Is Second Life revolutionary?

[kateamdahl]

On Charlanna's blog (whoops! forgot to link this when I first posted it!), she talked recently about how her expectations for Second Life had kind of dropped a little over time. It's still amazing, I think many of us agree, but it doesn't seem to be turning out to be revolutionary, changing society around us

Comments

Good points!

[anonymous]

You raise some very interesting points, Kate! Don't get me wrong, I still think there are tremendous possibilities that exist for virtual worlds. Your example of being able to virtually try clothes on already exists (to a certain extent) with My Virtual Model. A big part of what I was trying say in my post is that the school of thought that seems to believe you can take what you do in the atomic world and transfer it in the virtual world and somehow it will be revolutionary feels wrong to me. For widespread adoption to take place, it has to feel like a tool that people simply can't live without in the same way that it would be hard to imagine not having an email account. Technology, applications and adoption of virtual worlds will catch up, but IMHO, we're still a loooong way away from being close to that. (plus there are a whole couple of threads that I didn't quite touch on in the post but have been thinking about...one is that we might not even be able to conceive of what the best applications will be until technology catches up and the other is that some people seem wholly uncomfortable with the concept of projecting yourself through an avatar...but those are opening big cans of worms that I know I don't have a strong enough crystal ball to see)

Lanna
http://charlanna.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/my-tammy-faye-bakker-moment/

Re: Good points!

[kateamdahl]

Hi Lanna!

Oh, I *did* forget to say that my post is really a kind of tangent. You brought up the very good point that you can't just bring something into a virtual world and expect it to offer all kinds of special value just because it's virtual. Past that, though, I think even a lot of the things that can offer special value in a virtual world won't be able to appeal to a wide public until they are much more sophisticated in terms of those three things I mentioned.

My Virtual Model is a very good example! It seems like a great idea, but having a sort of online image approximating my body is a very different thing than being able to (if I want) have an online avatar that is pretty much exactly like First Life me, and dragging and dropping things on a Web page is very different from trying things on in a virtual world.

Right now there seem to be a lot of neat ideas and possibilities, but I don't think they'll become major forces in our culture until they're much more advanced than they are.

^^^\ Kate /^^^