Virtual Worlds, Games and Gaming, and Second Life

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

A long, long, time ago, in a country far, far, away, I played a game (or was a member of the community, if you will) called LambdaMOO. LambdaMOO was a blend of techno-utopian escapism, procrastination and hacker wizardry. Building on role-playing traditions, you connected to a text-only virtual world where none of the constraints of your mundane life applied.

Fifteen years later and a new wave of commercial virtual worlds sweeping the Internet in the form of Second life and it's ilk. Unlike traditional "games" these virtual worlds are not competitions, man-vs-monster or puzzle solving centred, they're community centred.

Second life is currently struggling with security issues, but there are much bigger potentially issues lying just under the surface. LambdaMOO lost much of it's appeal for many participants after the incident documented in Julian Dibbell's aptly titled "A Rape in Cyberspace," which evaporated the techno-utopian dreams and left the community traumatised. I certainly hope that Second life has a plan in place to deal with such situations.