Episode 34 of the Linden Lab sponsored Drax Files: World Makers, features the Cheeky Pea brand and the people behind it, Isla Gealach and Ewan Mureaux. This is the age old tale of virtual world scripter meets virtual world home and garden decor creator, they fall in love and live happily ever after. This of course isn’t the story the media often highlight regarding virtual world romance turned real, but it’s a story beautifully told in this edition of The Drax Files : World Makers.
Don’t panic, it’s not a mushy love story, it’s a tale of the benefits of virtual world collaboration and physical world realism making up the whole. The episode opens with Isla talking about the beauty of immersion in a virtual world, how the space can be manipulated to create something you can feel.
Where this episode really hits the button is in terms of the footage outside the virtual world. Isla using Maya to create items, her daughter taking an interest and even wanting to create her own items firmly makes the point that behind the 3D avatars are real people, doing real things.
There’s also an excellent section where we see how the physical world that we all live in, is an inspiration for the items created for a virtual world.
This episode is not all about the physical world though, we see plenty of footage of Second Life, from avatars walking around, to attending a live music event and this helps to point out that virtual world creators are not all about all work and no play.
The power of virtual worlds for shared collaborative working is once again raised in this episode . Isla and Ewan started out working together as partners with no romantic links and they were able to do this in a virtual world space to get instant feedback from each other. However it also turned out that they didn’t actually live that far from each other in the physical world, but the collaboration they describe has been exemplified in previous episodes of The Drax Files : World Makers by people who live thousands of miles apart.
Ewan also points out that the money he has been able to earn in the virtual world does pay for goods in the physical world. The money from his scripting helped to pay for his first car. Some virtual world creators can and do make significant money, which often makes me wonder why the mainstream media are so negative about virtual worlds. I firmly feel that this perception may change if the perceived virtual reality boom hits, there will be more people embracing paths such as this to earn a living and the media won’t be able to paint them all as being people with no life. Obviously if the media would scratch a little beneath the current surface they would find they have the wrong perception already.
The episode also touches upon how meeting in a virtual world is different than meeting in the physical world. This of course, seems obvious but the point made here is that Isla feels that virtual world interactions help people to get to know the personality of the person they are talking to. This is something that I’ve seen people raise before and there is an aspect to the virtual world setting that enables people to speak more freely because they are not face to face with that person.
This can help shy people to come out of their shells and engage in scenarios that they would not feel comfortable with in the physical world, this can be healthy, but on the flip side, meeting in the physical world also tells us a lot about a person with added depth that a virtual world cannot re-create. In the case of Isla and Ewan, they had known each other in Second Life for over two years before making the leap from the monitor to the physical world street.
The episode closes with Isla pointing out that virtual goods and services are getting more popular, but Isla also points out that it’s important to remember that all around us is a real physical world with delights, sights and activities that we should not neglect. Balance is the key.
This is a very well produced episode that in such a short space a time tells a very heart warming story. Yet again Draxtor manages to pack far more into a five minute slot than you would really think possible. This is well worth a viewing.
SLURL To Cheeky Pea : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cheeky%20Pea/27/133/21
Cheeky Pea Website : http://cheekypeasl.com