Final Project - Analysis of Second Life - Mirja & Pallavi

Talked about as game, Second Life (SL) is really a completely new world, which does have similarities with the real world (RL).People live there, make friends, shop (a lot) do business, travel (teleport!), and change clothes. However, the powers the people have in SL is more than you can imagine and want and RL. It is interesting to see what kind of people join SL and why, what changes they make to their avatars, and what competitions and activities they engage in.

The Residents
Residents (users) of SL have a sense of belonging and ownership here and are very friendly to the newcomers, helping them become a part of this world. People I have interacted with this far are in SL to try it out because it is not really a game and you can do anything you want to. Most people are here to have fun and make friends. Most keep their RL and SL lives apart but some do a role playing and are “themselves” in SL as well. A few examples of the residents of SL--a mother of three who was conned into joining SL by a man she was cybering, two students of computer science (one of them looking for a job), and an IT admin by day and gamer by night.

Appearance & Avis
Almost everyone in SL dons fantasy clothes and appearances. The fact that you can control what your body shape and facial features are has a lot of power to give these people the ideal appearance they want. There are many that go beyond imagination in the RL and then there are those that look and dress like they do in RL save something like a beard or glasses. As an example, see the RL and SL images of Stormy Twilight, a friend Pal made in SL.


Of the residents I spoke to most of them looked similar to their real self except for some features. People seem to do a lot of shopping for new clothes and accessories. The women apparently like to change their clothes everyday, much like the fashion competition we see in RL. It seems that fashion, especially fashion in terms of clothing, appearance and lifestyle plays an important role in SL. When “Keira”, Mirja’s avatar walked around in SL at the beginning, she looked obviously too “basic”, and for experienced SLers it was obvious, that there was not enough time invested to personalize the avatar. As a consequence, a female SL fashionista came to talk to Keira, and after a very few small talk sentences, she recommended a good hairdresser – that Keira should teleport to. And some time later, Mirja, who’s behind Keira in RL, found an email in her mailbox, asking if the hair issues were solved. The costs for fashion are mostly very high in terms of time, used to permanently update your knowledge on latest trends, to re-dress your avatar, to go to your virtual hair-dresser, but also in terms of money, because nearly all fashionable objects or projects are virtual material ones that need to be refreshed periodically.

If you start building objects or virtual buildings, there is also an incredibly amount of time (or money if you do not have the skills) SLers invest to construct homes and shops. Decorated and refined with many details, most people we met were proud of their creative output and willing to show us their virtual bricks.

Still, fashion is not a very reliable way of signaling in SL, because even if someone seems very exclusive, you can’t make sure if this is a result of his or her own skills to shape the virtual body or the online environment, or if it is maybe a high investment of bought objects and behavior patterns. In RL, you have still the human being behind, and even if this maybe transformed through tanning, clothing or surgeries, there is a human channel left, which might help you to interprete fashion signals more reliable. In SL however, this “human channel” and the entire context are shaped and controlled by the person behind and therefore the point of reference is missing. Most residents change their profile but not their personality. It would be interesting to know which people prefer to keep their real appearances in SL and which do not. However, in both cases, the avatar has a kind of a mediator role, which is different from a text-based chat, where A communicates with B through text only. In SL, A communicates with his avatar, which again interacts with B’s avatar. The real people are one level further than each other and the role of the avatar is the decisive one.

Language is also a way to express fashion and style in SL. Especially in interaction between people, language can be a quite powerful indicator of who is behind the avatar. Similar to text based chats. In some cases, we supposed chat-bots behind some avatars, especially in commercial SL places, as casinos and gambling spots, where SLers try to encourage you to play.

Gift Giving
Residents are amazingly friendly and generous with gifts to newbies. Within the first few hours of really experiencing SL and making friends, Pal got an entire wardrobe. She tried to give some of those to Keira but the objects/clothes are controlled with a ‘no copy’ clause and if she gave them away she would loose them from her inventory.
When we were talking about gifts in terms of signaling, Camerer mentioned in his paper, that gifts are economically often inefficient, because the recipient doesn’t estimate the choice the gift giver has made. In SL we experienced that people are very likely to make gifts to strangers – as Pal experienced with her wardrobe. Why are people so friendly and generous in SL? Is there an economic advantage behind? In the example of clothes, gift giving is not related to high costs, but still increasing reputation. This is probably why people are very generous at the first sight.

Keira received a interactive book as a gift, a real book digitalized page per page, the single pages uploaded as textures and turned into a readable virtual book. The gift giver explained the way he created the book, and the fact that he invested a mentionable amount of time to build the object, made the book a valuable gift. The creator explained the way he build it – and even if it didn’t cost him a lot of Linden Dollars, it took him a long time to set it up – what makes the gift precious. In this specific case, the quality of the gift and the way it was (positively) perceived could be an indicator of a match of personal interests (similar to the online gifts in dating environments we discussed in class).

An interesting point to note in this generous world is that, much like RL if you try to sit and ride a vehicle you find, but is not yours and you don’t know who the owner is, you are ejected the minute you try to start the vehicle.
In SL in general, assessment signals are more popular to communicate status and reputation, probably due to the fact that conventions are not clearly established and understood, it is hard to distinguish between RL conventions and SL conventions and therefore the risk of misinterpretation is relatively high.

Competition
There is not a lot we could infer from the competition in SL. Residents compete with one another in context of how much land they have and who builds better objects, houses, boats, vehicles etc. There is competition in terms of fashion among the women, where people shop, and what they buy. There is also a “coolness” attributed to objects (especially freebies) that residents come across and share with other newbies. This kind of competition is also seen in RL signaling wealth and skill.


Reputation
There are four categories for rating people--behavior, appearance, building, and given. Ratings used to be free when it started and the rating system became a popularity contest. However, now there is a $25L to rate someone and the ratings are being taken more seriously and are more reliable. Most residents do care about what others think of them and this is afforded, probably, by the design of SL. In RL people care about what other think of them and those that do not are the natural troublemakers and this phenomenon exists in SL too. The fact that in SL, residents indulge in activities much like those seen in RL and thus the signals and cues associated with those activities are alike, it causes people to worry about social status and reputation.

Lying can be costly and decrease personal reputation or break relationships between each other – if the lie is detected. In SL, it is very hard to distinguish between lie, role, fiction and reality. One helpful function of the interface design is here the rating of people. Even if it is only a small hint, an opinion of others can at least give you an impression different from yours and eventually prevent you from further interaction or business with this suspicious person. It seems after interviewing a few avatars and according to business related articles, that reputation can be achieved especially through ownership of land and real estate. In this case the online reputation can even reflect in real life reputation – as it is the case with “Anshe Chung”, having a prospering virtual real estate business in real life and her avatar titled the RL’s Businessweek cover.

Merging of RL and SL
Most residents keep their RL and SL life apart but many use their discretion and keep private information out of SL but are willing to share other information about their RL. There are no real life barriers when meeting and interacting with people in SL even though they share a virtual physical space. Sharing a common space however seems beneficial and adding value to interaction in online environments. The notion of space is not as obvious in only text-based chat rooms for example.

In the broader sense of the merging, some activities in SL have a direct impact on RL. Social online communities turn into real life social networks and vice versa. Groups having the same interest create private islands in second life and explore, research and experiment in the online environment as a place for education, remote conferences, participative design and democratic communities. For instance an island, “live2Give”, started by Wilde Cunningham for physically challenged people who log into SL during the day and are able to do things and be the people they never can in RL. A group raised funds in SL and bought a PC for this group in RL so they could run SL.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School for example, pursues a research project in the virtual Berkman Center of Second Life, where they stream bi-weekly real lectures into the SL environment.
John Lester, another researcher from the Harvard Medical School operates a private island in SL, Brigadoon island, for people with Asperger's syndrome and their caregivers. People suffering from Asperger’s can exercise social interaction in the virtual space and transfer the learned skills into real life’s situations.