Sometimes you read a blog post somewhere and decide it’s time to unleash the army of darkness on the author, I should add at this point that my army of darkness includes Elves. However sometimes you decide it’s best to refrain from abusing your powers as an evil drow wizard just because someone had the temerity to write an article.
Which brings me to an article over at WhatCulture! The article in question is GAMING VS LIFE: The Noob’s Guide to Escapism… by Brad Fear, which covers World Of Warcraft, Second Life and drunken nights in the pub and the potential aftermath, it also covers Star Wars: The Old Republic, for which I’m not in the beta testing, although I wish I was!
Part of the reason that I have decided not to unleash The Kraken on the author is because I find the article amusing! Lucky for him hey, it does play on some stereotypes, but that’s part of the fun, we can’t always get all disgusted of Tunbridge Wells over articles.
The article makes some good points about the lure of online gaming and virtual worlds, such as: “Online role-play is big business indeed. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Linden Lab’s Second Life are all the evidence you need of that.” Online roleplaying in Second Life could be bigger and better, which is why I disagree somewhat with Will Burns recent blog post about Kim Linden leaving. I agree with much of what Will wrote but Second Life needs to widen its appeal, although I still maintain that Linden Lab could benefit from not all of its spaces being under the Second Life umbrella, but I’m in danger of going off on a tangent here, so let’s get back to the WhatCulture! post.
The post has a tongue in cheek pop at some of the realities behind those who are the reality behind the avatar, pointing out that some may be extremely socially awkward, this is undoubtedly true and some will spend warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck toothed girl in Luxembourg but that’s part of the appeal and if you go to some clubs, like I did when I was a lad, you’ll find them moping around the dancefloor to The Smiths, I could be one of them, some will tell you I am but let’s move on rather swiftly.
The article also points out someone called Dave Pollard, whom I’d never heard of, who was apparently some sort of Second Life love rat, however these sort of things don’t just happen in Second Life, they’ll be happening in Azeroth too as well as behind the twitching curtain of your neighbour.
The online world does provide us with the opportunity to meet new people and expand our horizons, it also makes us realise that people are strange, when you’re a stranger and that reality does indeed bite. There are many pro’s to the online world and it’s something that’s going to progress further, humans need to adapt to this, but we don’t reallty want to end up in situations such as in Barbarella or Woody Allen’s Sleeper where some of the more fun and stimulating aspects of human to human interaction are replaced by technology, Luddites should reform if we ever get to that stage and do the job properly this time.
Entertainment evolves, my parents generally can’t understand why people spend so much time online and make observations about this during the commercial break in Coronation Street or before the next episode of Eastenders starts, although my Father is now happily using a laptop to search for the best price on their next holiday, he still speaks negatively of Facebook, despite having never used it and then asks me if it’s free, or is YouTube free, I haven’t yet got around to telling him Second Life is free, there are times and places for meeting people and I don’t want to meet my Father in a virtual bar in Second Life, I’ll stick to meeting him for a few pints down the real pub on a Sunday lunchtime!
The thing is that society is in many ways in denial about online activity, it’s geeky, nerdy, anti social, but they’re all at it and when they talk of nerdy, geeky, anti social activities they don’t mean the ones they engage in, they can’t see the hypocrisy of their stance because they don’t want to and Second Life still attracts far more negative sterotyping than World Of Warcraft, but then again Second Life hasn’t managed to get people such as Chuck Norris to advertise it, whereas World Of Warcraft has.
However the bottom line really is, if we can’t have a giggle about some of the stereotypes and consistently take ourselves all too seriously, the digital revolution will become a very sterile zone and we really don’t want that … although it would probably fit the storyline of some sci fi novels!