Hello fellow yellows! My name is Brian Isett and I'm a Junior in the Ag school majoring in Biology. I am a big fan of electronica and enjoy making my own synth jams on the daily. I like to snowboard and pop n' lock (dance like a robot), especially with buds from my home town of Doylestown, PA. I'm concentrating in Animal Behavior, and there are probably some interesting overlaps here... In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities to use game theory in describing online social behaviors.
I have a few favorite haunts on the ol' line, but the novelty of talking to people that I don't know in person wore off back in the middle school (when I was 10 I had an online girlfriend and the whole 9 yards (it was super chic)). Since then, I've found the net most useful as a means to communicate with people that I already know very well in person. I find myself sending private messages through forums to friends from high school and keeping up with people through Facebook, which has ultimately replaced AOL Instant Messenger in this regard.
I am particularly interested in the progression of online communities like Second Life where individuals become so consumed that they are willing to buy virtual real estate for thousands of real dollars- turning some virtual real estate agents into millionaires. I'm also interested in why people in these immersive virtual environments are attracted to this meta-living experience. It's not like a video game experience in which you can do things that are impossible to do in real life... real estate agents online could probably find very similar success doing REAL real estate work! I find the self-serving nature of Second Life commerce to be an extremely informative system for examining how the internet affects self-representation. I have never used Second Life, but perhaps I'll have to jump in to really understand the appeal!
In a distanced way, the Second Life experience would certainly derive from the online space Wallace loosely describes as the metaworld. Even though SL has evolved far beyond the basic environment that Wallace writes about, I feel that she had a lot of foresight to identify this burgeoning space. Since they have incorporated the many freedoms that were previously only available in MUDs, they now offer people an apparently irresistible combination of opportunity and self-recreation. SL isn't going away any time soon, so I believe that rigorous observation of the trends in this space offer a very unique commentary on our behavior.
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I feel that Second Life is still not used to its full capabilities. I have only actually seen it used once but it seems like Second Life has so much untapped potential that still seems to be limited to only a few people that are the heavier computer users.
I know in one of my classes that my teacher was trying to find a way to use Second Life to hold office hours. It seemed complicated but very interesting and while some people might consider this over the top, I think it is a creative new way to try to use the internet to interact. I have no idea of all the possibilities that second life holds but I feel that it has laid the groundwork for a powerful resource in the future that hopefully someone soon will figure out how to use to its full potential. Nice post Brian.
Massively multiplayer online games like Second Life have been quite fascinating to me for some time. I started playing the original, Ultima Online, back in 10th grade, and I still have an active account! (Schoolwork and other commitments make it difficult to actually play the game nowadays, of course.) UO has been in operation since 1997, so although I do agree that Wallace was smart to include the “metaworld” in her treatment of online spaces, I think she definitely had a lot of cues to go on back then.
Second Life is pretty interesting in that it is not organized along the lines of a fictional plot construct like UO, EverQuest or World of Warcraft, but rather it strives to emulate real life. This perhaps indicates that it’s not just magical powers and mythical creatures that draw players to MMOGs; rather, I think, it’s just the power over one’s own identity that such a game grants a player.
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