the most fundamental limitation of the "reality" of SL... the accuracy of the simulation, if you will, is that you can't really hug, kiss, or have sex-- so these things too are relegated, by necessity, to RL. But then, I wonder what percentage of their time the critics of SL spend doing those things anyway?

When a friend of mine saw me in a virtual sailboat race on Hollywood island, saw my excitement about it (which ultimately led me to make a short machinima film about it), he could not get over what to him was the blaring fact that it was not real. The water was not wet, the sailboat could not be touched, the wind didn't blow my hair. And the avatars, though controlled by real people, seemed to him utterly artificial... merely characters in a video game, and this coming from an avid gamer, no less. Sure, it might be fun to race around in those sailboats, he figured, but to actually schedule your Sunday around the regatta? Or to spend hours upon hours putting together a little video of your (virtual) friends sailing around in virtual sailboats, and furthermore to be sentimental about it? It seemed to him utterly insane.

What he did not understand is that reality is what we decide it is. Each and every human being has his own personal reality. Brian (the aforementioned friend), for instance, believes in God. God is even harder to see, touch, hear, taste, smell than anything in SL is, and yet Brian, along with millions of other people, believes in God fervently and that belief shapes every minute of his life. He is studying to be a theologan. To him, God is real. To millions of others (indeed, the majority of the population of earth), God is not.

When one person claims something is real, and few or none agree with him, that person is deemed insane, crazy, mentally unwell. However, collective realities are infinitely more potent. It is a bit more difficult to simply ignore something believed by thousands, millions, billions...

SL is a collective reality. It is real, and objects in it are every bit as real as objects in "RL". Their true functionality may be more limited, because of the limitations of the system, but they are real nevertheless. One popular argument against this is: what if the LL servers got blown up? SL would dissapear. Well... what if the Earth got bombed? It would dissappear too
:) You could call SL a figment of our collective imaginations... but to do that you would also have to call the "real" world a figment of our collective imaginations as well.

On a more scientific note, the more science-savvy of you know that many of the most recent theories in phyics postulate that the universe is not so different from a big "virtual" world after all- that matter and energy ultimately boil down to information; quantum bits, if you will. And indeed, at the rate technology is progressing, virtual worlds like SL will be rapidly becoming more and more "realistic"... higher resolution, higher framerate, more prims, more sims, more people, faster connections, faster computers, true-3D, etc.

Entering the Blogosphere

2005-12-27T20:40:00.000-08:00

Just testing to see if this is working... I'll post something real soon.

Second Reflections

Desert of the Real

Entering the Blogosphere