[geeks] Second Life is not a game?

[Jon Gilbert]

On Jul 31, 2007, at 2:33 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> I think the problem has to do with understanding the difference  
> between
> a simulation and a game. It's been blured by the fact that someone  
> won a
> Nobel prize for "game theory" applied to business and almost overnight
> every business professor was publishing something about game  
> theory, and
> all other simulations became games because people wanted to get their
> Noble prize too.
>

That's an interesting theory. I agree that the problem revolves  
around "understanding the difference of a simulation and a game."  
Perhaps that has led to a tendency to think anything that's a  
simulation is necessarily a game.

I studied the anthropology of "play" and "games" while in college.  
Much has been written about what exactly defines a game, as opposed  
to other types of behaviors in culture. That's the perspective I'm  
mainly coming from; Second Life does not exhibit the characteristics  
that are what makes a "game" a "game." However it is based on the  
same technology as almost every currently-made video game, so it gets  
lumped in with them by people who don't understand it.

> Second life is a simulation. It provides access to things that
> people would do in "the real world", but it is not IMHO a game.
> It's a mall that was built in the Internet instead of out by the
> toxic waste dump. :-) It's no more a game than a mall was a game
> of a downtown shopping district.

Exactly. It is a sort of loose simulation. However, I would disagree  
that it's a "mall," though. To be sure, there are plenty of malls  
within SL. In fact a vast majority of Second Life resembles suburban  
America -- probably because living in suburbia has sapped the living  
soul out of most people, such that when the create stuff in Second  
Life, all they can think of to create is more suburbia. But there are  
also areas of SL that are very much non-commercial and which are not  
mall-like at all.

I think a better analogy would be to say that SL like a 3D version of  
the internet. You can create your own site, which other people can  
find via a search engine. You can interact via voice or text chat  
with others. However, unlike the web, in SL you can also see the  
other people that are currently visiting the same site that you are.  
Companies love this, because it means that their customers can  
interact with each other and form communities much more readily than  
with traditional websites.

Much in the same way that Apple (or Xerox) used the physical  
"Desktop" as an analogy when creating the GUI, Second Life uses they  
physical "world" as an analogy when creating its 3D interface. There  
is a ground level, weather, night and day, a sky, clouds, etc. It's  
not just that it's 3D -- it's that, as you said, it's a simulation.  
It's not just that SL is 3D, since if that's all it was, then it  
could just as easily take place in deep space with no surface level.  
But in keeping with its status as a simulation of the real world, it  
takes place on the surface of simulated continents and islands. This  
makes it much easier to navigate and make sense out of for people,  
much like the desktop analogy of the Mac made computers much easier  
to use for most people.

-
Jon Gilbert
PGP fingerprint: 7FA9 B168 73CA A698 DD9E  2DF2 EE1A 3E73 3119 741F