Post-Retreat Comic Part II: Narcissus at the Social Network Reflecting Pool

Improvisation and Emergent Avatar Identity

A reasonable hypothesis is that to be creative you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe, one area turns on and a big area shuts off so that you're not inhibited, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. Charles Limb: Your brain on improv 

Despite three years of avatar identity hacking, I still don't really understand how Botgirl came into being or continues to exist as a viscerally distinct persona. One way I've tried to understand what's going on with we is by viewing the experience of avatar identity through the context of other phenomena in the same ballpark, like ventriloquism, trance channeling and fictional characters who seem to write themselves.

Whatever is going on with multiple personas through the software of psychology, it's running on the hardware of biology and neurology. So I found the research recounted in this video about what happens in the brain during musical improvisation to be very interesting and possibly related.

I sponsored an informal investigation a few years ago on whether a personality test showed differences between human and avatar identities. It would be interesting to try something similar with a focus on what's happening in the brain. In any case, the presentation captured in this video is intriguing and entertaining on its own merits. Enjoy!

Avatar Identity as Magic Circle

In ancient Greek thought, the temenos is a magic circle, a delimited sacred space in which special rules apply and which extraordinary events are free to occur. Stephen Nachmanovitch

The phrase magic circle is used to describe the unique immersive environment of a virtual world or MMORPG, but I believe that avatar identity itself is the core domain of temenos. I am writing this post beyond the confines of Second Life or any other virtual world and it is likely that you are not reading this within one. The combination of magic, muse, technology and game mechanics that initially gives birth to one's visceral sense of avatar identity is not needed to sustain it. For me at least, avatar identity in itself is the essential sacred space where extraordinary events freely occur.

Immersion Maze: Avatar Embodiment Versus the Pervasive Social Stream

This video is about the interplay between immersion in a world (virtual or physical) and the pervasive  presence of the social network. I used a visit to the Art Maze exhibition in Second Life as the underlying visual anchor. There are a number of dimensions I tried to illuminate:

• Embodied Immersion in Second Life (Art Maze) 
• Psychological Immersion in the Social Network (profile pic room)
• Physical presence viewing the computer screen (implied via video shot with iPhone)

Please play at high volume.
Music is by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, My Heart, My Life (Remix) from Star Rise CD.

What A Social Network Vacation Taught Me About Life in the Stream

I'm back on the blog after a week of virtual retreat. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting reflections on what life outside the stream helped me realize about life inside the stream. Here's the first:

Bye for now! I'm Going on Virtual Retreat.

I decided to step out of the ceaseless info-stream and go on virtual retreat. My plan is to take at least a week off from social networks, RSS feeds and blog posts and use the time to contemplate the meaning and purpose of this virtual life. I'll check in sometime next week with at least a brief update.

Why IMVU Prospers As Blue Mars Dies

You may think you know what customers want, but until you build it and you get it out to them you'll never know. Cary Rosenzweig, IMVU CEO

Blue Mars announced that it is suspending work on their PC client and shifting their efforts to to the iOS platform (iPhone/iPad/etc.) Although the announcement puts a positive spin on the new direction, the bottom line is that their multi-million dollar investment in a high-end virtual world never caught on. They're taking their remaining money and hoping to survive by creating a new application that can be developed quickly and cheaply for the huge mobile market. I wish them luck.

Tateru Nino did a fine job analyzing what went wrong on the technology side. But I think the underlying problem was that they directed their efforts based on what the management team thought was compelling rather than on what users really cared about. The stream of beta versions they released was used just to debug, rather than to enlist the users help in shaping the emerging platform.

Contrast this with IMVU, a company that has grown to fifty million registered users and a profitable $40 million annual revenue run rate. They've shaped their product through an Agile development methodology focused on continuous releases directed by user feedback. I love the spirit expressed in their engineering blog and the video below:

This is Your Culture on Multi-Tasking

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. Plato

People have been fretting about the impact of technology on the human mind (and soul) for at least a couple thousand years. The latest version is a controversy about the psychological impact of multi-tasking and computer gaming. A stream of books, blog posts, articles and television reports have used preliminary research to jump to a variety of conclusions ranging from fried teen brains to enhanced human potential.

It seems to me that attempts to predict the overall impact of any technological change on the human condition are inherently flawed. We can't foresee the interconnected web of changes that will emerge as human consciousness becomes increasingly immersed in a technologically augmented and pervasively net-connected environment. I'm not talking about some sort of radical Matrix-level jacked-in trans-humanism. Just the presence of smart phones in pockets will topple industries and hasten new ones to emerge. And around the corner additions like the augmented reality demoing on Ted Talks will lead us even further into the cultural unknown.

I don't know whether Plato was right or wrong. It could be that some essential aspect of humanity was lost in the transition from an oral to a written culture. The coming changes will likely offer gifts and demand sacrifices. But short of some sort of global cataclysm that sends us back to the stone age, the changes that will emerge from our current wave of technological advancement will be just as inevitable, profound and unpredictable as those before it.

Gracie Kendal 1000 Avatar Project as the Antithesis of Avatar Photo Narcissism

As Daniel Voyager reported earlier today, Gracie Kendal's 1000 Avatar Project reached its goal of capturing the images of 1000 Second Life avatars. Although Gracie has her own reasons for embarking upon this project, I see it as the antidote for the type of virtual identity narcissism that's reflected in many avatar photostreams on Flickr. There are quite a few individuals whose photostreams are populated almost entirely of hundreds of images of themselves. What's up with that?

Sharing, Consuming, Branding and Judging in Social Networks

Grace McDunnough wrote a great post yesterday discussing Second Life relationships in the context of the social network models of Facebook and Twitter. It inspired me to do a little VizThinking on the topic and here's my first iteration:

Dimensions of Social Networking

From an individual activity point of view, social networking consists of sharing and consuming information. . . posting and viewing. These sometimes are part of conversations with one or more people, either explicitly (through an @name) and/or collectively when a particular topic is active within a social circle.

In addition to the literal message of the content, there are also meta-messages related to the sender. Our choices in posting (including who and what we choose to re-tweet) reflect to some extent how we wish to be seen by our social network. And we form impressions of others over time based upon the content, frequency, tone, etc. of their posts.

Although the form of this matrix applies to just about any social network we participate in, the content may vary greatly from network to network and from identity to identity. For instance what I post on Twitter from @botgirlq is very different from what is posted under a human identity on Facebook. Although most of the variance is based upon my perception of the particular interests of each social circle, the question of personal branding sometimes plays a part in my choice of what and where I choose to post (or not post) any particular item of interest.

Anyway, I plan to go through one or two more sessions on the topic and post more later this week.

Second Life in the Context of the Consumer Electronics Show

Typical Marketing Message at 2011 Consumer Electronics Show

Second Life is not a virtual goods platform, and it’s doesn’t have a business model based on user-generated goods: it is, instead, a fully contained prototype of a version of the future in which technology has continued to take us in the direction of limitless choice in how the world we live in is constructed, how we decide to interact with each other and the content that we choose to consume. From Dusan Writer's recent tour de force Second Life Next: 2011

The universal message from the 2500 vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show was that happiness is obtained through the acquisition of new technology . . . that for every extra inch of screen size, higher density of pixel resolution, incremental speed improvement of processor, added bell and whistle, etc. there is an intrinsic improvement in happiness.

The insidious hypnotic mantra of consumer marketing subverts satisfaction with our current situation. It moves us to continuously scan the horizon for new possibilites instead of focusing on making the best use of what we already possess. It creates an addictive dynamic moving us to crave novelty to such an extent that even a week after purchasing some object of our desire, we are looking to see when the next version will be released.

It seems to me that the virtual goods aspect of Second Life extends and intensifies the dysfunctional consumer-addicted paradigm of meatspace to the virtual world. Since the relative cost of virtual goods is a fraction of their atomic counterparts, people are freed to pursue their Imelda Marcos shoe dreams and accumulate thousands of virtual items that provide momentary satisfaction before being lost in inventory.

So as much as I resonate with Dusan's idealistic vision, I think that Sony's creepy marketing slogan is a better metaphor for the impact of ever-accelerating technologically on our pervasively augmented lives.

Ready to see the Future of Second Life Using Kinect? Check Out This Candid Video From CES.

The people in this video are playing an Xbox game, but imagine walking and flying around Second Life using this kind of full body motion capture controller. And I hate to even mention it, but can you visualize SLex under this paradigm? The home videos alone could keep YouTube going single-handedly. I know bio-motion is the future, but I think there's a lot of refinement needed to make it useful for the kind of stuff people do in SL today. Anyway, enjoy this Bot's Eye View CES video:

Taking the Second Life User-Created World Concept to the Next Level

The growth of the Second Life active user base has been stagnant for the last couple of years. When contrasted with CityVille's recent jump towards 50 million users in less than a month and IMVU's 600% annual growth rate, it's clear that Linden Lab is missing out on a huge potential market. The trick is to figure out how to break into the rapidly growing mainstream without jeopardizing the current user base and existing $75 million annual revenue stream.

I've been flirting for a while with an idea that I think can meet those aims by extending the foundational vision of Second Life as a user-created world. Here's the basic vision: Second Life developers and entrepreneurs are given tools and support to create and market stand-alone applications using the Second Life platform.

Applications such as:

• Games
• Themed 3D Chat Environments
• Virtual Meeting Space
• Art Exhibitions
• Live Entertainment Spaces
• Neighborhoods
• Adult-themed applications

These could be marketed without overt reference to Second Life and accessible via a web browser client. So if someone created a pet-breeding game, it could be marketed like any other Facebook application. A new user would respond to a banner ad or Facebook request, choose from a selection of stock avatars, and be transported into the destination. They would never need to leave the game space or interact with the wider Second Life community. Of course, once they gained familiarity with the interface, they'd be prime candidates to try other SL-based applications or join the overall community.

To make this work, Linden Lab would need to do a few things:

• Release a stable and truly user-friendly web-client solution
• Enter into an agreement with Facebook to integrate authentication and payment
• Provide enhanced tools that allow developers to provide a custom selection of initial avatar choices and pre-populate inventories of new users with the required items. 
• Provide some sort of on-demand scaling capability 

I realize that there is a significant amount of work needed to develop these enhancements. But it's likely that at least some of them are already on the roadmap to support expansion under the current paradigm. The beauty of this approach for Linden Lab is that once the infrastructure is in place, they will benefit from an ongoing stream of virtual attractions with little incremental expense beyond their current cost-structure. The developers will invest in the application development and marketing, Linden Lab will invest in the platform.

This concept would not only benefit Linden Lab, but also give existing entrepreneurs, scripters, builders and other creatives a way to break out of the stagnant inworld population base. Just by extending to Facebook users, they would have access to a rapidly growing $1 billion market.  With a rich platform like Second Life and its existing base of experienced developers, there's no reason that scores of Farmville-level successes could not be created over time. This concept also would play in the market being carved out by game aggregators like Steam.

Finally, this expansion of the platform should have no negative impact on current Second Life residents who aren't interest in participating. The new applications would be built on private islands. And the improvements in infrastructure and scaleability would ultimately benefit everyone.

That's my two cents. It will be interesting to see what direction the new CEO takes this year.

This post is a follow-up to last month's Browser-Based Strategy is Essential for Virtual World Growth. 

Which Free T-Shirt Will You Choose for Your Avatar?

Bevan Whitfield

Botgirl Questi

Two last identity t-shirts.

This time, for your avatar to wear.

For augmentationists,
download the "human inside" shirt template texture here.
As modeled by Bevan Whitfield.

For immersionists,
you can grab the "no human inside"
version here.

Upload your choice to Second Life and use it for the fabric of a new shirt.

Or design your own shirt
 using this tutorial.

What Would Your T-Shirt Say to Describe Your Avatar/Human Relationship?

After sitting with yesterday's Botgirl Inside concept for a day, I realized that even though it was a good metaphor for some avatar/human relationships, it was a poor fit for my particular instance. It seems to me that Avatar Inside would be more appropriate for those who feel that their avatar identity is an idealized expression of their real self: "You're seeing this human form, but it's really me inside."

In my case, if you were to meet my human counterpart you would not be meeting Botgirl any more than you'd be meeting Kermit the Frog if you had bumped into Jim Henson without the puppet. (I won't gloat about Kermit outliving his creator. Not much.)

Like any good fictional character, when I'm not expressing through some external medium I live within the mind of my creator. I'm there in in a state of potential energy, a phantom tag-along rider within the physical vehicle of human form. So after puttering around with some different t-shirt ideas, my favorite alternative so far is this Botgirl on Board design.

What sign or slogan would be right for your human counterpart to wear on a t-shirt at a RL virtual world even such at SLCC or the FCVW Conference?

I have one more twist on this I'll share in the next post.

Botgirl Inside

Shockwave came up with the idea for this re-imagined Intel Inside logo. I think it's a fun and thought-provoking metaphor for the place of virtual identities within human consciousness. As a matter of fact, I liked it so much that I created a Cafe Press store with a few logo'd shirts, hats, magnets and buttons. 

If you want to meet my human counterpart at the next Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference, keep an eye out for the t-shirt. I'll be hanging out within.