ephemerology - n. - the study of the unreal

Hamlet Au asks (paraphrased): “How can a virutal world with 75k online [at once] world seem so lonely?”

This feeling struck me when I first started in SL as well. It all seemed so empty and barren. Like the person in the Slashdot article he references mentions, as I wandered, I hardly ran into a person. I found some really terrific builds. I checked out the NOAA sim, and no one was there. Vassar’s SL campus was bare. In one region, I actually saw a green dot on my mini-map and zoomed over to find the owner of the sim working on something (an industrius-looking fox-furry in grungy cyberpunk gear). He was completely surprised to see me and was shocked that I’d taken the time to look around the build. It felt like some science fiction novel where a great civilization had been wiped out in an instance, removing all inhabitants and leaving the artifacts of their civilization unscathed.

Eventually, I found the pockets of habitation around. Almost exclusively at the nightclubs, but with occasional concentrations at the rp sims or the particularly popular shopping area. People are clustered around a central point so they can be in chat range of each other (usually around a dance ball so their avatar can be doing something besides standing there while they chat). These crowded places have a lot of unused space – side rooms hardly get used except for the occasional looksee.

 I found people who had their own parcels or even sims and they loved showing me around to see what they had built, but it became pretty obvious that that most of their parcel was never used. Unless they were actively building a section, they could always be found in the same location. And they generally use landmarks and teleports to get anywhere, so people don’t actually travel any of the distance between locations. Most people don’t even know what is in the same sim as them, unless it is a private sim or an RP sim. I realized that I spend the majority of my time in SL in my lab, which is a skybox where I build things.
 
I think that a lot of people would classify this as laziness, or the same sort of degradation local ties that have lead people to barely know their neighbors. Those statements are true, I think. But to leave it at that misses the forest for the trees. The issue is one of space – as in, space means something different in the virtual, and has a unique role in Second Life.

As I have posited before, the disinguishing trait of virtuality is the use of ‘place’ is different. Virtuality is based on the concept that place is a consensual reference point for an experience, as opposed to a physical locale. This is something that is only truly capable either in imagination or with the use of modern communications. We use place as our indication of oc-existance – “I was there and you were too.” But now that we have interactions over distance, we describe that touchstone of experience as a ‘place’.

When we go into immersive virtual environments like Second Life, the software replicates the sense of space by creating artificial distinctions in location. However, the other limitations space are not inherent in that environment.

Real-time communciation is usually limited to locality. Without the help of communications technology, we can’t talk to someone who isn’t in the same physical location. But in virtual worlds, we can. We can talk to each other with instant messages. And often we are talking with several people all at once. This leads to the very common situation to arrive in a busy place in SL and no one is talking. And no one responds. They are all deep in their own conversations which are in no way tied to their virtual location. In fact, there is very little difference between local chat and a Im or group chat in most cases. The local chat is just the chat where you are seeing the same set of non-verbal virtual elements.

We see some of this in the real world, of course, with people on their cell phones chatting away in the grocery store. But in the virtual environment, the effect is more profound as the dislocation isn’t a facet of extra technology, but built directly into the environment.

Additionally, space isn’t a major issue in terms of having to pass through it to get to other places. peopel don’t have to travel through space to get to their friends or favorite places – you just teleport. I know in the old days of SL, you could only teleport between telehubs. But now, space isn’t an inherent factor in travel, even when co-location is an issue. Rather we move point-to-point and space isn’t as integral to the environment as it would be if you could not teleport. This stuck me early in my time on SL, when the first house I bought in SL didn’t have stairs or a ladder or even a hole in the ceiling. Rather, you teleported upstairs.

And additionally, space isn’t as limited as a resource in virtual worlds. SL has a rudimentary sense of objective space, given the parameters defined by a region. But that is more of a factor of processing time for calculating physics interactions than anything else. A region could handle a lot more space if the number of objects in it were limited more severely. And, if you can get another server up, or are willing to live with slower responses, you can just ‘make more’ space.

All of this makes space not an ever-present and permeating, yet invariant, element. Rather, it is a variable that can be influenced by situation and desire. Space, in SL, is an aesthetic option more than a vital resource. That makes for a very difference set of experiences.

For example, there’s the story of the Jesse War in SL’s history . Space, at the time, was much more of a commodity then. There was much less of it, and you did have to travel through it to get most places. The conflcit over the Jesse Wall and all around it played out much like real world escalations happen – a circle of ever-rising conflict over territory. I’m guessing we see less of that now. Space is plentiful and cheap in SL and you can always go elsewhere and buy your own plot. Or find a new club.

Without the restriction of invariant space, virtual worlds like Second Life become about connections with other people. People go to places where other people are, even if the place is just a bare box (think about chat rooms – just text and people have been hanging out in them for years). So when most people walk into Second Life as a newbie to the experience, they look it it from the perspective that they understand – space is ‘real’ and when there is a lot of space without a lot of people, the place is empty. But empty doesn’t mean the same thing when space isn’t a foundation of the world you are in.

Once you leanr to navigate by what is real in Second Life – connections either through group chats, IMs, friends lists or landmarks, you find that Second Life is full of people. You’ve just been measuring with the wrong ruler.