I read this weekend that one of my favorite places to hang out in Second Life has shut its doors and gone away. The outgrowth of one of my favorite podcasts, the Harping Monkey was a fun Irish pub style place, where I first learned how to swordfight and where I enjoyed Irish music and cool art shows and the like.
And now, it’s gone.
This is part of the Second Lifecycle, which I am starting to understand as this:
- Discover Second Life. Be amazed, confused, and bewildered.
- Spend every waking moment in Second Life. Learn building and scripting.
- Decide to buy land.
- Decide to open a business.
- Get your first Tier bill
- Have some kind of dramatic explosion associated with your land or your business.
- Get your second Tier bill.
- Stop hanging out on SL so much.
- Get your third Tier bill. Ask yourself, “Why am I paying so @$@$@##$ much for something that does not give me joy?
- Close your business, sell your land.
- Hang out every so often, just to see neat things, play with nice toys, and talk to those folks who are still in SL whom you care about
I don’t enjoy flux in my life. I’m one of those people who doesn’t like to move, doesn’t like to change things. So, Second Life really kicks my butt in the area of change.
But maybe it’s a Change / Chaos simulator. Maybe it’ll be good for helping me get over the anxiety over change.
Anyway, Harping Monkey in SL, you were a fun place. Sorry to see you go. I loved your whole setup, from the Tudor-style pub to the charmingly-hidden smoochie-booth to the parties we had there.
And if you want to still enjoy Harping Monkey goodness, the podcast, forum, and website are still up and running and will be probably long after Second Life is but a memory.
I was speaking to a friend of mine in Second Life last night, and I was trying to explain what it was like on the old text-based MUSHes I used to hang out in, back in the 80’s and a little in the 90’s. She could not believe that we actually wrote descriptions in text of everything, including ourselves, and that we had multiple “costumes” which were really just saved descriptions. It was hard to get across the idea of a “room” in MUSH.
But it quickly became very clear to me that Second Life owes a great deal to MUSH and similar early virtual world platforms. I just wish there was a way to simply and easily create the things that I used to merely describe with a lovely, long piece of descriptive texts.
We haven’t really gotten a good text-to-speech software solution; I think that a text-to-3D converter will take a bit longer.
I’m losing faith that Second Life will ever be anything close enough to a stable platform for anything valuable.
Last night, I went to a very simple conference in Second Life. The organizers had planned for the possibility that SL would crash, indeed, the audio portion of the program was not even hosted anywhere near Second Life. SL was mainly being a sense of place kind of provider, nothing more.
It still crashed.
Not only that, but it locked everybody out of that space, so we couldn’t even come back in-world to participate.
Luckily, we had the audio portion, still, and went forward. But it was vastly disappointing.
If one is to actually produce and coordinate and run an interactive RP story in Second Life, one will need to get to a point where SL is actually stable first.
And, the way things are going, I doubt very seriously at this point that it will happen any time soon.
And I find it disappointing to the extreme.