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The Archives
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10.30.10Emotional Bandwidth: Virtual Worlds and Games in the Age of ImaginationWe were talking about fruit. Bananas, a cup of melon wedges. He couldn't remember the pear. He could picture it, I think, but it took some effort to connect the image and give the pear its name. It wasn't exactly silent in the room. There were the bleeps of the machines and someone talking in the hallway. But there was a sort of silence in that space while we waited for the word 'pear' to materialize. There was something profound in that moment of silence, of waiting, and somehow it held larger silences, the deeper rivers of meaning that run ...
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07.08.10Metanomics Commentary: Courage to CreateWe just wrapped three episodes of the Metanomics Master Class - and I have to say, it was a really exciting series for me. First, I learned a lot, but it was also encouraging to talk with people who remain as enthusiastic as ever about the potential of virtual worlds (and Second Life). I'll have more thoughts in the coming days. In the meantime, I thought I'd post my closing commentary from yesterday's show: Last week, Alexander Macris, in talking about games, said that the challenge in creating great immersive games and stories is to remove the distance between the player and ...
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05.31.10The Why of Virtual Worlds, and Selling Second LifeThe why is more important than the what or how - and in saying that, Grace McDunnough reaches my heart. Picking up on a speech by Simon Sinek at TED, the question of "why" doesn't negate the "what" or the "how", but it's the basis of leadership: Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows WHAT they do, 100 percent. Some know HOW they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know WHY they do what they do. And by "WHY" I ...
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05.20.10Creativity and Mental Health: Do Your Dopamine Levels Explain Why You’re in Second Life?The typical Second Life creator quite likely shares brain chemistry with schizophrenics, although whether this explains the duality of avatar/physical identity I'll leave for the scientists to sort out. And while in some ways this might seem like a joke, I've been thinking a lot lately about the qualities inherent in the act creating in a virtual world, and whether this truly has an impact on brain chemistry. But maybe I've been putting the cart before the horse - it's not that Second Life and virtual worlds changes your brain chemistry, but rather people with a certain neurochemistry tend to be ...
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04.29.10Fix List: Virtual Worlds and Why You Can’t Create Tomorrow from YesterdayThere are two triggers for a heated discussion with designers and creative types: the phrase "design thinking" and Bruce Mau. Both are either considered window dressing on something that doesn't need it, or figureheads for a movement to make the process of design more accessible to more people, including the people inside an enterprise who may have more money than the guy who needs a new product package or an annual report. So I'll take both with a grain of salt and in recognition that there will always be something magical about "design". You can give it fancy names or you ...
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02.18.10Take Your Social Media and SLove It: Virtual Worlds and the Evolution of the WebThis blog is an ad. If you don't like advertising then you might want to go elsewhere. This blog is an ad for - well, for me actually. I'm not a journalist and I never claimed to be one. I don't particularly have any answers and, further, I very rarely claim to have any. Sometimes someone will spoon feed me information ahead of other people, or I'll luck out and notice some little blip of news that seems relevant and I'll post it because I also find it interesting. This makes me a flak. Someone "spins me" and if I buy ...
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01.30.10The Stars Alive: Rezzing Dreams at the Virtual CampfireHotel rooms and airports dehydrate me. Throw in a few times zones and eventually everything starts becoming a little blurry looking, and if you throw California into the mix it's a lethal combination - a grande frappe machiatto or whatever it's called starts to look like a little thimble and I start craving ever larger cups of coffee. Starbucks will start selling a bucket-sized thing one day and in California, at least, no one will notice, they'll all think they're drinking MODEST amounts of caffeine, no one will have the heart to tell them that Colossi isn't an appropriate size ...
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01.25.10My World Performs Me: Heuristics in Second Life and Social MediaCode is not agnostic. Code is the accretion of a thousand small decisions and a few large ones. Code, because it is not agnostic, produces effects comparable to speaking another language. I 'lived in French' for a while - listening to it, speaking it, reading signs in French, menus, newspapers. At first, I thought it was me: certain sentiments, feelings or explanations seemed incredibly hard to articulate. I thought it was because I wasn't fluent enough. When I went home to my all-English town, I suddenly realized that it wasn't my proficiency that was the problem, but rather that the ...
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01.15.102010 Looking Back: Second Life and the Cultural RevolutionSo the year started with a bang and in between airports, hotel rooms and forgetting where I put the coffee once I DID make it home, I was still trying to piece together some kind of uber-post wrapping up 2010. You see, with so few days left in this year, there's still hope that my predictions for the year will all come true and I'll score 100%, but for now I'm looking at a pretty good hit rate. OK, so the truth is my predictions seem, in retrospect, unimaginative and lame. What with M Linden (Mark Kingdon) coming out with his ...
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12.25.09To the Creator"In some respects, I'm 14 1/2 years old. In others, I'm an old man, growing into wisdom about the world, asking questions about why we are here. Imagination - that's my religion. Without imagination you have no art, no music, no literature, no religion. You can't throw one out without throwing them all out." - Sting It's easy to forget how astonishing it is. Maybe we escape the drum beat of the world to remember that there's a different vision of how this turns out. Or maybe we bring the world in with us and try to sort out new ways of seeing, ...
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