What Makes Second Life and Virtual Worlds so Stupid and Pointless

Lalo Telling in front of his Tudor homes display in Inworldz

I was working on a video project in Inworldz last night when I saw that my friend Lalo Telling was online. I'd been wanting to see the virtual synagogue he was building so I decided to take a break and IM'd him to see if he would give me a look. He was kind enough to send me a TP and I rezzed into the middle of his month old Sim. After an hour tour I was feeling completely dumbfounded by the rich, varied and beautiful environment he and his partner had created in such a short period of time.  It also reminded me why virtual worlds like Second Life are bound to be viewed as stupid and pointless by most nubes and casual users:

The truly compelling aspect of a virtual world does not arise until both the virtual environment and those you meet within it become as viscerally real to you as your physical world experience. That takes time. A lot time. Especially for one's first breakthrough experience. And even  after crossing that perceptual line, the reality of the virtual sphere will fade without consistent reinvigoration.

I intentionally used a fairly mundane photo to illustrate the point. To the casual eye there's a cartoonish, dorky-looking figure standing in a boring setting (except for that barely-visible hottie in the far background.) But experienced from a highly immersed mind's eye, one sees the deeper reality of a creative and multi-talented man standing in the midst of a fantastic world he and his partner are building.

There is as much perceptual difference between a casual user's experience of a virtual world and that of an engaged resident who is truly embedded, as there is between viewing a photo of a place in the physical world and actually living within the environment.

I'll post more on this next week. For now here's a quote from a post today by Gwyneth Llewelyn:

... the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we’re really seeing things from the wrong perspective. Second Life is not about happy newbies. It’s about high-quality immersion. And that has very low appeal to the vast majority of people out there.