Second Life and Emergence
Setting simple rules and watching unpredictable results occur...
Second Life is a huge world in which players are given almost complete customization from their avatar to anything their creative minds can think of. Player's can morph their character through clothes, to the length of their eyebrows, to the size and color of their eyes. It can take literally hours of customization due to the massive amounts of choices players can make. This feature of Second Life is referred to as "Open Source," an open authorship model that allows players to take the role of a GM and create their own content within a game. (Pearce) But the most enjoyable feature of Second Life is it's unpredictable emergence. Emergence can be described as a system with a limited set of rules that produces unexpected results from its complexity and meaningful play. (Salen and ZImmerman) Meaningful play is seen in every choice a player chooses to make, such as buying land for private or public use, creating a home of some sort that aspires other desginers and creating wearable items to sell. Some groups in Second Life are recognized by the items they wear, such as a pair of wings and a halo. During my play, I found myself being bombarded with hundreds of choices that would affect my avatars appearance to others. Of course, being able to customize your avatar allows you to change your appearance at whim, but I found it interesting that every player did care about their avatar's appearance and how they behaved. Second Life also demonstrates bottom-up behavior; simple rules such as 10 ways of customizing every body part of the avatar, or placing any skin on a created manipulatible object opens more outcomes than can ever be counted. Overall, Second Life is a prime example of emergence done well.