Last week, Linden Lab were encouraging people to get Premium Accounts with promises of access to adult areas.

My narrative is pretty flexible in some ways, but the core–the name and the usual look of the character–comes out of a story I wrote. I arrived with a narrative of my own, and picked up a few bits and pieces of others. I’ve built my “house”. I’ve tried being a “merchant”, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth doing. Has the Premium account been worth it? The quality of the service has plummeted since I started paying, but there’s no narrative there.

There’s other ways you could describe the whole thing.

It seems to me that using the term “narrative” is doing most of your work for you. You *assert* that what people do in SL can be characterized as “narratives” right at the start, then make the less controversial/more sensible claim that WoW is about narratives, and then you make the jump to “the narratives we create in SL are no different than the narratives created in mainstream MMOs.”

I saw someone already mentioned that your criteria for what constitutes a “narrative” could really be applied to anything in real life (which presumably is not a game if the term is to have any meaning, and nontrivial implications, at all), and your response seemed weak to me. Your RL underwear serves a physical purpose, but so could a lot of SL activity (generating an income being the obvious example).

I generally have an allergy to murky PoMo lingo, and this is why…

1 – Assert that something is merely a text, a narrative, an artifact, or whatever.

2 – Then, take the terminology’s fictional implications as applied to actual fiction based activities to create the appearance of uncovering some deep connection or fundamental similarity.

But the whole time you have just begged the question in a way, smuggling in a murky term to do your work for you. In fact, I’ve never seen this term accomplish the heavy lifting its often called in to do, but has a knack for appearing as if is.

Also, sorry @Otto if I misinterpreted what you said. Thought someone thought I was advocating griefing again because I try to approach it from a neutral stance – which for me isn’t too difficult as griefing in Second Life ceased to have an impact on me or anything that I am doing quite some time ago. You know how it is, certain people like to holler griefer at anyone who views griefing as something less than terrorism.

Ultimatum? That doesn’t sound like an ultimatum to me lol. Anyways, whether or not you can change a wikipedia entry to say something else isn’t a reliable way of determining much of anything. Anyone can edit wikipedia. Hell, I could write a bot in C to detect when the page has been changed and re-upload my versions. And if someone wasn’t using a bot, then you just have a bunch of crazies sitting around bickering over a wikipedia article as they go back and forth changing it, all because we can’t agree on whether or not a game is a game.

Seriously, does it even get any more petty and stupid? Wikipedia is not Encarta dude. I can change the wikipedia article to say that Second Life is a delicious chocolate bar with caramel and nuts. If I did that, then would you start arguing over whether or not your game is a candy bar? Most colleges don’t even let you cite Wikipedia as a reference for papers. At least, the ASU semiotics class didn’t.

@KWS: I wasn’t actually trying to say that anything is unnecessarily constrained. The narratives people follow might be necessary or they might not be, but either way I would like people to think about how they spend their time in virtual worlds. It’s like a recent blog post on Henry Jenkins’s blog, coauthored by the Herald founder Peter Ludlow said, “Choose your fictions well.” That was really the point of this essay.

Link: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/04/choose_your_ficitons_well.html

I also would like to encourage people to consider being more mobile between virtual worlds. Good content creators don’t shy away from transmedia shifts. They find inspiration and possibility in them. I see too many talented SL creators limiting themselves by refusing to look for the creative potential in mainstream MMOs. As artists we should appropriate from everywhere.

@Tux: I agree with you, but I think technologies like WebGL are the way of the future. I don’t see SL revolutionizing the internet unless LL goes bankrupt and starts giving away all it’s code open source. Even then, it would have to be ported to something like WebGL (BTW, I wish you luck with getting your account back, it would be a shame to loose you).

Do you live Second Life? . . . . . Then it is a false reality.

Although, at the start of the year I blogged about how I saw the future of the internet. And I said that I thought it would change from static pages *sigh* to a 3D environment. Businesses will have offices that people can walk their avatars into. Etc etc.

But this would not be the Second Life platform, simply because LL prevents a free option. I will explain. ATM anyone with access to the internet can setup a local webserver and display their site to the world. OSG goes some way to this, but it isn’t fully unified or simple enough. Plus I think the client will have to undergo a major rethink. Either and web based java client or something better thought out, and I do not mean SLV2.0!

SL residents seem to be riddled with all sorts of ailments, and most I believe are claimed as some sort of status booster. Whilst I fully believe many disabled or ill people do play SL (I include myself here btw). I think many more use it as an excuse.

For me it doesn’t matter what colour the RL person is, or what sex (I don’t do the virtual sex thing anyways) they are. IDC if they are obese, gay, deformed or anything else. Because I play SL, my interaction is with other players avatars and their personality traits. I enjoy filling in the gaps.

Nothing drives me more crazy than places like Help Island where the in-click there discuss what they bought from the supermarket whilst claiming to be helpers. Usually ignoring people until after they have finished explaining how well their diet is going. Crying griefer when anyone wears a box or comedy face.

So yes, SL is a game.

But in what sense are the pre-fab spaces into which Bubblesort imagines nubes enter actually narratives. And what does do, how does it shift our appreciation of what’s going on their to see these situations as narratives as opposed to another frame.

In Roland Barthes’ _Mythologies_, he writes a kind of loose ideology critique of toys, in one short essay — complaining that all the toys given to French children are based on a kind of ridiculous projection of adult social value systems onto the child’s world. Thus the boy is to imagine himself MD or architect, the girl nurse or cook, etc.

What he finds crushing is not even so much the gender bias, but that the toys are so much less playful (because the outcomes are so constricted) than something freeform like blocks.

So here it seems like Bubblesort is looking at (for me) a similar problem of a kind of play that is, in his view, unnecessarily constrained. SL is fascinating and exciting, a sandbox worth learning how to play in to the extent it is freeform (or open) like the set of building blocks, and much less cool if it’s just another space to act out, consume, in the usual old ways that are so often given to us by structures that preexist.