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The Archives
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05.10.09Mapping Home: Virtual Worlds and the Geography of DesireLinden Lab's decision to create a continent in Second Life for explicit adult content had me picturing wagon trains loaded up with dance poles and avatar, um, attachments. We had been told the frontier days were over, after all, and with new management it was time for a bit of geographic relocation, a partitioning of the States, newly articulated geographies and a bunch of self-governed cities behind the firewall, or on private regions at least, the days of "one world" had ended back when they allowed direct teleports, I suppose. After my initial reaction it felt like things had settled down ...
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11.16.08A Sense of Place: Mapping in Second Life and Virtual WorldsI often regret that I wasn't around for the days of telehubs and a contained land mass: Second Life is too vast now, teleports make it too easy to bounce around, and private islands mean that the majority of the Grid isn't a continuous space. Over on the OpenSim grids, you get a sense of place: it's still small enough to wander around and meet all your neighbours. The map of SL isn't much of a map really. Show it to a cartographer and they'd scorn it: it's an information dashboard, maybe, showing land for sale or green dots, but ...
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