trees are people too

There have been numerous philosophical issues that have arisen during the building of our Second Life set, it’s just that I have been so busy building that I seem to have forgotten what they are… I’ve touched on a few of them when discussing the differences between my own street and my second life street – a pertinent comparison, as in building I endeavoured to model my Second Life street closely on my real street. In doing so I carefully considered aspects of my controlled, social space in comparison to the limitless spatial possibilities available when shaping a virtual street.

In a way, the Second Life environment began as quite threatening and alienating. I didn’t really like that I could terraform the land with the touch of the mouse, that I could ‘build’ a tree, that people could move and manipulate my objects, and mostly I didn’t like the concept of blocks floating in the air. That didn’t fly with me at all. If this was my Second Life, why was everything so uncontrollable? It lacked the order, the stability, the normality, the banality of the real world. A creature of habit and routine am I.

But over the course of building, my attitude changed, and the philosophical challenges became benefits, attributes to the experience. Terraforming the land and the ability to build, copy and modify (described to me by a seasoned SL inhabitant as the key functions of Second Life) meant responsibility, but also freedom, sharing objects meant letting go of my controlling side and learning that collaboration can mean incredible synergy, and floating blocks in the sky…. well, i still grapple slightly with this, but have also learnt to tolerate it.

Ethically, Second Life is an excellent sounding ground. It is about people, places and experiences, and although we have practiced our time there in a relatively controlled environment, it is easy to be aware of the limitations, the challenges and the possibilities. More experienced SL’rs would have a different relationship to the space than I do – more time inhabiting the virtual space would allow for a more engaged response and a different perspective… To me my set was just a street I built in a computer game, but to another inhabitant it is an new environment, unexplored territory, a potential demonstration of values and ideals.

Building the set in Second Life forced me to consider some of my own spatial relationships, my perception of space and narrative. What did a space mean to me? What did it have to look like to convey the sensations I wanted it to? Why did I choose a conventional environment, rather than a castle in the sky? While some of the perimeters set responded to the brief, others were personal – my own preference of order and stability. But this is all about learning to relate to space and narrative, representation and communication, in a completely new and different environment. This video introduces it nicely:

Courtesy of GiffForseti and available under creative commons.

It’s only as i dig deeper and deeper into machinima, and start understanding what can make it amazing, that I am learning to treat the space in Second Life in a different way, view it differently, see it from another angle. It is the capability of machinima to use these environments in imaginative and innovative ways that is exciting – the reworking of existing characters and spaces to create new and unprecedented narrative devices.

We talk about remediation; understanding the relationship between old and new media. I think this is similar in a sense to learning to understand the relationship between old (actual, traditional, conventional) and new (virtual) space. Only after understanding and practicing this virtual space can we break away from conventions, utilise it innovatively and effectively, and produce fantastic and amazing media. Recognising the limitations of real space allows us to recognise the limitless possibilities of the virtual world.