{"id":286,"date":"2008-01-27T21:59:01","date_gmt":"2008-01-27T21:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=286"},"modified":"2014-01-12T13:15:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T13:15:10","slug":"batten-down-the-hatches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=286","title":{"rendered":"Batten Down The Hatches"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity and this will be tested with regards to Second Life this week when the BBC2 documentaty<\/a> “Virtual Adultery and cyberspace love”<\/em> is aired.<\/p>\n

The Beeb is of course the bastion of no advertising (Other than its own stuff) and worth every single penny of the licence fee to stop it denigrating into the awful crap that is aired on its main commercial rival ITV. However sometimes they can’t avoid giving a backward plug to the product and no matter how bad this documentary is, someone is going to take a peek into Second Life on the back of it.<\/p>\n

The premise of the documentary is regarding people spending too much time online and falling in love with people they’ve never met, even though they themselves are married. People who spend upto eighteen hours a day online will be featured and a woman who travels thousands of miles to meet her Second Life partner, leaving behind her existing family.<\/p>\n

The Times cover this better here<\/a> (Warning, includes swear words), although names appear to be different in The Times piece, the tongue in cheek poking of fun at the absurdity of pixel sex is very abundant.<\/p>\n

When I arrived in Second Life people told me that there was nothing to do here but sex and gambling, with gambling gone people will now say there’s nothing to do here but sex. Personally I’ve found this wide of the mark but not only is that stereotype likely to be reinforced, but also the stereotype that Second Lifers are people with no first life. This sort of stereotyping has been around ever since internet chatrooms arrived on the scene so it’s nothing new, yet to me Second Life is incorporated within your first life, that’s the whole point, it’s no different to playing games, be it a standalone game or a multi player game, indeed it’s no different to most hobbies.<\/p>\n

Yesterday for example I spent the afternoon at the home of football, Villa Park, with 39,000 other people. I have no contact will all but a handful of those 39,000 people, a bit like I have no real contact with the 50,000 or so people online in Second Life when I’m on. However going down The Villa isn’t considered a geeky pastime for those with no life and yet, we have websites where we moan about the management, people who complain that things aren’t right, blogs where people have differing opinions and yet it seems, if something is tactile, it has more street cred.<\/p>\n

Indeed I see no reason why one day I won’t be able to watch Villa games within Second Life at a virtual bar. Of course there are rights issues, but surely the broadcasters will eventually be able to strike a deal there, I’m going off on a tangent here.<\/p>\n

Back to the premise of The Beeb documentary, and the key question, what makes Second Life so compelling that people will absorb themselves so deeply in it that it completely engulfs them? Some will no doubt say that it’s dangerous, but surely if these people weren’t using Second Life they’d be using facebook, Myspace, chatrooms, yadda yadda yadda.<\/p>\n

The doors are open, the horse has bolted and the stable door is only going to open wider, it’s not going to close and virtual worlds will become more and more popular. Is the sky going to fall on mankind? Not bloody likely is it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity and this will be tested with regards to Second Life this week when the BBC2 documentaty “Virtual Adultery and cyberspace love” is aired. The Beeb is of course the bastion of no advertising (Other than its own stuff) and worth every single penny of the licence … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Batten Down The Hatches”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,14,647],"tags":[77,1022],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rJUK-4C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}