QotW: Second Life is cool!

This is me. I have ropey brown hair and silver clipped wings. I wear a spider suit and purple pants. So unlike me! Only the dark eye rings are like me.

This is the first place I went to. It's called Jade Jazz Place. Saw a lot of people dancing and simple love the songs. Also there shoutouts like "Love SL!", "Songs are cool here!"

Then I realise I lost the little guiding window on the left. So I went to search for 'Orientation Island' under 'Places'. I learn stuff smoothly on this pseudo Orientation Island. A lady named Magda told me politely I would not be able to get back to the one I came from. She also helped me to put my skull back.

I met someone who looked like me before. If you can see which is me. OK im the purple pants and the red hair was me before.

And then I went to another dance place, they played hip hop or R&B, and they let me dance, free! (said it the Singaporean style)

Obviously i haven't had enough of dancing, so i thought the poor status had stood still for years and danced infront of him.

I went to Help Island. And I played hangman. I won! The word is 'hanging'!

Then I went to sit on a bench, just to feel how it feels like to sit on a bench in a second life. Turns out that I sit too stiffly. So unlike me in real life....

In the end I decided I still like Jade Jazz Lounge the best.

Bonus Mission #2: Why is it not just a game?

• Because you can make money out of it.
  

A millionaire in Second Life.

Anshe Chung is now a famous U.S. millionaire. Not just any millionaire. She is the millionaire who makes her fortune by buying and selling property in the virtual game Second Life using Linden dollars.

Her creator, Ailin Graef started with an initial investment of $9.95 second-life account and bought large-scale lands which she then divides and builds buildings to rent out or sell. More than 2 years later, the fortune she commands is several million dollars in real U.S. money. Asked what is her motivation for building such a large mass of fortune in a virtual land, she replied that it is her vision of community in the virtual worlds and work spaces that is driving her. “It is her philosophy that Second Life is above all a social space...”

And while relationships are formed through the game as social space – business deals made, new friendships formed, even resulting in marriages in real life, they can also be determined through your avatar. It’s “kinda scary”, especially when these things “[avatar appearance] is changeable with a click” (Linden, 2006)

• Because your avatar represents your race and your social identity.
  

Racist biasness appears in Second Life

Well, Chip Midnight had always wanted to create a black skin in second life to show the true proportionality of races in first life, that is, real life. He asked his usual model Erika Thereian, normally a blond and white skin, to test-drive his skin. Immediately, she got racist remarks from a couple of people.

"One said, 'Look at the n***** b****.'" (Linden, 2006)

"Another said 'Great, they are gonna invade SL now.'" (Linden, 2006)

In the three months she was black, some of her friends avoided her and she stopped fitting in with her good friends whom chatted easily with her. Her social dynamics have changed along with her skin color. Some friends asked her, “when you going back being you?” (Linden, 2006) This shows their bias towards blacks. As much as this is a virtual world, as good as a second chance in life, in a whole world newly created, people brings their stereotypes and biasness into it.

Conclusion

That pretty much summarizes why Second Life is not just a game; why Warcraft is not just a game and why games should be treated seriously, as part of the society. Not just some silly teenage boy’s pastime that not only wastes parents’ money and does not benefit the child like education does. It is a good opportunity to learn about the real world through second life because it is modeled after real life. The issues and problems concerning real world are still appearing and happening in Second Life and soon we might see racial protests or environment non-profit groups appearing. The ways to get rich are also modeled after real life. Ailin Graef is not one of the first millionaires to realize that investing in property is one of the quickest and best ways to get rich. Before her, billionaires like Donald Trump and Li Ka-shing have already done it in the real world. Second Life might be a good "try-out" place for fantasies. As Arianna Huffington discusses her thoughts of saving her marriage if "her husband had fulfilled her gay fantasies virtually" (Poprocks, 2007), I say, "why not?"


Bibliography

Levy, S. (2007). World of Warcraft: Is It a Game? Newsweek. Retrieved April 06, 2007 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757769/site/newsweek/page/3/print/1/displaymode/1098/

Clarren, R. (2006, 16 Sept) Virtually dead in Iraq. Salon arts & Entertainment. Retrieved April 06, 2007 from http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/09/16/americasarmy/

Lydon, C. (2006, 27 Mar) Living in Game Space. Open Source with Christopher Lydon. Retrieved April 06, 2007 from http://www.radioopensource.org/living-in-game-space/

Dibbel, J. (2003, Jan) The Unreal Estate Boom. Wired News. Retrieved April 06, 2007, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/gaming_pr.html

Plush City @ Second Life, Wuhan, China @ Real Life. (2006, 26 Nov) Anshe Chung Becomes First Virtual World Millionaire. Retrieved April 06, 2007, from the World Wide Web: http://www.anshechung.com/include/press/press_release251106.html

Linden, H. (2006, 23 Feb) The Skin You’re In. New World Notes archive. Retrieved April 06, 2007, from http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/02/the_skin_youre_.html

Poprocks, (2007, 25 Jan) Can Second Life save your marriage? nowpublic: crowd powered media. Retrieved April 06, 2007, from http://www.nowpublic.com/can_second_life_save_your_marriage

QotW7: Twitter Action!

At first I have my doubts that Twitter can be a community. Because it is just too fragmented… I guess it does not enforce existing communities because you cannot surf profiles and search for friends like Friendster allows. And the emphasis is not so much on the profile than the posts. If I wish to view a stranger’s profile, I could only click on their nicks that comes up at random at the Public Timeline.

From my observation, Twitter can be an online community, however, like how we, the UB-SIM students are using—by updating their random moves or updating news or information only which we know for sure that we share; like when we have completed COM125 assignment, or the presence of events in SIM like the EA games.

Twitter has a very strong concept; it asks people to do a specific action. The focus is on what people are specifically doing right now. This topic is relative to everyday lives and easy to understand. How many of you have always thought you’re doing something really special and wants to share it with anyone, anyone at all that would listen. It could be sky-diving, killing your first pest, or finding the perfect note for that part of the music score that you always thought sounded a little out of tune. Or perhaps, finally getting down to clearing that stack of old textbooks left on the shelf since the year 1997. Unlike other social network sites, people are asked to set up profiles to personalize themselves, to give a branding to themselves. After decorating their profiles with smiley photos of themselves and their affiliations with organizations as well as hobbies and pet-peeves, users often wonder, ‘what now?’ But with Twitter, the focus is on actions, almost on the grindings of the daily life. Although it is intended to report actions, the emotions attached to situations comes naturally from humans. Therefore, humans will speak of their emotions almost as if it a natural thing to “do”. The worry that Fox (1995) has that “all this razzle-dazzle connects us electronically [but] it disconnects us from each other, having us 'interfacing' more with computers and TV screens than looking in the face of our fellow human beings" might not be a cause for worry.

The simple urge for people to communicate and share encourages them to log on and post each time they are doing something of interest or importance to them. Twitter can be interpreted with what Sennett (1977) hopes to put across: that men can act together, without the compulsion to be the same. The very act of writing about your acts links us all up together as we all act on in our daily lives. The very act of telling about your acts brings us together as a community, according to Fernback & Thompson, who says that the structural process that is associated with community is communication.

On scouring the Public Timeline, I have seen non-personalized nicks. Mainly nicks are publicly recognized as a brand, existing communities such as freshpodcasts, BBCnewsworld, googlenews, technorati, wordpress, flickr and Giovy. Also, their avatars are the logos of brands. Good news. Icons of community interests are already starting to ignite. When “followers” of these icons have round up to a number large enough that qualifies as a community, that is be when the advertisers will come in. quoting Benjamin Koe, “If you have a community, you have a business”.

References:

Social Network. (2007, March 13). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 16, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking

Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1996). "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities." Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.acm.org/%7Eccp/references/wellman/wellman.html

Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1995). "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Koe, Benjamin. "Public Relations and Online Communities". Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore. 13 Mar. 2007.