Students Blog

And that’s the second thing that I noticed within the game: the system. The reason this stood out was because within the game rules itself, there is no system, no meaningful play at all provided by the game designers. The entire world is player generated, and everything that players generate is open for other players to see, experience, and use. Within this we have two different types of emergence: What I like to call “random” emergence, and “societal” emergence. Some people like to create random stuff, or what appears to be random to other people within the gameworld that don’t know the ramifications of the items, buildings, or pictures that other players created or added. There’s no real benefit to them for creating these random islands, but it’s a lot of fun and they can do it with their friends, laughing as other players enter their domain and are confused as to what meaning it has. Societal emergence is much simpler – people like to do what will be generally accepted or what “fits” within the area in which they are creating things. Curiously, Second Life illustrates far more “random” creations than “societal” ones, and I think there are a couple of reasons why this is.

The first and most obvious reason is that people enjoy making things with other people. Simply because of this, there is going to be a certain level of uniqueness to anything created, ESPECIALLY if the two (or more) people creating them have a context. And that’s the second reason: context. There are hundreds of thousands of objects in Second Life, and quite a few have contexts that extend out of the game itself. I found this the most interesting part of running around in the game world. There was a definite trend of people pulling information from other games or the internet and creating some type of personification of that information/game/community in the Second Life world.

I mentioned the SomethingAwful forums during class a week or so ago, so I thought I’d expand on it here because it helps to illustrate the point that I just made. Players like to create things that they can relate to in the world, and while doing so a lot of the context can be lost on other Second Life players within the game who aren’t in on the joke. So to get us started here are a couple of screenshots from the SomethingAwful domain (they have an entire island):

Now, I can pull all kinds of meaning out of the objects and what’s actually making up their little world here, but if you introduced this to someone who didn’t have experience on the forums, almost all of the jokes within the objects would be lost and it would be reduced to “wow, that’s hilarious, it’s so random.” This is not the only situation I found that people added their own context to the in-game world. In fact, almost everything in the game has a personal touch from their creator(s), and some communities go as far as to recreate entire worlds within Second Life (an example would be the Uru area that we visited in class).

I really enjoy the lack of meaningful play within Second Life. It takes away the pretext for actually having to perform, and allows people to do whatever they like – effectively making Second Life a virtual world instead of just a gamescape. It makes everything player driven, player created, player scripted, players even determine the rules within their domain. Players create worlds based on what they want to see, and become designers themselves.

Actually, I would even go as far as saying that Second Life is less like a “video game” and more like Magic the Gathering. The entire system of the game (if you can call it that) is designed to allow players to create their own systems. You create what you want to see and do, and then others can experience it as well. It’s the closest thing to a metaverse we’ve seen yet, but it still has a little ways to go.

I’ll end with a picture of me, because emergence has allowed my character to look absolutely awesome: