In January 2008 I blogged about the funeral of Stanley W. I still get emails about the machinima I took of it at the time from a wide variety of people, from researchers to film fest organizers to just random curiosity seekers. Death is interesting, and digitized death even more so.
Here’s the video if you hadn’t seen it. Forgive my “first day with Fraps” camera work.
I’ve since discovered that this wasn’t the first time an online funeral had been attempted by any means. Take the following video, where a group gathers in World of Warcraft back in early 2006 to mourn the real-world loss of a fellow gamer and friend. It didn’t exactly go as planned though: a group called “Serenity Now”, hearing about the proceedings, thought it was a fantastic opportunity to catch a bunch of opponents unprepared. Mayhem ensued.
What do you feel about that? Bookmark that emotion for a second, we’ll come back to it.
Try and remember that back in 2006 many were having a very, very hard time taking virtual environments seriously. Two factors were at work in people’s minds:
It’s all just a game, a toy, a plaything. Anyone acting too serious is really just asking for it. Being serious is for idiots.
Hey, we’re here to play the game! I’m seriously here to play this thing! Anybody not playing the game is interfering with my goals that I’m justifiably pursuing. Seriously, they deserve to be punished.
Funny how happily contradictions about seriousness can live together in people’s minds. When all of this was fresh and new, just a few years back, these were understandable perspectives because they brought the comfort of “being right”. As we all know, there’s nothing in the world people who spend a lot of time online like more than being right.
At the same time though, remember that feeling you bookmarked about this. Those people were mourning the loss of someone special to them. For real.
Back in early 2008 I wasn’t completely certain I understood funerals, but I’ve been to quite a few since then. I’m starting to understand the need to say goodbye properly, the need for the ceremony, the trappings, the event and the monument. I’m starting to understand what it is about closure that we’re all getting through the process.
So it was with these thoughts tonight that I sought out the original cathedral I had filmed machinima in just over a year ago. While I didn’t find a thriving v-funeral parlor business, I did find this:
That’s Dharma Austin’s grave. She was a friend of mine. Apparently, she died in March. I didn’t know.
…
So here I am standing at a gravestone… well no. No, what’s really happening is that I made an avatar walk up to a 3D graphic of a gravestone that’s clickable and contains some text about someone I’ve never actually met, not for real. None of this is real…
Well, what is? I mean, skipping the hackneyed existential argument about the nature of reality for a moment, the fact is that I’m really, really glad that gravestone is there… wherever the hell “there” is.
Standing there is important. It gives me a place to be, even if it isn’t a real place, to think what I need to about this. Now I can get through all the hard work my mind has to do, reminding myself to take better care of my friends, and how important every stupid moment we spend together is, how monumental a thing it is to joke around with someone for an hour one Friday afternoon, and what a precious thing life really is…
I need this gravestone. How the hell am I supposed to make sense of any of this without it?
God… even now I’m struck by how strange things have become…
Just how far will virtual goods go? How much influence on the real world economy are they really going to have?
(Answer in the comments!)
What’s really struck me this week is how good the Linden Lab company blogs are. Honestly these are real quality things, philosophy-free and entirely focused on practical examples that really show what can be done. Companies from all industries could learn a thing or two here.
Oh, in other news: I killed the Marketing category for now. It was too prone to idle philosophy and advertorials.
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
Sony Pictures loots Home virtual world
Despite Sony’s best efforts, a skunkworks project inside the company has conspired to put something in Home that’s actually worth doing.
Musician creates stunning, information-rich virtual world
Very much worth reading; a great example of how virtual spaces help organize large amounts of data. (Shockingly this is from itbusiness.ca… thought they had a strict “virtual worlds are prolly ungood” policy!)
Events
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
OpenSim reaches 95% compatibility with Second Life
OpenSim is getting there, but the real news will be when we start seeing the creative community putting down roots here. That’s when you’ll know it’s going to stick.
1) World of Warcraft (46.7%)
2) Second Life (3.2%)
3) Dark Messiah of Might & Magic (3.0%)
4) Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword (2.7%)
5) Bookworm (2.3%)
6) Half-Life 2 (2.2%)
7) Civilization IV (2.1%)
8 ) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (1.7%)
9) Chessmaster Challenge (1.7%)
10) Starcraft (1.7%)
Well you know statistics, they don’t always mean anything. Still, perhaps between this and Mitch’s article above we’ve identified something here: that all of these people we’ve been finding every week that say “Second Life is dead” have been suffering from some kind of sociological disorder. What’s been going on here?
Did I miss an important story? Got feedback? Leave a comment below, or email me at info [at] calebbooker.com
This latest video from Draxtor Despres covers a variety of topics related to the real world’s struggle against adoption of virtual worlds – and how the struggle is truly in vain.
A quote from Philip Rosedale sums it up best: “If you were in your working career around about 1998 or 1999 you had to get an email. You didn’t want to, but at that point you felt like the world would leave you behind. You’re all just eventually going to have to have an avatar, and some of you will still not really want to have one when you finally have to get one. But you will.”
Ethnography in Second Life – Resistance is Futile! – The Drax Files for May 2009: Dareth Denimore is a sociology student at Cambridge University in the UK. He just finished a survey on relationships in SL and in the process talked to over 200 avatars about their habits when it comes to relationships and..well, relations. Draxtor Despres, fresh back from the first ever virtual journalism summit at WSU in Pullman, WA, profiled this energetic young man. Watch for some Philip Rosedale hidden in this video as well…
In every company there’s one person willing to bring the big ideas forward. This is the visionary, the thought-leader that wants to bring the latest technology and business practices to their stakeholders. We call these people Corporate Evangelists.
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Want to know more? Contact us and we’ll walk you through the best ways to get your company started in virtual worlds.
While I’ve been known to go off on a rant in the past, I’ll restrain myself a little bit this time. Promise. Maybe.
Every week that I do the Business in Virtual Worlds News at least one story comes out deeply concerned about the state of the hype about… something. As if we’re all very concerned about how interested in things reporters and bloggers are.
There’s something you have to remember about full-time reporters though: they aren’t actually doing anything. They’re just talking about people who are. There’s a difference, honest!
Here, this is what I’m talking about:
Farming Hype Is Over
Yes that’s right ladies and gentlemen, it looks like all of that hype over farming (or as the scientists would call it: “agriculture”) is finally over. Around the turn of the century it’s all anyone could talk about. In the decades that followed we were all very concerned about drought and government farming policies. Remember the debates over pesticides and fertilizers?
But think about it: when was the last time the New York Times even carried an article about farming, except to report on the latest livestock disease? Let’s face it, farming is dead. Old news. Just give up on the whole thing.
Hype != Worth
Somehow the logic has been that if nobody is promoting a thing, nobody is finding it useful. To put it another way: everything worth doing is being actively sold to you as a good idea, and always will be. As soon as you are permitted to forget about something, you should because it is no longer useful to anyone anywhere.
Meanwhile, people get tremendous use out of things every day that most people have no idea about. Take this largely ignored CBC report from 1993, for instance:
When this aired nobody really cared, and it certainly wasn’t the beginning of any kind of hype cycle. Heck, it really only covers Usenet newsgroups. It wasn’t until people started hearing about the “world wide web” that the hype really started, quickly followed by reports that the hype had “finally died down”. Meanwhile, the Internet kept growing. Repeat with the “Web 2.0″ catchphrase.
I’m not saying that hype doesn’t have an impact. The dot-com boom was all about people putting too much stock in hype, and the bust about people assuming the negative hype meant something. Still, if you were foolish enough to have lengthy discussions about “the state of hype” over all of this, rather than getting out there and doing something, I guarantee you missed something.
So, what was the last conversation you had about something that was “all hype”? How many things could you have explored, discovered or actually experimented with during that time? What would have been the difference?
