Whereas Inara Pey , Daniel Voyager and Nalates Urriah are bringing us the skinny on the lowdown regarding Second Life’s tenth birthday (even though Philip Linden and Steller Sunshine hit eleven this month) I’m going to look forward to a Second Life related birthday of a different sort. On April 22nd Hamlet Au’s New World Notes will hit its tenth birthday. As far as I’m aware there will be no events, no booths, no sponsorships and the cake is a lie, but never the less, love him or loathe him, it’s an important milestone.
Thanks to the wayback machine, we can look back at some of Hamlet’s early musings, from a time when New World Notes was incorporated within the Second Life website and even had its own forum. Early Hamlet is rather interesting, because you can get a sense of being ready to expect the unexpected:
“Because what is happening now in the Beta test of Second Life is very much a social experiment in the making. Literally, “making”: thousands of volunteers are already in there now, buzzing around in Linden Lab’s servers, shaping their world out of thin air. From a default canvas of wide oceans and rolling hills, they’re cramming the place with coffee tables, exotic swords, sunglasses, ride-able rockets, electric guitars, readable books, soaring Japanese pagodas– pretty much anything you might imagine, and a lot more you wouldn’t dream of– to create a playspace as vast and varied as creativity and enthusiasm allows.”
Nobody knew what would happen, what would be formed, of course we have a better idea now, but that potential for creative space is nicely summed up there, so are the dangers of user created content because it’s certainly true that things you wouldn’t dream of, have been created, but that is part and parcel of the beauty and beast of Second Life.
Early Hamlet tells us how he tried to make his avatar look like his RL self and how the vast array of choices on how to customise your avatar, was challenging. Hamlet pointing out that back in 2003, you didn’t usually get that much choice on how your character appeared on screen.
There’s talk of a Blade Runner inspired city being built, someone publishing poems in a virtual book, a gated city called Lusk Court, people beating each other to a pulp with weapons, riding around on rockets and the concept of virtual marriage.
Then there’s talk of a virtual photoshoot with Tanya Linden, whom I’m not at all familiar with unfortunately but Hamlet muses:
“So it occurs to me that this is almost a workable alternative to a real world, everyday business necessity. And there’s got to be others, if you’re willing to get creative. If you work for a company with offices across the world, for example, and a bunch of you need to meet, why bother with a teleconference, when you could all gather around a virtual table?
For that matter, why not build a virtual office building, and stock it with all the files and data you’ll need to work, and let your personnel sign on for their shift, only from their home, or an Internet cafe, or a park via a wireless laptop, or pretty much anywhere that’s connectable in the world? I remember this idea being tossed around before, when fantasy MMORPGs first grew in popularity – trouble was, not many people wanted to have a business meeting where everyone was wearing robes and carrying swords. But since Second Life isn’t geared to genre, it could be the first online space where something like that is viable.
Not everyone’s wild about the idea of commerce and mundane business activity sneaking into their play space, to be sure. But then, I think it’s also safe to say it’s something that’s on the way, whether we like it or not.”
Second Life for business usage has been toyed with, time seems to have passed that idea by to a degree, new ways of remote working have transpired over the years, remote working is frowned upon in some quarters these days even though it was touted as the next big thing at one point.
I have seen discussions on mailing lists about people wearing unsuitable attire for meetings within Second Life, so this did actually happen and of course business has very much touched Second Life in terms of users building their own little businesses and big or small business, some people don’t like the commercial side of Second Life, it did make its way here, whether people liked it or not.
Rather interesting stuff, I wonder how things will look in ten years time when hopefully we’re all around to look back.