Yes, virtual worlds and virtual reality are mutating into hyper-reality and next-reality.  Advertising creates hyper-reality. Is advertising good? If you are paid to create it, it is wonderful.

Computers are only useful if you can afford electricity to power them. They can give you a vast virtual experience or keep your checkbook organized and in sync with the bank.

I have lived in virtual worlds for the past 20 years. Even the concept of suburbian living is a hyper-reality--- to wit, not real. Imagined and engineered for the select few who have the resources to live the SUV and suburban lifestyle with access to the golf and country club.

I have lived in a hyper-reality all my life, and I know that it is not sustainable. I live in terror knowing the day my parents die, I will not have the resources to keep the house, cars and suburbain lifestyle that my parents have been able to live.

Networking and internetworking means every individual is a node on a network, and being a node, should have the same access as everyone else. That is the challenge of the free world to win the war over opressive globalism-- to make everyone an equal to a middle class lifestyle without the threat of loosing everything to the bank or mis-fortune.

". . . I would argue that, thanks to their sheer immersiveness, virtual worlds are qualitatively different from previous escapes, and getting more sophisticated all the time. My concern is what happens to the world while we're waiting to upload into our digital utopias. The more realistic and appealing our virtual worlds, the more I fear people will avoid dealing with real problems. It's certainly possible that virtual worlds will have a positive societal influence, with people trying to replicate some of their virtual experiences in real life. But I think it's far more likely that people will increasingly seek to escape a world with poverty, sickness, social strife and other ills for one where such suffering is not only eliminated, but simply not represented because those who suffer can't afford the cost of entry."

I think we've already seen that to some extent with the widespread obsession with science fiction, fantasy and comics. I know people who let the fictional characters, situations and ideologies in these media dominate their mental lives, in stark contrast to the banality of their low-wage service jobs. This phenomenon strikes me as a kind of "life dysfunction." Virtual worlds will just enable more of this habit of personal failure.

The lure of soma.

Simon's comments do have some weight to them but let's remember that this problem is in fact very old. Dickens, Orwell and many others go on and on about how the poor and working classes would drink themselves into a stupor, smoke crack, take meth, waste away in front of the television, etc. in order to flee the grinding pain of their lives of trailer parks or run down housing projects.

The point is people will find ways to escape no matter what the technology.

It's interesting how every new medium comes into being with fanfares and praises as a great liberating force. Then the reality settles in and it's a mixed bag. Television was trumpted as the great educator back in the 30s and 40s, they didn't foresee dreck like Survivor or Jerry Springer I guess.

But some of the predictions turned out to be true and sometimes unexpected benefits emerged as well.

The people who actually care about what happens to the real world, the ones that matter, won't be blinded by the goodies purchased by Linden dollars. They've already got a sense of perspective, temperance and rationality. They question themselves and question the world. That's rare and that's what keeps us from going to hell in a handbasket. At the same time, those qualities are tough and hard to stamp out once they emerge.

I don't think a game, no matter how compelling, is going to take that away from them. Some people just seem more resistant to "falling for it" than others. These people will still mind the store when the rest of us have slipped into escapism.

Maybe these are bigger questions. Are some people more prone towards addiction than others? Can some people be successful, functioning junkies that can still take care of business in the real world?

I think you need to spend more time in SL, Simon. ;)

People are quite generous on there. When newbies start, there are plenty of people who will chip in $50 each and also transfer expensive hand-me-down clothes to them to help them get started and improve their generic appearance. The people on NINcropolis where I hang out a lot do that all the time (and so do I). Even when longtime users are L$ broke, people will transfer you a little money to tide you over if you're known to be generous yourself.

There are also lots of interesting initiatives going on in there that tie SL into the real world. In addition to things like museums and art exhibits, there are United Nations kiosks handing out white bracelets as part of their campaign to end poverty.  The people who wear their bracelets in Second Life on October 15th and 16th will have their votes counted as part of the UN effort to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people in one day to stand up for stopping poverty and reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Sl is being considered with equal weight to real-world participants - like its own continent. Interesting!

"Can some people be successful, functioning junkies that can still take care of business in the real world?" - I think so. There's a happy medium for everything and while SL is quite addictive for many people, they usually settle into a realistic balance after a while.

We also need to remember that not everyone is destined to be wealthy or wildly successful in the real world.  Plenty of people are quite happy with average jobs and simply don't want the overtime and stress involved with many high-end careers in the first place.  If they can afford a beautiful house and things and experiences in SL *way* beyond what they'd ever attain on their incomes, for a mere $6 a month, I think there's nothing wrong with that. You have to remember the demographics of the site, too. The average age is 32.  If people are still in service jobs at that age, they're likely not changing, so joining a place like SL is not really escapism, it's realism.  It adds a facet to their life they otherwise would be very unlikely to attain in the real world in the first place. Also, people who would have never even considered being business owners in the real world find it quite easy to do so here... and be successful at it!

One thing that surprised me about SL was the fact that there's just as much human drama on there as in the real world. I was kind of hoping there would be less of that in the online utopia. :)  I think I'll blog about that aspect of things later in my own SL essay...it's quite interesting.

I just wanted to add another example of SL being used as a tool to almost seamlessly extend the reach of real-world charitable efforts.  I just got an email wondering if the NIN fans of Second Life would be interested in some type of special event the night or nights of an upcoming benefit concert.  They were thinking it would be cool to host a virtual gathering and "charge" admission, perhaps a $5 donation to The Bridge School [http://www.thebridgeschool.org] for those fans unable to attend the actual show in California. So, people are getting novel ideas about how to use the site for cross-reality events that will have a real impact on the real world.

SL is definitely being used for much more than escapism and I just hope that Linden Labs can get a handle on all the site outages that have been happening due to attacks on them, plus the added pressure of the rapidly increasing user base (which is growing at something like 25% per month).

I can't find a way to edit my comment, and the correct URL for the site referenced in my above comment is http://www.bridgeschool.org/

"The Bridge School is an educational program dedicated to ensuring that children with severe speech and physical impairments achieve full participation in their communities through the use of augmentative & alternative means of communication (AAC) and assistive technology (AT) applications."

In addition to the excellent precedents that Pragmatica mentioned, there is yet another -- perhaps unintuitive -- way in which SL can be a positive thing. Because it is a sandbox in which we can experiment, and because Second Lifers can abandon conventions and inhibitions that are a part of the real world, these things can eventually trickle into RL.

For example, if you're shy, you can easily overcome that problem in SL; this in turn can create a increased sense of confidence in RL.

Yet, Simon does have a point. The reality of the situation is that users are still physically rooted in RL. Our material and physical well-being are still (mostly) determined by our lives outside of virtual worlds. The two major problems as I see them are escapism and and exagerrated sense of 'being' in SL. Both of these things, if left unchecked, could result in a diminished quality of living in RL.

But the same thing can be said about other trappings like alcohol and television. Moderation and a healthy dose of realism is the key.

Pragmatic wrote, "We also need to remember that not everyone is destined to be wealthy or wildly successful in the real world."

There is some truth to that but, I think it's more accurate to say that what society rewards is not necessarily the only standard of success that matters. Everyone is talented at something but some things are more valuable to the economy--business management--than other things--poetry.

I've read an article months ago on Worldchanging that NRPGs are turning into the golf ranges of the under 40s. Just as business decisions used to be decided by the old boys club on the golf range twenty or thirty years ago now SL and other NRPGs are serving the same purpose, at least in the software industry:

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004120.html

I also wanted to amend my earlier comments. I agree that most people will find a medium between NRPGs and reality. We did with television didn't we?

In the book "vacuum flowers" you had these slow-rotating habitats with humans inside. -- Insane amounts of humans, in a low gravity orbital slum. They were the poor of the 2N-th century, easily programmable by wetware brain hacks and put to useful jobs whenever you needed them. The real powerful in the world of "vacuum flowers" were those who best applied those mind-programming technologies on themselves or others. They were no longer humans.

This is an example of a (bit dated) transhuman fiction where humans have become raw material, to be used by an ueber-strata of posthuman overlords. The same can be argued as happening in The Matrix: I never really bought that battery story. Maybe the machines keep us around because we still have citizenship votes?

My point with above examples is the deflation of human value. The masses of humanity have never been worth much. Only in the last century, and only in narrow segments of western affluent society, have large percentages of humans had any significant legal worth. In China the lower classes are imprisoned and accessible for organs: but even the value in raw organic materials can be assumed to be over soon when we can grow or print artificial organs. If that happens a new conflict-race for resources and space heats up between patheticly slow humans and their posthuman kin. Will humanity be eventually pushed into new existential slums?

Places like SL are concensual hallucinations tailored on the value systems of (bored liberal rich world) humans (in the early 21st century). SL is o far still fairly entertaining. However imagine a human culture in such a VR. Imagine raising virtual kids in a reality where wishes are easily realised and their realization is as worthless as the pixels its rendered from.

I have been playing SL a lot the last year. A LOT. I am currently taking a long overdue break in the middle of a hectic romantic relationship. And yes, the above considerations are in part something that weighs heavily on my mind and are reasons for me wanting a short break from SL.

If our posthuman heirs want to get rid of humanity in a humane and convenient manner, a wish realization VR will do just nicely. Do we actually want that - and find ourselves suddenly in the most subtle of hells when we do?

Having been immersed in Second Life for over six months since last August, I've been surprised at the

Effexor. Effexor withdrawel.

Alcohol and lexapro. What are the side effects of lexapro. Lexapro.