3d

I was thinking about art in SL, specifically sculpture/installation art, and wondering why it works. This came up when I sent somebody a snapshot of Bryn Oh's lovely and poignant Rabbicorn; we started talking about what it was that our typists were looking at.

That it does work is pretty obvious, the success of Burning Life* and many inworld galleries and artists make that clear. A significant minority of SL residents regularly travels to remote sims to experience these works for themselves; as a percentage I'd guess that it is far higher than the prevalence of habitual gallery-goers in most of our RL cities.

But why do we do this? When our typists view 2d art in SL, or a snapshot from SL in Flickr, they look at a pixelly 2d representation of a 3d place. When we (avatars) travel to that sim and stand in the sculpture and look around us, our typists look at: a pixelly 2d representation of a 3d place. There are lovely machinima of all these pieces online; we could see the piece in comfort, without lag or other people standing in our way, with a soundtrack and sometimes commentary, without leaving our digital homes.

The reason is the immersive experience of being somewhere, the experience of moving and seeing in a 3d volume in real time; at least for those of us who do live in SL. Our typists are looking at a monitor, but we are living in a world. The monitor is just a tool in that process, in the way that somebody walking the fells would probably not describe their activity as "reading maps while wearing boots and a raincoat."

It would be instructive to find out how many of the regular visitors to SL art would self-describe as immersivists; I'd guess we are by far the majority.


* yes, I know the Lindens dropped out and forced a name-change. I can't remember the new name. Shoot me.

What is it that I remember, when I remember SL

I was thinking about memory, about the Me-component of my memories, about how my body is part of many memories: its position, actions, movements, experiences. That made me realize one of the defining effects of embodiment in SL.

When I remember communicating with a fellow resident of SL — I'm deliberately framing this awkwardly, all will be revealed — I do not remember what my RL body did i.e. sitting in my home office with a typewriter* under my fingertips and a cup of tea on the desk, looking at a screen.

I remember being in SL, not my home office: I remember sitting together at the Playgoda, or dancing together at Fracture, or trying on clothes at AVid, or lying in hammocks on the beach at whatever that place was called.

I remember talking, not typing: I remember the words we spoke and the feelings that they brought forth.

I remember the outfit I wore in SL, rather than my RL sweater and slippers.

I remember the glass of red wine I held in SL, rather than the cup of tea on my desk.

Second Life is a place in its own right. It's neither here by me nor over there where you are, but in some neutral zone at right angles to the RL distance between us. In that place, there is no separating distance and no timezones**. This is another distinction between SL and many, perhaps most, "games:" no matter how many hours I spent playing the Sims or Civilization IV or Blades of Avernum and the like, they never became places that I could be in.

The key is immersion, and in my experience flat games on a screen don't offer that.

Actually, that reminds me that we could try to get some WoW players to talk to us. That would indicate whether the place-ness of SL is specific to it or perhaps a more general attribute of MMOWs.


* Sic, what a marvellous slip that is. I wonder when I last used a true typewriter? Probably when I left college in 1984. One of the first programs I wrote was a typewriter emulator, which sent keystrokes directly to a dot-matrix printer. Such were the joys.

** Time itself does still exist, remind me to talk about lag.