I’ve blogged before about Second Life.
Read a report by PBS about religion in Second Life. (Be sure to watch the video on that page.)
“One of the fastest growing sites on the internet isn’t a Web site, but a 3-D virtual world built and owned by it’s residents. It’s called “Second Life,” and for millions of users, it’s a place to escape reality. But just like the real world, good and evil also exist in “Second Life.” As a result, religion is finding it’s way there too.”
The whole virtual world and Second Life have never really sat well with me. The idea of a world without consequences, where the reset button can be pressed at anytime, and where many adult situations are promoted and encouraged seems wrong. It seems to be the world that Satan would want us to live in.
Many players, after long exposures, have difficulties distinguishing between the virtual world and the real world.
Some will say it is a missionary opportunity but I believe for the same reason we don’t place ads in adult magazines we shouldn’t promote the church in an adult environment.
I personally would like to take a stand against second life. Stay away from it. Don’t let your friends play. Stay as far away from the environment as you can.
Just my two cents.
The same argument could be said of any online community. Although I don’t patronize Second Life myself (I have a hard enough time keeping up with my real-world life), I think this “adult” behavior is largely an artifact of “frontier living.”
If you look at history, frontier towns we’re largely dominated by rough-cut, liquor-drinking, independent individuals with loose morals. Frontier towns were great places for people to hide. Gunfights were common, law was scarce. Once things start to stabilize in the community, many of these people would move on to blaze another trail. Eventually, a government is formed, people establish laws and subject themselves to the civil law to facilitate commerce and It’s a maturation process that takes a long time.
I’m confident that in 5-10 years, virtual worlds will be a lot more “civil” and useful for the rest of us. I’m not suggesting that we all jump into a porn-filled second life. But I also don’t think we need to abandon a potential technology simply because the dominant adoption of that technology is currently being used in ways that are inappropriate.
Indeed. Sociologists and other social commentators have said that concerning the Internet in general, it’s not a question of ‘will the Internet be regulated’, but ‘when’.
Second Life represents a lot of uncharted virtual territory. It’s experimental and there is new potential; for example, the world now has a millionaire that built her wealth selling Second Life real estate. I think the frontier analogy is apt, really.
I have considered trying out Second Life. It looks like a lot of the content there is “adult,” however, and it looks like there are very thin barriers between that and the rest of their world. Because of that, I am not currently interested.
I would like to comment on Kevin’s remark, though, about how players of online games ” … have difficulties distinguishing between the virtual world and the real world.” In my experience, the only people who have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality are those who have never experienced fantasy.
As an example, the Final Fantasy XI community occasionally posts lists like “You know you’ve been playing FFXI too long when … ” If someone who had never experienced fantasy read the list, she might be horrified by the comic exaggerations. FFXI players, on the other hand, find such lists hilarious, because the juxtaposition between FFXI and the real world is funny. If we could not tell the difference, there’d be no point to these or other jokes.
I would like to comment on another point he made, as well: “The idea of a world without consequences, where the reset button can be pressed at anytime”. The primary draw of online games like FFXI and Second Life is in the opportunities for interaction with other players. There are consequences for interacting with other players, and they don’t have reset buttons that one can just press. They have real feelings, because they are real people like you.
Online games aren’t just games. They are communities. This is a fact which is often overlooked — by those who can’t tell the difference between games and reality, and who haven’t yet realized that the puppets they see have real people pulling their strings.