Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures
There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges:
Amazing how fast a decade passes. And yet SL is still there, even if many of us are not. This article reminded me of the promise and the peril of SL.
After reading the piece, I realized, with a decade's hindsight, how silly it was for most of my fellow educators to even try to promote the space. After all, as the author so aptly puts it for business users, "why talk your clients into conducting business in an environment that also caters to Gorean slave girls in the first place?"
Business meeting: then run out to collar a Kajira. I cannot even imagine, on today's more "Woke" campuses, how trying to use SL would go, given some of its subcultures. Of course, other subcultures in SL would cater to precisely those changed realities on campus.
And still. Just try, my esteemed colleagues, to explain Gor to an IRB committee or Associate Dean overseeing budget. My mesh tophat's off to you if you try and don't lose your job. The more controversial communities in SL explain, in part, why some researchers decided to leave the virtual world. When I go very infrequently to the once-vital SL roundtable where I was an officer, you don't find anyone with a lot of status or doing real research any longer. Nice folks, but the action for researchers has moved to other spaces online and IRL.
But the Kool-Aid from Cory and Philip sure tasted good, 10+ years ago. Your world, your imagination.
The "woke" angle is a fairly fresh one. I suspect many or most colleges would be perfectly fine with all the virtual sex among consenting adults and praise the virtual world's strong LGBT community. But roleplay groups based on books depicting women as happily subservient slaves to their male masters? Yeah, not quite seeing that go over well at the next department meeting. (And Goreans are probably on the relatively milder end of the vast fetish spectrum on display in Second Life.)
I think we should not confuse the technological invention with its SL application. In fact, researchers and teachers left in many cases using opensimulator, the LL open source version to shelter their users from more troubling topics but also completely free of charge ...
The problem is that it does not easily offer a marketable activity as long as the demonstration of interest for the human brain in learning will not be proclaimed by authorized scientific sources. While all the material on this subject exists, it does not seem to interest anyone ... Unfortunately, it must be said that the youth of the process (avatars) is waiting for the commercial interests of games and other frills used as helmets to be exceeded ... (?)
Posted by: Jenny Bihouise | Tuesday, December 03, 2019 at 04:52 AM
It is a sorry state of affairs when GOR is deeded to be the main motivator of Second Life. Sorry, it is not. It is a sub culture that caters to a few, not the majority of Second Life residents. If you want to go there fine. It is your SL. Or you can be a captain of a star-fleet ship..
You can find me on the beach or on our land dedicated to someone that cared for others more then himself. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Saminaka/53/227/22
Have a bright and cheerful day
Best regards,
Josiah Darkbyrd
Posted by: Josiah Darkbyrd | Tuesday, December 03, 2019 at 05:30 AM
There are ways the technology could have been further developed to keep things out of protected environments. Keeping people caged from exploring out of those environments is probably more complicated. My limited experience with the institutional/educational run of SL wasn't plagued by the seedier aspects of SL. It wasn't a problem for us. The problem was the institution itself. My institution gave lip service to education and outreach, but the main goal was RL money and branding. They really didn't want to put the muscle into creating something that was alive. It's real work, it requires real resources, and it requires the ability to embrace a more progressive way of thinking. It didn't take long for me to see that the SL project I was working on was destined to die.
I was different then. Sure, getting paid was great, but I would have devoted much more time for free to have some higher purpose in SL. LOL, I was so naive.
It was a great learning experience about how unproductive and crippling institutional control, rules, and pecking order can be.
I think everything worked out as it should have. SL is another planet and the things that grow in it's soil need to adapt to the environment. New possibilities was it's strength, not it's weakness. I think SL is experiencing it's own climate crisis from all of the institutional envy poisons that's been introduced to the environment over the years. Vulture capitalism, gaslighting, monopolies, cronyism, greed, and the neutering of it's middle creative class down to consumer drones has done it's job.
A little dirty sex isn't responsible for bringing down SL any more than our real world. The future won't thank us for all of our pearl clutching.
Posted by: Victoria Leavenworth | Tuesday, December 03, 2019 at 08:32 AM
AND YET! Somehow, real-life schools exist in a world that has far more controversial human activities in it than Gorean roleplay!
Here's the thing, too. So-called "woke" colleges (I attended one) frequently engage their students about society's dark sides, controversial issues, and problematic human behavior ON PURPOSE. It doesn't try to shelter students from them, it encourages them to face them & discuss things like this - that's kind of a big part of what being "woke" is about??
While I was still in school, we had several incidents with controversial groups on campus, including anti-abortion protesters who posted graphic images on large signs, etc. And we were all able to handle these things like civilized fucking adults. School staff made it a custom to alert students to events like these, so that we could choose to avoid them or not as we chose, because we're all grown-ass adults who have agency. And these controversial topics of discussion were the norm, not the exception. The process of becoming woke is to examine controversial topics, to try and understand them, not to run away and hide from them because they're upsetting to think about. πππ
What a frankly stupid, completely ignorant, out of touch, and not-well-thought-out "hot take" by the person who posted that comment. πππ Do they think they being woke is just being offended by everything?? OK BOOMER
Posted by: Nebulosus | Wednesday, December 04, 2019 at 12:52 AM
First, Hamlet, why are you using that ancient picture!? I know a lot of Goreans haven't updated their looks since 2010 but digging out that ancient of a photo makes my eyes bleed!
Second, as an active roleplayer, I can report that Gor is dying. The number of active Gorean sims is way down from past counts. There are a few old school sims which have survive for a decade or more but new ones are increasingly rare. Having to explain them is unlikely. I think college students and instructors would be more disturbed by the pervasive overly sexual classifieds which blanket the front page of search as soon as you enable Adult rated content and the other, far more accessible degrading areas like escort clubs and AFK sex sims. A handful of fetish sims for an obscure sci-fi series is benign and easily ignored compared to other areas which get featured in search.
Posted by: Arwyn Quandry | Friday, December 06, 2019 at 10:13 PM