This post sparked a bit of debate here in the office about the merits of making a major move into into Second Life. Feelings range from great enthusiasm to deep aversion. I fall somewhere in the middle. On the one hand I'm intrigued by the phenomenon of full-blown social worlds developing in 2nd Life, World of Warcraft and other mmorpgs, and I feel a slight pull to venture (more as a tourist than anything else) into a place that still feels to me like the future -- to live out some of the science fiction I've read or seen about virtual universes (i.e. the Metaverse in Neal Stepheson's Snow Crash). On the other hand I'm put off by what instinctually feels to me like an impoverished human situation, a collective escapism where the deepest flaws and deepest pleasures of "first" life are smoothed over into plasticine fantasy. This is undoubtedly an outside view and I'm curious to see how my preconceptions might be altered (or confirmed) by actually going there.

All of that said, I think the potential for Second Life as a platform for modeling three-dimensional discourse is a compelling direction for the Institute and I'm all for buying an island and setting up a lab -- or salon, or a mansion made of text, or whatever else we can think of. I can imagine this group "retreating" there more regularly for brainstorming sessions. And other, larger groups converging. "Hosting" someone else's experiment takes on a whole new meaning...

Our approach over these past two years has been to throw ourselves fully into the emergent forms of the moment while retaining a healthy level of skepticism and curmudgeonly discontent. Blogging has been the focus so far: both the cultivation of if:book as our intellectual hub (eclipsing the main site, which has become a neglected garden), and the various mutations of the blog form that we've concocted in our networked book experiments. This has been incredibly fruitful path for a group with big ideas yet relatively little in the way of resources. We've stretched the familiar to its limits and, in doing so, given a hint of what might lie beyond. Second Life -- or, more generally, the movement toward 3-dimensional, environmental interfaces -- might be the logical next step (as long as we hold on to the skeptical and discontented part). Even so, I wouldn't want to abandon or demote our web-based activities. Better in my opinion to form an annex (more than a back porch but not a full institute) and see where it goes. Migrating fully to Second Life would remove us from the larger flow of ideas and experimentation in the 2-D world -- a world that continues to fascinate me and which, by its limitations, never lets me forget about that crucial first world.

Scattered thoughts about Second Life:

It probably won't surprise anybody that I'll play the curmudgeon card here even harder than Ben. As usual, there's an element of the devil's advocate in my stance here: somebody needs to look at enthusiasms with the jaundiced eye of criticism. I do think we need to look at what we're doing and why we're doing it.

Two criticisms of Second Life have come up in the office at various points in time, and I think there's something convincing, or at least worthy of consideration, in both. About a year ago we asked Ken Wark why he wasn't writing about multiplayer games and environments in Gamer Theory. He answered that he found this sort of environment less interesting than single-player games because multiuser environments tended inexorably to replicate the hierarchies of the real world. This isn't something I would have thought of myself, but I think it makes sense: it is, on a certain level, extremely disappointing that if you go to the trouble of creating a new world, you end up with capitalism and all the players have to go off and get jobs in their second life. This strikes me as a massive failure of the imagination, and not a particularly interesting one. Adam Greenfield explained his dissatisfaction with Second Life as being, in part, a rejection of the real world, which, though flawed in as many ways as you can count, is the world we're forced to live in. Just about any form of media could be (and has been) accused of being a vehicle for escapism; but Second Life is escapism reified, right down to the name. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents might be worth taking a look at here.

(Something that falls somewhere between the criticism of Wark and Greenfield comes from thinking about interfaces while watching people play with the Nintendo Wii. Playing the Wii is a great deal of fun, in no small part because it's so tremendously physical. The same sort of physicality is evoked in the videos of Apple's iPhone: there's something immediately appealing about the idea of making gestures with one's fingers more complex than point-and-click with a mouse or trackpad or pressing a key. It's exciting and it suggests a way forward; I imagine it's only a matter of time before something like this is hooked up to something like Second Life. Another echo of this can be found in Richard Powers's piece in the New York Times Book Review over the weekend about abandoning the keyboard for text to speech. (Ashton pointed out the online version of this in a comment over at if:book.) It's interesting, though, to look at what's being lost when moving towards these newer and more direct interfaces: the current level of abstraction that we're used to. On a certain level, there's not much difference between hitting the A key as fast as you can to punch and punching as fast as you can with your Wiimote in your fist. But abstraction in interface also functions as a sort of tabula rasa: it levels all comers before it. An 8-year-old might well beat Mike Tyson if it's a battle of hitting the A key as fast as you can. But we seem to be heading towards a future where the race is once again to the swift and the battle to the strong. This is where I think Wark's argument is recapitulated; on the flip side, however, one could argue that contra Greenfield the artificial world is becoming more real. There's an argument in here to be made about the role of abstraction in language and interface and how that's connected to abstract thinking and the importance thereof, though I'm not sure I'm ready to make that argument yes.)

Where do I fall? The pragmatist in me argues that it's the real world that we should be paying attention to; Donald Barthelme declares in Snow White that "anathematization of the world is not a valid response to the world," a statement that I worry about, if only because I tend to fall into anathematization without any outside help. So the question of Second Life and the physical world. While books have historically functioned as an escape mechanism, certain books - both good and bad - act upon the physical world through their readers. Can Second Life be used to do that? Probably, but I suspect it's not very likely at this point, if only because the novelty of the medium is too distracting.

More later, more later.

Ben laments leaving the experimentation in the 2-D world among other things, because its limitations keep you anchored to the "firstword." So, the 2-D world has not been exhausted yet. On the other hand, it is precisely the novelty of the idea which is seductive about 3-D environments. In a place like the Institute, it seems to me that it'd be possible to use these virtual universes as places not to replicate the hierarchies of the real world, but as vantage points from which to pay attention to the real one. If, as Dan says you go to the trouble of creating a new world to end up with capitalism and all the players having to go off and get jobs in their second life, then the whole enterprise is a waste. There will be always something lost when moving towards newer and more direct interfaces. From idea to speech to writing, from language to language, and so forth. In an immediate, and infinitely more pedestrian way, Power's article made me think about the miseries of dealing with voice recognition devices when you have a strong foreign accent. Froget aboud it.

It's embarrassing re-reading my thoughts here for the shear inchoateness of them. The problem of escapism, though, has been much on my mind lately. A useful way to think about this might be Guillermo del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth. It's worth seeing; apologies if you haven't seen it yet, and maybe you shouldn't read this, because I need to discuss the ending of it. I assume most people have seen it?

Pan's Labyrinth is about using fantasy to escape from an intolerable real world (in this case, the horrible aftermath of the Spanish civil war). This is a subject that's been treated time and again; think of Benigni's Life is Beautiful, among many others. The plot of these movies is generally that the power of the imagination can eventually conquer hardships. Going into Life is Beautiful, you know that there has to be a relatively happy ending: the good guys did win WWII after all. And it's a movie, and you know how movies work: there's generally a happy ending.

Pan's Labyrinth upends this. In part because you quickly realize that it's taking the side of the Left in the Spanish Civil War, and you know that the Left didn't win that. The weight of history hangs over the movie. You also realize very quickly that for a fantastic movie, it's extremely graphic: the movie makes no attempt to hide that people are dying in cruel and horrible ways; one by one, the sympathetic characters are killed off. This continues to the ending of the movie; Ofelia, the protagonist finds a resolution to her fantasy, but it ends in her death, in a staggeringly matter-of-fact way. There is a resolution to the movie: her death is a martyrdom, and her antagonist is killed by the remaining forces of good.

Del Toro said in an interview somewhere - maybe this Charlie Rose show, where there's a roundtable of the bright young Mexican directors - that the death of a martyr and the death of a tyrant mean very different things: a martyr only begins to exist after her death, while a tyrant stops being a tyrant at the moment of his death. On a certain level, this is describing the ending of Pan's Labyrinth: a tyrant dies and a martyr is born. It's convenient. (There's a resemblance here to the concerns of Children of Men.) But we know, historically, that this isn't true: Franco's forces did conclusively triumph in Spain, and whatever hope the remaining leftist characters have at the end of Pan's Labyrinth is illusive at best.

But I think del Toro's point is best understood as a meditation on the power of cinema (which is how I want to eventually bring this around to Second Life). Cinema is escapism pure and simple: for the two hours that you're in the theater (if you're in the theater) you abandon your daily concerns. But when you leave the theater something else happens: you take the film in your mind and begin to mix its ideas with your daily life. (This is how books function as well, of course.) In a way, a martyr has been born: Ofelia's death is emotionally affecting, and it stays with you. Context is extremely important here: in this country we think about the Spanish civil war barely ever, thinking about it as a sideshow in the bloody history of the 20th century. I suspect that watching the movie in Spain would be a very different experience: del Toro's fantasy is bringing the history that constructed their world into scrutiny using the lens of fantasy. (Maybe an analogous American experience might be reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, which brings fantasy to bear on the pain of slavery; there may be better examples.)

Maybe my view of fantasy is too fixated on ends: in science fiction, for example, I certainly prefer the work of Samuel Delany, who uses his work to meditate on the present-day realities of race and sexuality, to that of Gibson and Stephenson, who seem to be caught up in the excitement of all the new things they can imagine. I think this is why Second Life bothers me: it seems more the latter than the former.

This isn't meant to be a condemnation of Second Life: I'm merely trying to work out why I'm unexcited by it.