My Amazon orders -March 08-
Philip Rosedale: “Second Life:” What Do We Learn If We Digitize Everything? (Aug 16, 2007)
I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life (New Riders) by Mark Stephen Meadows (Jan 6, 2008)
Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games
by Edward Castronova (Oct 15, 2006)
Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality
by Edward Castronova (Nov 27, 2007)
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 am
can you provide a short feedback on the books you bought so that we can have a guide to its worthiness…
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I will be happy to oblige. Sorry for the delay.
The Long Now Foundation’s DVD of Philip Rosedale “Second Life: What Do We Learn If We Digitize Everything?”
First the critic: The DVD was made on November 30th 2006 (or 02006 as per the Long Now Clock)…which should be a good reminder that this is a dated presentation in today’s SL performances, how educators already use SL, and how presentors use SL for hybrid (or mixed-reality) conferences. There are now user-generated machinimas and other videos on blip.tv and YouTube that offer tutorials (see Torley’s tutorials for example) for targeted skills, and presentations freely shared (on slideshare.net, for example) that illustrate teaching events, research, best practices, or even general overview of the SL platform better than that what the Long Now DVD offers.
Now the good points: This is a very nice presentation, going at a pace slow enough (but not boring) for newbies (new to SL) to understand the potentials of the platform. P. Rosedale explains what the vision was and how it develops today, reminding everyone that his product is really a revolution in technology (social networking going 3D, free access) and in human behavior (user-generated success, consciousness in metaphor-free environment). The questions from the host and the audience provide some interesting information, some more mundane (*) than others but always feeding our curiosity about SL and the people behind it.
(*: Why did P. Rosedale named his company “Linden Labs”?)
A good complement to this DVD would be the April 2008 congressional webcast, in which P. Rosedale (among other luminaries of virtual worlds) testifies. See http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-ti-hrg.040108.VirtualWorlds.shtml
These 2 videos provide an interesting historical view of SL’s evolution, both technologically and socially.