the second life of marx dudek

I attended Codie Redgrave’s memorial installation at Rouge last night.  Botgirl said it so perfectly – you could not explain to anyone outside of our unique culture how a screenful of mostly-gray attendees attempting to walk through a molasses-murk of server lag to stand amongst row upon row of identical, digitally-engraved tombstones could tug at anyone’s heartstrings.  It was a moment unique to our culture as SL residents – a real culture, a native culture, and a culture just as vulnerable as any that has been set upon by well-meaning but ignorant Crusaders bent upon bringing Their Ways to bear upon the noble savages to “improve” their lives.

Of course, Second Life is by no means a homogenous culture.  However, there are rites of passage, rituals, and experiences which are common to all of us that are to any other culture – real or virtual.  There are those things that, regardless of our language or our surroundings, we all eventually learn to accept as norms of our shared experience.  Assimilating into Second Life is, admittedly, not easy – and insisting that it can be or should be is, quite simply, an insult to our cultural evolution.  Those who undertake the admittedly sharp learning curve and come out on the other side have completed a rite of passage – an experience common to all of us.  Grasping that Second Life has a genuine micro-economy, and thinking about purchases and sales and earnings in terms of the local L$, rather than mentally translating their value into our local RL currency is another.  Learning that work in SL is, most often, genuine hard work – and that you are about as likely to earn a RL living in Second Life as you are working in a third-world country to pay your bills back home in America, but you should be able to pay your virtual expenses.  Realizing that, no, Second Life is decidedly not an anything goes, clothing-optional environment, despite what a lazy media has been spewing for seven years – but rather one that is generally tolerant of diverse and divergent lifestyles and offers areas in which most of those lifestyles can be experienced, should one choose to do so.  Discovering that you are free to be whatever gender, color or species that you wish to be – and accepting that the right to be a glowing pink raver-leopard does not trump the right of a realistic 1920s-themed-speakeasy club to turn you away at the door.  Distinguishing and respecting the differences between immersionists and augmentationists, and so on.

And understanding that, for whatever reason, the disappearance of a familiar name and face from the grid can and may cause the same feelings of grief that we associate with death.

Of course, this barely scratches the surface.  But it underscores the trepidation that a good many of us feel when we are told that efforts are underway to dumb down our cultural experience, all in the name of population growth.  Second Life is not for everyone, and it’s not even for most people.  And while improving the “first hour experience” is essential, this is achieved most successfully through real person-to-person contact.  Making Second Life iPad-compatible is more likely to be adopted by existing residents than by new ones.  Having someone to meet new residents as they arrive on the orientation sim, determining whether they are new to SL, actually helping them with the basics, answering questions, handing out landmarks and information pertinent to their own interests, and clueing them in on the fact that, yes, they’re going to meet nice people and not-so-nice people, and here are the basic ways in which to respond to problematic residents and griefers.  Identify new people who may have a helping-teaching temperament and groom them for what could easily be an inworld-paid first SL-job as new-resident greeters.  You don’t need to outsource to RL companies, and the results will be so much better when you use someone who is truly excited about our world – not a call-center staffer.

The best ideas are going to come from those of us who live SL every day.  Yes, some are grouchy and will never be satisfied under any circumstances.  But some of us are simply grouchy because we feel our voices aren’t being heard and that our ideas don’t matter.  Existing SL residents could easily be the best advertising the Lab has at its disposal – word-of-mouth has always been the way that most people find our world.  Stop forcing new policies and procedures on us – involve us in them.  This is our world, too – it can’t exist without LL’s server farms and collocation facilities, but it also can’t exist with the wonderful, bright, talented, creative people who make themselves a part of it because they love it.  Without the residents, Second Life is nothing.  Without happy, involved residents who believe they genuinely matter, Second Life will fail – and no web-based client will save it.