"How can we meet the gods face to face till we have faces?" -- C.S. Lewis
This is a big subject. I should really do a book on this subject or at the very least, a long magazine article...except that SL *itself* is always that book....
"Physical Avatar -- Ventrella Linden:
"Physical Avatar" is the name of a new technology being developed at Linden Lab which allows the avatar to be more intimately connected to other avatars, things in the world, and realtime user manipulation. Ventrella believes that in general, avatars in virtual worlds are still stuck in their own local coordinate systems (referred to as the "lonely coordinate system"). Physical Avatar uses 3D physics and a special 3D transformation scheme to make avatars pliable, manipulable, and interactive, in many ways."
This fellow is that Ventrella who used to be in There. I never got much out of There, being turned off by the cliquishness which seemed worse than TSO or SL, if that can be imagined, and it seemed expensive. One thing I liked about There, which was meta to the game, so to speak, is that they figured out that the female demographics is really what they had to play to. And they also figured out that people just didn't have the graphics card power to play this game. So they basically said, let's send out free graphics cards to all the females that write in and ask for one. Nifty, eh?
The lonely coordinate system is exactly what has distressed me about Second Life every since I came there the first time in about May of 2003 was it? Then came for the duration in September 2004. It's just impossible to dance with, hug, kiss, shake hands with, another avatar, in any kind of really lockable groove. I don't know if that's what Ventrella means about the lonely coordinate system, but this jig-jag way you have to mesh the different sizes of avatars and get them to do stuff is hugely annoying in SL and makes you just keep to yourself.
We were just friendlier and nicer in TSO because we could shake hands, dance the jitterbug, do back rubs, pat someone's shoulder in sympathy, and so on, not to mention kiss romantically with cheesy Hollywood music surging in the background. Now, maybe the avatars slid on the same kind of jig-jag -- we all know how we start walking in squares to take out the garbage after playing these games too long -- but something about them just *fit*. That's because they were all the same size and proportions, there were no sliders making some bigger or smaller, or some dragons or furries and some norms.
If the avatar could move in the round more organically, in serrated edges, with roundness of motion, with less predictable jig-jags, sure, that's a good thing. Of course, we all know that we can set up gestures with that balky thingy in the UI (I never did learn how to use it, and I am stuck with the same 9 set of gestures Ingrid walked me through and helped me put in back in the day, and have never added on to them). We can buy those ridiculous A/Os, that chat and make avatars constantly assume these pouting poses like they are models on the runway all the time (that's the idea). Of course, the sex pose industry is highly developed and not only can you hump another avatar frontwise and sidewise, you can match up 3 or 4 or more on some of the furniture. You wish there was the motivation to put this much care and precision into the handshake, the holding of hands, the shoulder pat.
The other thing is of course the facial expressions. We all saw how those worked with something special rigged up not yet in the regular software that Eric Linden used in Bells and Spurs. I actually feel that weakens machinima, and makes it look too much like a caricature, the way that this funny parody of a children's shows operates on one of those granier and higher-numbered cable channels where the fingers are dressed up as people and talk.
There is a concept that Rudolf Steiner, the educator (and mystical philosopher) who created the Waldorf Schools had about how children play, and what's good for children. If you've ever had your kid in a Montessori or other type of progressive school with one of these theories, you may have encountered it.
Their idea is that it is better to have dolls with very plain or even no faces, and just the plainest blocks of all. Rather than having the elaborately painted and artificial and too-adult faces of a Barbie, or have the coloured Lincoln logs or Tinker toys, you go for plain, because not only are you attempting to appear wholesome and connected up to the world of simple Platonic ideals, you are trying to leave room for a child's imagination. The theory is that they can imagine the many ranges of emotions that Raggedy Ann can have on her own, with her plain sewn face, or a similar doll with no face even, than they can if the face is already pre-printed with that combination of vapidness and laciviousness that you find in the Barbie or the G.I. Joe.
The same for the blocks -- simple, wooden shapes will be easier to combine and recombine in a million imaginative ways. That's why I often think that sometimes, it was easier for me to create and I was more inventive in TSO, where I had the standard stock of inventory that everybody else had, than in SL, where there are a million prefabs.
An avatar who can move and groove quite a bit more than the already pretty groovin' SL avatars might lead to more immersiveness -- or it might lead to people burning through content faster, and becoming jaded faster -- what can they imagine? What can they add? Burning through content is of course the problem all game gods have to face with their mortal customers, the Lindens being no different, even though they have the strategy of promoting the content of a few demi-gods in order to keep the burn-rate down.
And nobody seems to have noticed much the work of some of the more innovative tekkies like Kitten Lulu, who is actually trying to wire up her facial expressions in RL to SL -- or rather -- mapping it out and figuring someone else will do the heavy lifting because she went on a long vacation LOL.
Of course Yadni has his emoticon thing and she references that -- but that's just it, for those of us who were in TSO with the really easy and intuitive controls for our dances and interactions and emotions (remember how they could cry? real tears??), it's hard to beat. I'd have to say that the most moving times I've ever had in virtual worlds involved my avatar's ability to cry, and another avatar's ability to pat me on the shoulder or give me a hug.
So, you know, I get as excited as the next person about this stuff until...I get like I do with my customers sometimes struggling with their poorly-made videos -- I tell them that if they log off and go turn on their TV, or go to Blockbusters or Loew's, it will be so much easier than trying to watch a movie in laggy and crashy SL -- and it will actually cost them not a whole lot more money LOL.
Aside from the puppetry and complexity that will be involved in queuing up or toggling or mouse-clicking various menus or HUDS or panels with emotions and movements and interactivity, there's the other way to go, which is I guess a kind of macro.
Remember when they did Bells & Spurs, in fact that's how it was done. People didn't act with their avatars as puppets, trying to move them around on stage and gesture (as the heroic SimArts people did in TSO when they once staged "Waiting for Godot" with sims (!)) -- instead, they just created animations, like Disney would do for a movie, making a kind of harness that you'd click on, and then it was just a question of keeping online, watching your avatar go through his paces, and making sure to unclick him or stage him correctly.
I find this very unsettling. But I'll bet it's the wave of the future.
Under the guise of more freedom of expression, more emotionality, more intuitiveness and right-brain and immediate-brain connectivity we'll get...more rote, autonomaton thinking.
I have to say that after being in SL for so long, going into WoW, I can't tell who are the NPCs and who are the real people. Some of the NPCs even talk and I still haven't sorted them all out yet. My kids laugh at me because of course they've already mastered all the instinctive visual cues you need to tell an NPC apart from a real human-managed avatar. But I'm going to persist in studying this because many of the new people flooding into SL now come up to me in the infohub in Ross and think I"m an NPC. If I'm in build-mode or trying to write a notecard and don't talk or greet them, some of them come up and click on me, thinking I'm going to say the same thing. In fact, because I *did* say the same thing in a row to a few newbies arriving, I think this fellow got the idea that I was an NPC and did a double-take when I said something "out of character" and asked him something about his interests and groups he picked on his profile. ROFL!
Maybe I missed my calling, I could have been a contender, I could have been an NPC!
I imagine I'm not so different than other people in SL, that aside from the creepiness of having to go through Eric Linden's paces on that movie, I like some of the things that are little set, contained animations.
For example, Jim Lumiere has a variety of objects he creates for his store Gestalt This 'N That that you click on and that have you do things like knead bread, dip a pen into ink and write, even wash a floor. Somehow, putting those around in a lodge I have is just deeply satisfying. People like to come and click on them and do the things, even though of course there's no skilling, no payout, no nothing. And it's not for everybody. Some people completely give them a pass. It could be gender, age, or culture related, one would have to check.
I see people come into this lodge and they'll either go in the hot tub, or they'll go for the freebies, or they'll go and do the kneading or scrubbing stuff or the chess -- or none of the above. Because...unless there is another avatar there to do these things with and enjoy them, it's no fun.
Of course, in SL there is a sizeable number of tekkies who absolutely hate and scorn anything like There or the Sims that involves having avatars do anything like having houses with kitchens and faucets where they really wash their hands, bathtrubs where they wash themselves, and beds with sex poses. They want everything to be extreme and unlike real life, and in fact I think that impulse is what drives both the furry and BDSM movements because they can make things fantastically unlike RL and feel something -- feel something they couldn't in RL, feel something they couldn't feel in SL if it is too much like RL.
What does it mean to feel something in a game? Is this a good thing? It's an article of faith among the tekkies that Everything Bad is Good for You.
Several times on the forums, newbies, who have either been ignored or ridiculed, have asked this question. Is is a dangerous thing to feel something for a stranger induced by the "Garden of Paradise" surroundings and the "Adam and Eve" animations? If they are on SL too much, do they experience headaches, confusion, withdrawal, like a drug, or like some other kind of terribly distracting experience?
St. Augustine was one of the early thinkers to grapple with this issue.
I see many really facile and stupid summaries of The Confessions on Yahoo or in the Cliff Notes type of pages that basically castigate St. Augustine with that horrid moral prudishness that only the licentious are truly good at -- imagine, Calvinist moralizing against the moralizer lol. They read, "To Carthage then I came where I was surrounded about by an unholy cauldron of lusts," and stop all thought.
What's important about August is that he tried to parse and think about the internal machinery of the human being, the mind and the emotions, in ways not unlike what game gods do today.
Back in the 4th century, in Book III when he analyzes the spectacula, or theater of his day, Augustine of Hippo asks whether it is a good thing that a fiction can move you to emotions that in fact are not real:
"Stage plays also captivated me, with their sights full of the images of my own miseries: fuel for my own fire. Now, why does a man like to be made sad by viewing doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure? Yet, as a spectator, he wishes to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very sense of grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched madness? For a man is more affected by these actions the more he is spuriously involved in these affections. Now, if he should suffer them in his own person, it is the custom to call this "misery." But when he suffers with another, then it is called "compassion." But what kind of compassion is it that arises from viewing fictitious and unreal sufferings?"
This is the oldest surviving image of Augustine, from the 6th century AD at the Lateran in Rome
The kind of emotion that is responsible for the grip of the forums and of SL and other virtual worlds is analyzed:
"But at that time, in my wretchedness, I loved to grieve; and I sought for things to grieve about. In another man's misery, even though it was feigned and impersonated on the stage, that performance of the actor pleased me best and attracted me most powerfully which moved me to tears."
He goes further, of course:
" This is the reason for my love of griefs: that they would not probe into me too deeply (for I did not love to suffer in myself such things as I loved to look at), and they were the sort of grief which came from hearing those fictions, which affected only the surface of my emotion. Still, just as if they had been poisoned fingernails, their scratching was followed by inflammation, swelling, putrefaction, and corruption. Such was my life! But was it life, O my God?"
That is, the manipulated emotionality of the theater (the video game) was enjoyed precisely because it didn't go very deep, it was controllable, enjoyable, not overwhelming.
Augustine believed that the subjecting of the soul and the fine inner workings of the emotions to such superficial and false agitation was detrimental, causing even "an inflammation" and "putrefaction".
Nobody in the modern world believes such things, which is why the yahoos at Yahoo can write dismissively of such insights but...what if it does have an effect. What if night after night, killing lots of monsters or watching lots of people cheat on their spouses with beautiful avatars or trying aggressively to beat out business competition or whatever action or emotion you chose in SL *does* have consequences, and consequences whose relentless, if invisible eroding action is destroying something innately good and fine about our souls? Nobody really wants to ask themselves that question, but by not asking it, they are letting some Congressional commitee ask it in a way that is a hundred times more coarse and blunt. The issue of games and distraction is often turned into an issue of addiction; what if it is also about spiritual distress?
"This is the reason for my love of griefs: that they would not probe into me too deeply (for I did not love to suffer in myself such things as I loved to look at), and they were the sort of grief which came from hearing those fictions, which affected only the surface of my emotion. Still, just as if they had been poisoned fingernails, their scratching was followed by inflammation, swelling, putrefaction, and corruption. Such was my life! But was it life, O my God?"
What I observe is that there can be a wonderful inner satisfaction to a completed round of some fake avatar activity. Example: a desk at which you can draw a watercolour, such as can delightfully be found at Deborah Doowangle's studio in Barton. You can take a picture of yourself, and even imagine that it is you who has drawn that painting, although, of course you haven't LOL. You could tell yourself this might inspire you to go draw in RL, this little interaction -- perhaps it might inspire you to your own creativity in SL itself, if nothing else, to make your home more beautiful by buying this artist's content in SL. But...you won't be going to go draw in RL because you suck at drawing in RL, which is why...you are in a virtual world in the first place enjoying somebody *else's* art.
Or perhaps a salsa dance, in a wonderful primmy salsa gown, of course unlike anything you own or do in RL. You might be inspired to go hunt for salsa in RL, but you'll never look as good in your salsa gown as you do in Second Life!
So...what is that inner satisfaction that SL or any virtual world can deliver *for*? Clearly, studying it is key to understanding how games and addictive behaviour and substances all work.
Cocaine is said to give people the illusion that they have all their work done and that everything is fine. I remember I used to have a friend who was on cocaine and not happy with it who would describe the feeling of being really superior and bright and not having to do anything because that sense that it was all done and you were very smart was all satisfied. That is, in RL, the sense that draws you forward is that sense that you've got a to-do list, something to get done, to get to work, or wash the dishes or put the kids to bed. That draw moves you allow the draw of life -- it has been called "being-partk-dolg-duty" and I imagine the "to-do" list only scratches the surface of such a concept ("the greatest thing is to be able to do").
Now, what if it wasn't a sin, or concupiscence of the wrong sort, but a useful exercise to have an avatar engage in leveling up, or selling a house, or making a piece of avatar clothing and seeing someone else delight in it. What if it was simply modern life? (Cory Linden was trying to float that boat by claiming that gaming had taught him to be a good father to his toddler who behaved something like an NPC...).
"Even in troubled times, how could you want to work on anything else when what you are working on is the future of everything?" -- Philip Linden in Ahern.
What if it is the future of everything???
Well, come now, it won't be EVERYTHING, of course, because, like that guy wrote in Wired or was it that other gamers' mag, I'm forgetting the name, that his girlfriend in SL was just never as compelling as his RL girlfriend with her crooked smile *just for him* with the gap in her teeth *just so*.
But how to understand that feeling that something important has happened if you avatar has done something, leveled up, gotten some loot, or sold some actual creation for RL-cashable money -- which is the hook SL has, of course. What if it is no worse -- maybe even better than -- the illusions of RL, that the 90-day impact study you completed for some obscure commission actually has some effect on the world, or the widget you sold, or law you drafted and helped to pass, or even patient you healed. What if the illusoriness of these RL things which fall away as ashes unto ashes when we die is *no better* at imprinting on the soul, *no better* at engineering the soul, so that we turn to the virtual version because it's faster? or deeper? or...something?
But...It's the irregularities of the organic, the chaotic, that the game -- the lonely axis, the code-as-law, the scripted experiences, the clickable pose balls -- simply can never reproduce.
In fact, one of the reasons the Lindens allow the licentiousness they do is because they can't think of any other way to create the sensation of the unexpected.
People are hoping that by having avatar actions, whether enacted or scripted or achieved through more elaborate puppetry, they will heal human beings or at least make them salve the itch of desire.
Already, there's at least two licensed clinical pschologists in SL, one of whom, Craig Kamenev, has specifically developed "avatar therapy" the way you would develop "play therapy" for children, or role-playing for adults.
And...healing is one thing. But what if it is just the normal course of things to come?
Yeah, SL sucks with all its prefabs. It needs those plain building blocks you're talking about, maybe some nice wooden ones, made of plywood--
oh wait
Posted by: Schwartz G | 07/03/2006 at 09:46 AM
Heh, small world... you post a pic of my RL face, and then mention Rudolf Steiner... little do you know that he was actually my gf's great great uncle :)
Posted by: eggy lippmann | 07/03/2006 at 11:26 AM
Your picture was put up in public at your birthday party, so I thought it was something you must not mind using, but I didn't label it as such -- now you have : )
Well, no, I didn't know that about Rudolf Steiner. Steiner also had this idea that until children had lost all their first set of baby teeth, they couldn't be taught to read. There was some kind of connection between...ability to take out discrete teeth from the set of teeth and the ability to sound out words in a sentence and parse meaning? Just kidding lol. He can get wacky at times. He was an important figure, though.
Oh, and yes...everything's connected. It's all One. :P
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 07/03/2006 at 01:57 PM
Oh I don't mind at all. I'm a camwhore, or so they call me... I have hundreds of pictures. There's one up on the history wiki too and a couple more in the forums.
Posted by: eggy lippmann | 07/03/2006 at 03:26 PM
WOOT!
Thot that was yoo Eggstah ;)
*smooches shell*
Posted by: Brace | 07/04/2006 at 07:46 AM
"In fact, one of the reasons the Lindens allow the licentiousness they do is because they can't think of any other way to create the sensation of the unexpected."
When you start looking at some of LL's apparently odd decisions to act--or more often to not act--and the continual seemingly counter-productive changes to the platform in this sort of way, it begins to seem less irrational.
Prok, I'll be honest, I have to struggle and work had in trying to grasp a lot of what you have been exploring lately, but that's my problem--I simply don't comprehend complex things as easily as I used to. Yet I have been very engaged by many of the ideas you are working over, such as the one quoted above.
There are times when we find our flawed Utopia very frustrating, but it is somehow also a rewarding frustration when you realize that the flaws are there not becuase the people who design and maintain the structure are chin-drooling idiots who couldn't code their way out of a wet wad of toilet paper, but becuase there is some kind of vision guiding them that seeks to elevate the flaws to soemthing else, largely through the way that we choose to respond to them.
In a way it makes me think of that great bit in "Time Bandits":
boy: "But God, why does there have to be evil in the world?"
God: "oh, something to do with free will..."
In the days before I really got a lightbulb (note that I say "a" rather than "the" because we all know there is no actual "the") regarding SL, I was one of those who used the pharse "visually stunning, but socially barren" to describe it. I have since come to accept that yes, parts of it are, but that I simply hadn't explored enough with my eyes actually open to see the other posiblities, as well as the social realities...
"what a work is avatar...how like a god..." and all that.
One of the most interesting things to me that you're asking is where do we find that sense of inner satisfaction that makes particiaption in this flawed Utopia rewarding. And I increasingly feel it is the combination of perceived (and real)randomness with our ability to choose to respond in many vaired ways, that makes this an intriguing personal and collective experiment, rather than just a great way of killing time, in the same way as say...oh...brewing your own beer (which has its own elements of randomness when some of the bottles explode inthe basment, while others turn out to be better than you could have hoped).
For example, the other day, a new character in the form of a little arm chair with feet wandered into my pub. (I think it was kind of swedish modern....plain, but not unattractive).
As my pub customers regularly include everything from cultured furred folk, vampyric socialites and other miscellaneous representatives of the undead, standard dragons, mecha-dragons, a dragon wearing top hat and pince nez, tinies, visiting Goreans, steampunk and victorian humans, pirates, faeries, to the occasional adventerous (or lost) new resident oru tourist...well, an anthropormorphized arm chair didn't seem all that odd.
I greeted him, pleasantly while it explored the poub..I asked if he wanted anything (I think it was male) and though it didn't reply, I gave him a mug of ale anyway, which he accepted. He hopped into a chair with his ale, while I continued chatting with some other guests, evey now and then asking the wee chair if he was doing ok or needed anything, and tomake himslef at home. Same kind of treatment I give all my guests.
He seemed to be listening in on our conversation, which was a mixture of catching up with an old friend and meditations on the nature of life and society among various Gorean comunities, and Dragon-related stuff, when the curious little visitor poofed.
Later, we all received a general announcment from someone that they had a griefer situation and had banned the perp--the name listed by the announcment's author was my little wandering armchair guest.
I'm not sure if he was just looking for the right person to grief, or had simply rubbed the other property owner the wrong way with his curious actions and persistent silence.
I looked up the little fellow's profile and noted that he was new and did belong to some grief-oriented groups...but perhaps the choice I made...being polite and giving him a beer anda welcome...made some kind of difference. It did, I must confess, give me some inner satisfaction...free will is a wonderful thing, and how we exercise it in SL is what makes a world rather than an eratically functioning game.
Posted by: Aldo Stern | 07/04/2006 at 11:30 AM
What's the deal with random posting comments on 4 year old entries?
Posted by: Amanda Dallin | 07/08/2010 at 12:21 PM
Click the link in their name and all will be revealed. :D
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | 07/08/2010 at 12:55 PM
I figured. Hard to believe this is an effective form of advertising but they must think so.
Posted by: Amanda Dallin | 07/08/2010 at 08:18 PM