Comments on: The Story Box: Second Life & Magic

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » The Stars Alive: Rezzing Dreams at the Virtual Campfire

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:01:27 +0000

[...] we’re here because we can tell stories, we can be inside art, we can give context to conversation and learning and collaborating in ways [...]

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » De-Augmenting My Reality and Beach Houses in Nebraska

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:25:07 +0000

[...] In fact, I feel almost wistful for the day when I was able to stand up in full horror and ire and fight back against someone who called me an [...]

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » The Story Box: Second Life Breaking Borders

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:41:10 +0000

[...] Life is a Story Box: But when I look at Second Life I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, [...]

By: Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:19:13 +0000

Philip Dick is full of shit. I’m sorry, but people like him are always grandly pronouncing on the need to change and give up and be destroyed and…it’s always *other* people, not the person who has had that grand vision. How did Philip Dick change and what did he give up and could he report back to us now that he’s destroyed? Well?

>to me, Second Life is not a separate world

Then you’re an augmentationist, not an immersionist, and a platformist. Deal with it. Why this attempt to get street cred as an immersionist?!

Second Life is a world — that is, it may be many worlds to many people, but it is a separate place for the overwhelming majority of people who spend more than an hour in it. They readily adapt to the geographical contiguity and conform to the constructs of living inside these boxes. They don’t pause every five seconds and tell them selves they are merely pushing pixels on a screen and augmenting something in real life that takes precedence. Their attention is pinned. Why is that so hard to accept? SL is an economy of attention. For the time that people are absorbed in Facebook sending links and adjusting pictures and whatnot, they are in that world, which is a lighter and flatter world, but still a place “out there” where their attention is pinned.

To be truly entertaining or captivating, stories can’t shout out constantly “look, I’m a story!
“. And that’s why you can’t get too meta- with this concept.

I said 9 years ago in an interview about the Sims offline that the incredible thing about that game was that it was revolutionary — Will Wright had made a revolutoinary machine — it took the narrative engine out of the hands of Hollywood and the TV networks and put it into the hands of ordinary people. It was like the Kodak camera. For the people treating SL as a meta, tweaking its images and scenes like Bettina, the world becomes the world of *that* (one kind of world, itself). Or *that* plus plurk. THe NPIRL gang bears the relationships to the world of SL as roughly Russian emigres or American expatriotis in Paris in the 1930s to their countries and their arts.

Kevin Kelly and his ridiculous communistic generatives-out-of-nowhere is my least favourite tekkie pundit on the Internet. We don’t *have* to have a collective identity, for one. Whose collective?!

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Virtual Worlds: Top Five Books Cover Second Life, Avatars, and Cash

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:59:55 +0000

[...] laugh. This is an important one. Because to me, Second Life is a Story Box. As a site for creativity virtual worlds are being built prim by prim in, perhaps, the largest [...]

By: Inquisitive

Inquisitive — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:57:02 +0000

Dusan, Are different ways of knowing being created in the bifucation of self existence? Do you think we are developing new ways of sensing in virtual worlds that replace the RL senses which are not being utilized in a life-world void of physical reality?

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Does Second Life Have Feeling? M Linden’s Stories

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:01:24 +0000

[...] from Age of Conan for Second Life I’ve called Second Life a Story Box. And by calling it that, I don’t just mean that it’s an immersive playground for being [...]

By: Failed Screenwriter

Failed Screenwriter — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:15:15 +0000

Tools + amateurs = story for virtual worlds…

Even though Dusan Writer’s post on the explosion of small worlds and how they’ve sold out the promise of virtual worlds was a rant, it clearly described the issues at hand. The virtual landscape is splintering, increasingly proprietary, and built for…

By: Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Crowdsourcing the Future: The Mountains We Can Move

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:34:56 +0000

[...] Second Life is a Story Box. When the birthday celebrations begin, remember that there are two going on – one which was pure crowd sourcing, and one which tried to be but then decided they’d rather be a platform instead. [...]

By: Dusanwriter » My Avatar is Not Me, or, Why Virtual Worlds Will Not Become Appliances

Fri, 23 May 2008 23:25:45 +0000

[...] I favour the idea of Second Life as a story box: [...]