Module 4 Second Life

Second Life is addictive, creative, and social. While it may require basic knowledge of how things work to make the laws of nature different, it seems to have unlimited possibilities to reinvent yourself and the world in which you live, all for $1,000.00 down and a couple a hundred a month. Philip Rosedale, the man who created Second Life, in The Disruptive Power of Second Life says it is a bottom- up situation where digital people create, buy and sell digital items; it allows people the fundamental freedom to create. However, we may prefer our digital selves over our real selves. Regardless of the possible downsides, according to Rosedale it is unstoppable, inevitable, and disruptive.

It is much like the Internet and the Web in the early ‘90s. People can put themselves forth in the form of an avatar that is who they want to be, not who they are. It replaces cities, simulates space. Users create data that they can sell to earn real or digital money; people can build houses, businesses, and events anywhere. You can even have a baby, a digital baby, in Second Life. There is no structure to this game that is not a game. The economy of the game drives what people create; they want to sell their creations to exist in their virtual world.

Social creatures need others to learn, recommend, and experience information together. This may be the essence of constructivist learning. While this seems no more harmful than television in many ways for adults, is it applicable to people who are not adult learners?

Ryhmes of History Technology

Unfortunately, I have become addicted to the game on Facebook called Kingdoms of Camelot. This game, of course, harks back to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We are sanctioned by the king to build cities around a castle and produce resources to support the one industry that is available to us: war. Of course, other activities, such research on improving things like fertilizer to grow better crops and training our troops, are part of the game, but mainly they are ways to have more might than someone else so that we can beat them. Furthermore, we have alliances of other players that will help us if we are attacked or if we need to have more resources than we can individually support.

The interesting thing to me is how this has drawn my family together. My brother and sister-in-law started playing and told us how fascinated they are. Then my sister started playing. Because of my classes in Walden, I resisted, but just like the Borg in Star Trek, resistance is/was futile. I joined and so did my nephew. All of these people are over 40; my 18-year-old nephew just thinks we are silly. There have been times that four of us sit in one room, each with his or her own laptop, playing the game and discussing strategies. It reminds me of a quilting bee, each of us working on our own project and chatting. There is also a very active chat online with this game. We have found a community of players who have avatars and names that hide their ‘real’ identities; my sister and I are taking our real selves to Pennsylvania next week to meet some of them and go to a Renaissance Faire. We also have a code of conduct, norms that are established by the high ranking members of the alliance. These norms sound very much like the Knights’ Code of Chivalry from the Song or Roland. So yes, the future is like the past, just with cooler toys. And only pixels died when we go to war.