Philip Rosedale & Other Readers Ponder the Appeal of "Living, Breathing" Simulated Worlds

Great conversation that spun out of last week's great podcast interview with Philip Rosedale by ex-Linden Melinda Byerley, spinning off from my comment that "I'm a bit sad that he talks so much about how in the beginning, the focus was on making Second Life a living, breathing world with a simulated ecosystem and realistic ocean, sun and moon cycles, and so on... [when] both Second Life and High Fidelity, which now look, feel, and operate far more like interconnected 3D chat rooms."

To that point, Philip comments:

I so much agree about the magical appeal of the 'living, breathing world' - but why is it so appealing? I think about this a lot, and although I feel it in the most passionate way, I still wonder where the feeling comes from.

To that question, Mac speculates:

It may be because we, in our 'real', breathing lives, live in a vast ecology. We live on the ground (even if our feet are in an apartment 20 stories high). We exist in a network, invisible to us though it may be. We are solidly of our earth (and will return to it!). We are alive within an unimaginable connection which we evolved through and grew up in, through countless generations and millennia.

That may be why a series of discrete 'interconnected 3D chat rooms', as Wagner puts it, feels unnatural. The 'imagined reality' of these rooms technically and practically ends at their borders, unlike physical reality (in the physical reality of our world, you cannot get to the end of reality; you can't reach out and find that it has ceased. There is always something beyond your reach, be it air, space, vacuum, the rest of the universe. You cannot get to a point of 'nothing'). A teleport between rooms isn't quite the same as a physical tunnel. Discrete 3D chat rooms push against an internal fundamental knowledge that the world is still 'of a piece' even though it has become many pieces, many places, many communities. I would imagine that this feeling (analogous to the uncanny valley) will fade over time as we get used to non-geographically-designed digital landscapes: people can, have, and will adapt to situations which seem uncomfortable or unsuitable at the start. We are, after all, discursive and negotiable creatures. These are still teething times for the digital human.

In other words, he's arguing that it's a feeling we can evolve away from. Melinda herself makes a comment which suggests it's a feeling mainly confined to childhood:

I find myself drawn back to the phenomenon Philip described- that we as humans almost always base our creative efforts on what we have already experienced. We almost don't know as a species what to do with an infinite level of creative tools. Only children, as I said on the show, seem so unfettered creatively. which explains Minecraft and Fortnite. I don't know what the answer is, but I can now see why Philip has spent his whole life on this problem: because it's incredibly complex and has its roots in things that don't change quickly like human minds, educational systems, and hardware technology.

The sense that a virtual world has endless expanses to explore, or as with Fortnite, endless varieties of experiences, seems key to creating a world that can draw in tens of millions. More than anything, however, I think it's a matter of time. Most kids in the developed world have large swathes of free time to play and explore that none but the luckiest adult simply does not have. This is probably a core cause to Second Life's lack of growth: Not only that it has become more and more like a 3D chat room experience, but that it's always been positioned as a for-adults experience -- when it's kids and teens who most want, need, and most of all, have the idle time simulated worlds. 

Depicted above: Minecraft Machinima: Beautiful And Innovative New Video From Maker Of The 8 Mile Minecart Viral Hit.

Comments

[Orca Flotta]

Butbutbut ... what if I'm not interested in a chatroom or a multritude of chatrooms? What if I'm a socially awkward loner like 99% of all SLers, and just want to experience the visceral quasi-pysical virtual life? Shoret, what if I wanna experience SL as Philp has planned it and how it actually was back in the old times? Just with more eyecandy,less lag and on a more robust grid?

Can we have that please?

[Pulsar]

Many good points, the age and available time too. In Second Life there are also retired folks and people with disabilities, but not so many young people.
There are some educational purposes too, but many people seem to come in SL to dream. To be still 20-30s, to look like top models, flirt, selfies, a villa, yachts, horses... Let alone the roleplayers. But some people also dream to be in a wonderful place, or to have the sailing boat of their dreams and to sail for hours among seas and rivers (just by their own or in organized group cruises), or to have their own airline to fly among isles and "continents" and hundred people join Drivers of SL every week to drive among the mainland, despite region crossing in SL kills most of the fun.
Places like "Grendel" were full of young people once, meeting there new friends and playing with any sort of fun and weird avatar. Someone had fun creating in sandboxes too.
But by now the bar to create anything in SL has been raised a lot, SL has become more and more a virtual selfie and flirt activity (not to everyone at least). Besides clubs and shopping events, now in popular places avatars just pile up at the entrance and don't move, don't look around do nothing (someone sends private flirting messages / waits to get messages or ends up AFK). We are at the point that who owns a popular place has to put a system that pushes the avatars away from the entrance.

Simulation games work, creative games like Minecraft or Kerbal Space Program work, multiplayer games work. So a whole world simulation which allows easy creation in real time and allows people to easy meet and to interact / play together / share the experiences may work.
But a bunch of interconnected 3D chat rooms where you don't do much else, that requires external and professional software to create anything, and even many other things move outside from the virtual world as they are more practical to do externally, such as sharing pictures etc., and maybe it has even long download times every time you move from place to place... does this really surprise anyone if the tens of millions are elsewhere?

[Clara Seller]

Orca and Pulsar have really good comments. There was a reason that SL was successful and the reasons why it started to fail have been rehashed over and over again. There was so much boo-hooing and disappointment when the world couldn't seem to make a place for corporations and institutions. I think in a way, they are still trying to serve their needs when they design these worlds. They sure do love to put people in boxes and control them.

We are humans, born of the Earth, and circling through the universe. Our imaginations and our dreams are in the places beyond our reach. It's who we are and will always be. The very notion that we will adapt to a cage is pretty sociopathic. Gee, I can't imagine why you keep failing over and over again with these series of "experiences" concept. It's exactly what a zoo is.

[Better then Ezra]

Agreeing with those above while just thinking to myself "Why do we keep getting VW that the users do not want, while never seeing what we do want" why is it so hard to get a SL but better place with Voxels, Impressive Avatar Maker,Ect, this must be an incredible task very few on earth can create the way Philip and Ebbe talk.

Oh btw Linden Lab DID NOT answer the question i asked about terrain textures on the mainlands being updated...they likely never will its just too hard to do =)

" both Second Life and High Fidelity, which now look, feel, and operate far more like interconnected 3D chat rooms" I guess they do when you cannot build a world sized place like one could in Blue Mars or even OpenSim they had 100x sized regions... Secondlifes Region restrictions are a joke while being adopted in Sansar and High Fidelity just the same.

Someone today could take Blue Mars old master code, put a new name on it and it would blow Sansar and high fidelity out of the water.

[Justa Thought]

"Why do we keep getting VW that the users do not want, while never seeing what we do want"- Better than Ezra

Now that would be a great debate for Philip and Ebbe to do together.

I'm not sure who would win. SL has given both of them both the opportunity to fail magnificently and not have to suffer the consequences. Imagine having a cultish customer base who spends millions and millions of dollars and insists on looking to you as a god, then abandoning them or throw them in a landfill to go off and create their own versions of a nuclear dumpster fire. This insanity is reserved only for the privileged. It's not behavior that would ever be tolerated out of working class people. Surely it's time to stop looking to them for anything.

[Bavid Dailey]

Building even a simple artificial life ecology is really hard. I set out, in Second Life, to have several species of autonomous creatures, hunting and fleeing from each other, mating and just generally exploring their world. I spent lot of time trying and soon found I was spending more time banging my head on limits - LSL limitations, script time slicing, engine physics weirdnesses - than actually scripting the interactions that I was interested in. I've been programming for 50+ years and I concluded that this was one of the most engrossing, infuriating and plain difficult projects I had ever attempted. I did succeed to a limited extent, but never entirely to my satisfaction.

In the end, when I no longer had access to a sim to play with , I put it all aside as too time consuming. There's a lot that could be done with animesh actors I think. I'd love to TP into an empty sim and see denizens going about their daily business, for example wildlife in the undergrowth or NPC avatars in a medieval village rather than the static snapshot I see today. Just need a rich patron :-)

[Joe Nickence]

A feeling of interconnected chat rooms comes from being able to teleport. default humans are analog. we are forced to be linear. when I'm in SL, I only teleport to a location if its something I want to see for a moment. if it holds my interest, I will not teleport within the world. I walk. I dont ride in a scripted vehicle. And I keep my visual settings at max. Yeah it gives me a buttload of lag. But I get to experience a world, a location, rather than just occupy it.and that is the experience Phillip was looking for when he envisioned "The street". If I wanted to teleport everywhere, then I miss the experience.