Finally a word I can relate to: magic.

In today’s Guardian, Victor Keegan proclaims that we’ll all be citizens of virtual worlds, and quotes what might be a new interview with Philip Rosedale.

Now, sure, maybe he’s slicing and dicing, but it strikes the right note: at least he didn’t mention anything about grandmothers getting jobs in Second Life or how much easier it is to use than the Internet. It’s a crisp message:

- The first hours (in fact, Rosedale says the first day) is hell
- But once you get past that there’s a “magic” that you don’t find on Facebook, for example: shaped by the sense of presence (which goes beyond just feeling like your avatar is next to another, especially when the background for presence is a user-generated world).

And the intersection of that magic with how we work, socialize, collaborate and learn will lead to unexpected results: it’s not that we have a new “mode” for meeting and saving the ozone layer or whatever, it’s that we have a new mode PLUS it’s combined with magic, which will lead to profound change in how we think about creativity, identity, work and culture.

Use cases try to predict why we’re there and how to modify the interface and experience to suit that….but many of the central pillars of SL’s growth have come about by serendipity and unexpected consequences. M’s focus on tools for content creators, therefore, should be applauded – too much obsession with use cases should be guarded against.

This is also where I part company on the idea of devolving policy to “hosts”….policy is a critical shaping force as these profound changes take root. The combination of evolving user needs and technology, magic and sociality, mean that we should also caution against abandoning policy or letting it devolve – the policy experiments have barely begun, after all.

A snippet from the article:

“It reflects what Philip Rosedale, founder of the pioneering Second Life, calls the “presence”, or magic, of virtual worlds. You could, he says, be browsing with 500 other people for the same product on Amazon, but you would be alone and unable to speak with them. Rosedale says virtual worlds are now branching out into different user models. Although many of the addictive networking features attached to them could, like Facebook and other social networks, migrate to mobile devices, they won’t find it easy, he argues, to capture that immersive magic of virtual worlds.

Second Life’s unusual libertarian model – in which users can build everything from scratch – confirms it as the most creative of the virtual worlds, but also the most difficult. Rosedale admits it could take a “day of total suffering” to get used to it. Others would say weeks. But it offers opportunities for all, including older people, because, thanks to the anonymity of avatars, no one knows how old you are. Different generations can meet in a way they don’t in real life. “