Weekend Read: The Four Types of Second Life Places

Canary Beck has a really interesting and provocative and long analysis of the types of Second Life, based on her 8 years of being an SLer, which she categories in four ways: Real-Fake, Real-Real, Fake-Fake, Fake-Real. You should read it all here, but I wanted to highlight a couple of my favorite insights before you go:

The very most popular SL places in terms of traffic are Fake-Fake:

[F]ake-fake sims are not what they say they are, and not true to themselves. Sims like this are harder to find because they tend to not be often photographed, or written about. I believe we tend to model most simulations on either originals we have experienced in the real world or build them in ways that are entirely impossible in the real world. Fake-fake sims, however, seem to be a haphazard mixture of the two.

Frank’s Place Jazz Club

Self-touted as Second Life’s Premier Dance Venue (to be fair they did win at least one Avi’s Choice award in their category), nearly everyone in Second Life is aware of Frank’s. According to Metaverse Business, Frank’s currently places as Second Life’s 2nd most popular sim – and its most popularGeneral sim. The interesting thing about Frank’s (pictured below), is that it’s neither a “ballroom” (as it says in its description), nor does it really play jazz. What you actually get is a mall leading to a palatial open-air dance floor that bears little resemblance to any jazz music venue I’ve ever seen. It has a formal dress code where men dress in tails and the ladies dress in ball gowns (clothing which isn’t at all associated with most jazz clubs in real life) and instead of jazz, Frank’s mainly streams easy-listening music.

And she gives many other examples in that category. (By the way, she's not saying "Fake-fake" as a value judgement.) She's very astute to note that a popular sim like Frank's Place doesn't, well, feel like an actual place (though clearly, a lot of people love it all the same.) By contrast:

Fake-Real places tend to be more photographed and featured in machinima (as above) and praised as beautiful

Fake-real sims are not what they say they are, but they are true to themselves, in varying degrees. Due to the limitations of virtual places, it’s in some ways easier to make a place that is inspired by a real life location, than one that is a direct copy of it. Like in the case of Basilique and Angel Manor, the “originals” needn’t be real at all to fit this category, as long as they fit within the constructs of our collective imaginations or memories. Other good examples of fake-real include

• Caelestivm – “a recreation of a realistic medieval environment with a touch of fantasy combined with Celtic traditions and medieval living in a natural environment.”)

• Makeahla Jungle - four conjoined sims that recreate the look and feeling of a jungle infested with (albeit static) wildlife.

• Phoenix One Station - a space station that offers an environment that is meant to simulate an abandoned deep space research station, now acting as humankind’s last outpost after the Earth has been destroyed.

• Otium – an intimate island village set among five isolated islands

I am not saying in any way that fake-real sims are more valuable or better than real-fake sims – like so many things, one’s appreciation for virtual places comes down to a matter of taste. Personally, and probably unsurprisingly, I prefer fake-real over real-fake.

As do I, as do most SL photographers and machinima-makers. So in Second Life, maybe what is better aesthetically might not be better commercially. Anyway, go now and read it straight from Ms. Beck.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[Cube Republic]

A great read.

[Iggy]

I went to read Canary's analysis of Frank's. I've not visited, but there is something nightmarish about formal ware, easy-listening, and a mall bundled together.

It's rather like a place where we'd shunt the ebbing minds of institutionalized elderly folk, once we have VR. IRL they'd be strapped to feeding and toilet tubes, but their minds would be tripping the light fantastic, right out of a cyberpunk novel.

IRL we have so many "real-fake" places. American (and UK) suburbia is all real-fake, trying to conjure some vision of rural (or rural village) quiet and sense of community that few if any suburbanites have experienced. In the words of novelist and social critic James Howard Kunstler, who has worked with my classes a few times, such RL places are "not worth caring about." With him, I argue that we need more places worth caring around, even dying for. Maybe we'll all just sink into virtuality instead; fixing RL is so much harder.

[Cube Republic]

Ha Iggy, if you want a nightmare look up English New Towns. They looked nice on paper, but decades on they're soulless crap holes.