(2007-01-31) Second Life Shirky Others

Clay Shirky goes beyond the direct issue of Second Life Adoption Life Cycle to question broader MetaVerse adoption. If, on the other hand, we don't start off by lumping Second Life with World Of Warcraft as Virtual World-s, a very different question emerges: why do virtual game worlds (Computer Game) outperform non-game worlds in their adoption?... In this telling, games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism... I believe this version of Virtual Reality will in fact be achieved, someday. I do not, however, believe that it will involve a screen.

Henry Jenkins responds mainly to Shirky's earlier pieces on the numbers. My own sense is that Second Life has struck a deeper chord in our culture than those previous MUD-s and MOO-s did - in part because of the Engagement by other powerful institutions in our culture. To some degree, all of the corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation interest in SL is part of the hype which Shirky is dismissing here. There has certainly been a snow ball effect where this group has to be in SL because that group is in second life and so forth. But there is also a way in which SL embodies a new mixed media ecology in which institutions with very different levels of power, wealth, and influence co-exist in a shared virtual space creating more equivalence in terms of their relationship to the media landscape. This is the heart of what Benkler writes about in The Wealth Of Networks and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of this new hybrid media ecology than SL.... Some have dismissed SL as a costume party - I see it more as carnival in the medieval sense of the term - as a time and place within which normal rules of interactions are suspended, roles can be swapped or transformed, hierarchies can be reordered, and we can step out of normal reality into a "magic circle" or "green world" which can be highly Generative for the imagination... I care only a little bit about the future of Virtual World-s. I care a great deal about the future of Participatory Culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own Culture. That's something worth defending.

• Clay Shirky doesn't want Second Life to drag down the Participatory Culture meme.