Futuring and Sustainability For Virtual Worlds?
As Alex Steffen at the World Changing blog points out, “we can’t build what we can’t imagine.” The city of Berlin, hoping to help build a better future for itself, is now in the process of catalyzing some imagination in a series of events looking at “the future of urban spaces in [the] world.”
As futuring goes, this seems like a great way to go about things, especially the series of citywide “experiment days” involved in the ExperimentCity project. This got me thinking about whether there couldn’t be a way to do a similar thing in virtual worlds.
ExperimentCity sounds like an exciting project to map onto Berlin:
The idea . . . is to engage the creative community with the principles of sustainability, networking together an impressive array of existing efforts and bring forward new arts, design and communications efforts that will inspire Berliners to break out [of] the mental prison in which their presently dire circumstances have boxed them. . . . To that end, ExperimentCity is partnering with Berlin21 to hold not only the usual discussions and workshops, but city-wide “Experiment Days,” which will identify and bring forward 50 cutting edge projects, and weave a network capable of enticing Berliners into supporting them. The focus . . . is on “stories, projects and people,” and creating new ways of bringing forward visions of the city (like art exhibitions and fashion catalogs) rather than on the mechanics of sustainability themselves.
For the virtual world, this raises a couple of questions, not least among them what the notion of “sustainability” means in the context of virtual worlds. It may be far too early to start answering that one, although it’s interesting to think about. (Is the World Wide Web, for instance, sustainable? What makes it so? Which of those characteristics are shared by a virtual world like Second Life? By one like ActiveWorlds?)
The other is what kind of “cutting edge projects” might be brought forward, and how one gets them to emerge from the noise. That’s a much easier one, and I’m tempted to answer it by launching a similar project in Second Life, one that would combine a few interesting chats about the future of the platform with a program to galvanize resident projects and “weave a network capable of enticing Berliners Second Lifers into supporting them.” The initiative would presumably seek projects that promote “sustainable” uses of the virtual world. But again, what does that mean exactly? I invite readers to give it some thought and get back to me, so that perhaps we can start to get a project like this off the ground when I get back from Texas next week. What do you think?
A discussion group on VW sustainability sounds excellent. If you post a time and SLURL for a discussion I’ll dust off my SL avatar and take part. I’ve jotted down a few notes on the topic, but I’d like to hear from people with more experience.
In a slightly related note, Mario Gerosa published an Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architecture, which (if it isn’t a joke) is a recommendation for the creation of standards, laws, and a governing body to protect virtual builds. After all, if the in-world culture isn’t sustainable then why should we care to sustain the world itself?
Good to see that other SLers have caught the sustainability bug!
I think it’s easy to define sustainibility in the virtual word – it’s whatever reduces lag while at the same time reinforces the real-world behaviors of frugality and responsibility. The fact is, sustainability requires a change of lifestyle, so why not try it out in the virtual world first?
I’ve spoken briefly with a few individuals about instituting a “prim cap-and-trade” system in SL. Baseline prim limits on estates would remain as is, but Linden would allow people to reduce their parcel’s max and sell credits to other landowners in the same sim.
I’ve created proposition 1915 in SL’s Feature Voting System to forward this idea to LL and I’d love to discuss it when you set up the chats.
No, the convention for protection of virtual architecture is no joke, I think I’ve even blogged about it before (which means it *must* be true, right?).
Thanks for chiming in, you guys. I love the idea of a prim credits trading scheme. Anyone else have anything futurely kicking around in their heads they’d like to discuss? Feel free to do an early brain-dump here. I leave for Austin tomorrow night (5 September) and I’m not back till 11 September, and will set about organization after that. Should be fun.
The idea of selling “credits” of the prims in the sim to other landowners seems odd to me. If someone should have excess prims (a rarity, as you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many prims), then they sell the “prim farms”. They’ll hunk off 256 m2 of land somewhere on hillside or water or whatever and sell it carefully to a neighbour by name, not put it on the open market often (because it would get griefed up).
We’ve also discussed the preservation of architecture quite a bit in the meetings of the Society for Virtual Architecture — what are you preserving when you do this? Is it a fool’s errand? Given prim drift, tier costs, and the easily-bored architect who wants to keep erasing and try something new on this easily-painted canvas?
Why would you “preserve nature” — Eric Linden’s idea of Nature? Khamon Fate’s idea of Nature?
You could recast the entire thing as not a world of discrete objects in space and time on XYZ coordinates, but more what it is — streaming ephemera constantly changing which you design and sort of license to use for a time, like a movie ticket. As viewer, you don’t attempt to “keep the movie” or “sustain it,” you watch it, and then perhaps for some movies, you might be motivated to go buy the video and watch it a few times at home over the next few years — but probably you’d be more likely to rent. so clothes, houses — they are disposable, replaceable, impermanent.
Of course, people really do need permanence and can’t live on a Moebius strip and feel comfortable. So they become very attached to geographic sense of place.
There’s little in SL, a world of excesses, that would introduce the habits of the heart that would lead to frugality in RL. The only thing you could say is that while you are consuming SL, you are less likely to be, oh, I dunno, removing the ozone layers with your hairspray or something.
The question might be better asked, how can you sustain your real life, while monetarizing your time on line, such as to feed part or all of your real life. And…would you want to?
Perhaps instead of thinking in terms of prim credits it would be more germane to think in terms of sim savings:
The current practice of selling prim farms does alleviate the strain on virtual landowners who wish to exceed a certain estates’ limitations. However, the alternative proposed here goes a step further in rewarding those who make the effort to build low-prim structures and minimize their “footprint” on the server.
Economics has taught me that building market systems to reward certain behavior leads to subtle changes within the actors that engage in that market. I can only hope that the rewards associated with saving prims in this fashion can take hold in the consciousness of Second Life and be applied more broadly in people’s lives.
I see this notion of prim credits as utopian even for a utopian world, and not addressing the practical concerns people have — they need prims to make structures that look more real and have more detail; getting around prim usage through the use of textures makes the world seem more fake for some, they like the 3-D deliverability and heft of primmage. They also want to decorate — it’s not uncommon for a dinette set to eat up 600 prims for the table and 4 chairs, it’s insane. The Lindens saw fit to put square meterage with a standard amount of prims in them as a kind of server space analogy with a facsimile of geographical space. Structures take up space. You can build a low prim house but then people are only motivated to do that to use the remaining prims for their furniture or various projects they want to be able to spread out, perhaps building a vehicle or making a musical instrument or whatever their fancy is. I don’t see why you need to be Calvinist about prims, and I don’t see anything intrinsically evil about prim usage, even high prim usage; you pay for it, you use it. If you don’t need it, you don’t buy it.
I don’t need an economic system builder such as yourlsef to induce changes in me, even subtle changes, against my will, with an ideological program that is slipped into the structure of the economy itself. I dont need someone to treat me like Pavlov’s dog in their social engineering experiment and induce some sort of behaviour that they think should or should not be rewarded. I’d like such changes not to be indoctrinated or snuck in through manipulation of reality by the few with abilities in programming; I’d like there to be a democratic process in which we all discuss openly what’s reasonable, fair, just, necessary in a liberal democratic society. Why *save* prims? For whom? For what? Why? To what end? So that a few people can live in a tent with a flower and feel superior morally to somebody living in a McMansion with unnecessary kitchens and bathrooms? But…why?
I’ve spent a LOT of time on this subject running my communities in SL for 2 years. And I find that all these utopian notions, which I’ve tried myself, of creating prims commons; of trying to get people to use self-restraint; of trying to allocate fairly — they all have to be thrown out the window in the windstorm of real practice and use. More and more, especially with newer waves of people uneducated at all in worlds or games even, it gets harder and harder to explain, for example, that on group land, if you grab more than your rented allocation of prims, you are taking from others. The tragedy of the commons repeats and repeats in new and absurd ways.
People have gotten around this by fleeing to private islands and giving up on trying to get communities to work. I don’t do that — yet — I keep trying. But I’m realistic about it.
Already, you should be aware that the land barons have experimented with the idea of both low-prim and high-prim sims. You can now buy 4 sims in a pack of “void” sims that have less prims in them, and therefore cost less and can be rented for less. So now, those who wish to have a huge vista to look out on, and who are content to live in a low-prim arrangement, can have a whole sim with only 1,875 prims in it instead of the 15,000 plus normally in a sim. Or a half sim for 937 prims — normally that would be in a 4096 m2 size. There hasn’t been a hugely booming market in these low-prim “frugal” sims, because their CPU capacity also appears diminished, but they are good for things like sailing.
Would people be interested in discussing how the private ownership and hiding of the SL code base affects sustainability?
On the one hand, the Lindens’ controlled releases ensure a ground truth, defining exactly what it means to be “in Second Life”, unlike the web, where every browser and server implement standards partially or incorrectly.
On the other hand, the maintenance of the grid is tied to LL’s commercial viability and as a result they’ve focused on the features which are important to their community, vision and business. For example, at present there is no way (that I know of) to back up your work or push it into another world, which is a key feature for longevity of customer work, if not sustainability of the world.
Trevor > “Would people be interested in discussing how the private ownership and hiding of the SL code base affects sustainability?”
Yes!