Avatar superstar
Brink loves Brink. But if it didn’t … then it could make an avatar to fulfill its wildest identity-shifting fantasies. And to make virtual life easier, the BBC reports that now your avatar can span across virtual cliques. That is, your Second Life character could also be your … Wii character. Or other virtual world character/ facsimile. (Love that word, by the by. Use it sparingly, but wisely, and your life will be richer.)
Anyway, this could be useful, considering that your workplace orientation will probably be taking place online. So you can judge a person by his avatar after all. Hmm. Well, Brink Google-imaged (and created a verb) “liz avatar” to test that statement. Let’s take a look:
And if that isn’t Brink in a nutshell, then I don’t know what.
Paying digital respects
Not all of us can make it to the Virginia Tech campus to pay our respects, so instead, residents in Second Life are visiting a memorial in the online world. Yet another cool use of the game.
(Thanks to Matt @ College Ave. for the link)
Partying with pixels
Tonight’s IC event, “Virtual Worlds: Real Connections” was basically just one big Second Life wine-and-cheese party. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, and James Gee, a professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin?Madison, were the night’s main guests. Unfortunately, Jenkins missed his flight. But Gee was great ? more on him later.
The event was held in the physics lab, and students and faculty demonstrated the game on eight projection screens around the room. The space is perfect for this kind of thing. The designer, Michael Rogers, said the lab has a pretty great soundsystem, too, and one night he projected The Matrix on all eight screens and blasted the volume. That got me thinking, and, at the risk of sounding totally geeky, this lab would be perfect for a Halo party.
Photographer Jeff Morganteen and I just wanted to get some pictures and mingle, but somehow I ended up being one of these student demonstrators. The lovely April Korpi, who works in Park, lent me the use of her avatar, and for about an hour, I wandered the NBC island, which is just a virtual replica of Rockefeller Center.
While playing, I spoke with Joan Falkenberg Getman, the senior strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell, and Gee. Gee told me he’s been playing World of Warcraft since it came out, and there’s a group of about eight faculty members and a bunch of students out at UW-Madison that play it all the time.
We talked a bit about PMOGs (which, you may recall, I talked about last week), and he raised an interesting point: That PMOGs are really just “awareness” tools ? they alert you to your Internet use, and point out what and how often you are using. PMOGs make you aware of the Internet structures you work within every day. So why not track your e-mail use and, as with some PMOGs, get points in a game for it? You’re going to be e-mailing all day anyway, might as well make it fun.
What was really great about the evening was the enthusiasm about the potential for using these online networks as educational tools. Professors from Cornell and IC, with little knowledge about Second Life, were willing to take 10 minutes to learn about it and even give the avatars a try. One of the Cornell business professors is now figuring out how to set up business classes that would teach accounting, stats and so on in a game that mixes Second Life and, what he called, “World of Bizcraft.”
Party pictures after the jump. Read more
When will it end?
The virtual world never ceases to amaze Brink. That College Ave. guy (recently returned from a three-week hiatus) sent me this heads up: Artists are bringing your virtual selves back into the real world.
Fabjectory creates scultptures of avatars, including your Nintendo Mii ($50 for a 3-inch piece, $100 for a 5-inch piece); your Second Life avatar ($99 to $200); or your SketchUp creations ($50 to $150).
So basically, you create your virtual self, which may or may not look like you (some people prefer to have tails and wings in-world). Then you pay Fabjectory a (pretty hefty) commission to bring a virtual-specific creation into the physical world.
Fabjectory might be on to something here. But it doesn’t have to end there. I for one would like to see residents in Second Life set up an in-world business that makes virtual replicas of the physical replicas of residents’ original virtual selves (which may or may not look like them).
So, wait, which one is the real you?
Hyperart
Online worlds: Weird? Nah, to Brink it?s fascinating stuff.
Richard Minsky, an artist and founder of the Center for Book Arts in NYC, is publishing the first magazine dedicated solely to online world Second Life?s art scene this month. The publication, called Slart (read: Second Life Art), will cover issues with online art (one feature: “Is All Virtual Art Illustration?”). It will be an in-world publication, and there might be a print version, too.
Second Life is designed totally by its users, and people take their creations very seriously. Users make clothing, churches, houses in the sky ? you name it, and SL probably has the digital incarnation of it. SL already has about 100 online galleries. Actually, SL itself could be considered one big piece of art. Its open source model distinguishes SL from, say, a multiuser game like World of Warcraft, which doesn?t allow players much creative control beyond avatar design (that, and SL isn?t really a ?game game,? there?s not much of a goal involved).
It probably goes without saying, but digital art really does make you think of art in new ways ? in terms of presentation, production, and the traditional relationship between artist and viewer. Digital art is interactive and participatory, blurring that static relationship between the artist mounted on a gallery wall and the silent observer. It really all comes down to making connections, among people and ideas.
Sure, there?s plenty of net art out there, and has been for some time, taking its cue from Dada, Fluxus and conceptual art. But Second Life, already inhabited by about 3 million users (crazy!), makes the in-world art movement well worth following, even if the SL craze dies within a few years. Such a high profile network can only further the popularity of digital art and push it into new areas.
There is plenty of good reading on SL and digital art, but here are a couple of my favorites: Social Sim is a blog about SL and social networks in general. Written by Aleks Krotoski, a Ph.D. student in England and a games blogger for The Guardian, the blog takes a deeper look at the social networking trend ? really interesting stuff. And since I always encourage a good read, check out Christiane Paul’s book, Digital Art. Paul works in the new media division at the Whitney museum.
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