Literature and Second Life
The Guardian on the growing literary subculture of Second Life, the online virtual world. Penguin has created a Snow Crash area, introducing avatars to the famous Neal Stephenson novel that popularized the idea of virtual worlds, and another user has created a painstaking recreation of The Shakespare and Co, a legendary Parisian bookshop. (Where the books currently link to Amazon, but will eventually be in-world e-books.)
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I wish my computer were good enough to try Second Life out. I'll get a new one next year, then we'll see.
it ran on my computer, albeit slowly. i had a whole lot to do without ever leaving the "warmup" island and decided actually getting into the main game would be way too immersive.
second life is f-ed up. did you know you spend REAL money to buy things like furniture and your house and clothes etc.? that's f-ed.
No, you spend in-game money which can be bought and sold for real world money. You can also earn in-game money, ironically, in-game, so you're not bound to use real world money.
It's actually rather clever if it becomes popular enough, it allows you to shortcut the whole ebaying phenomenon.
Why the fuck would I want to immerse myself in yet another world where everyone's just trying to sell me shit? Yeah, yeah, social networking, yeah, yeah, identity play, blah, blah... It'll be pretty wicked when everyone's so distracted from the tangible physical world that they forget that they live there and start disappearing one-by-one into the ultra-virtual happy capital orgy, leaving their bodies to wither and die, and the world outside can cleanse itself of the filthy stench of marketing.
Because it might be fun.
I'm an SL resident. I think its a blast, and I'm holding office hours for a class I'm teaching next semester there.
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