Cyberian strangeness
15/02/2006 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIzzie was listening to a most fascinating program on the radio about some rather quirky developments in the world of online games. While the Iz knows very little about such online addictions, we are not immune from the affliction - this Serpent Diary (and LJ in general) being one of our favorite Cyberian locations for lurking
I understand that nobody has ever broadcast a network program from within a game, so that was one of the achievements. I think a lot of people who contacted me after the program were fascinated by it. I mean revolted and fascinated as well, because of the sheer, probably what they believe is the waste of human energy going into living in an alternative life online. But at the same time, we’re coming to the realisation that for some people, their online life is more real than their real life, or as real.
Last month, the BBC’s NewsNight program, hosted by Jeremy Paxman, crossed the boundary between the real and virtual worlds.
Program Transcript
Jeremy Paxman: No need to adjust your set, I or some child with access to a computerised paintbox’s idea of me, am speaking to you from inside a virtual reality world as part of NewsNight’s Technology Week. I’m joined here by our resident geek, Paul Mason, or a close approximation to him, who’s going to explain all. So, first of all, where are we?
Gerald Tooth: Where Jeremy Paxman and his business reporter, Paul Mason were, was inside an online game, a virtual world called Second Life. Players assume new identities, or Avatars.
The NewsNight team at the BBC decided to broadcast part of their program from inside the game. That involved building a virtual set and the presenters taking on their own avatars.
Jeremy Paxman: Right, prove you’re not real.
Paul Mason: Well, in this virtual world there’s no gravity, so I’m going to do something you rarely see on NewsNight, and that’s fly off. (BOING)
Gerald Tooth: Back on earth in the real world, I asked NewsNight business reporter Paul Mason about his apparent obsession with online games, that led to this unique broadcast moment.
Paul Mason: My interest in multi-player games comes from the same obsession I’ve got in my reporting, with the way that technology is changing human life. And we started by asking ourselves what can we do to explain to people who don’t get it, and don’t necessarily experience it, just what a big thing this is. So all line role-playing games are massive in the world. If you think about the most popular one, World of War Craft, it’s got about 4-million or 5-million subscribers. These people are playing per year, what it costs to subscribe to an American high quality cable channel, so it’s big business.
What we did is, we went inside a game called Second Life, and it’s quite a unique thing this, because inside Second Life, it’s not really a game, it’s just people represented by these 3D avatars, little images of themselves, doing whatever they want to do, and as long as it’s legal, they can do it. And we went in and we got somebody to build a replica of our set, we got them to make avatars of me and Jeremy. Jeremy, my colleague, is probably the biggest anchorman in British television, and very fearsome as well, when he’s interviewing politicians. So it’s quite a big thing to put him inside a game. And we did an in-studio session, and then I went into the game, and reported on what goes on there, which is of course highly interesting.
Gerald Tooth: Are you still there?
Paul Mason: Am I still in the game?
Gerald Tooth: Yes. Or have you managed to extract yourself?
Paul Mason: Well after the program went out, I went in and had a long conversation with all sorts of people who were bizarrely dressed. I mean you have to bear in mind that inside this game, Second Life, a lot of people like to have avatars that look like glamour models, let’s put it that way.
Gerald Tooth: And I’ve seen your avatar and believe me, there’s nothing glamorous about it.
Paul Mason: The problem is, we decided to make our avatars realistic, so I’m one of the only people in Second Life who has a stubble and wrinkles and looks my age. Everybody else seems to look like Angelina Jolie or Keanu Reeves, and the other problem is that of course they’re all anonymous, you can’t tell who they are in real life, and they get up to all sorts of exciting things that unfortunately I am not able to do, I just have to be me, and sit there and answer their questions, and take the flak. You know, people spend 40 hours, some 90 hours a week at these games, and I met some of them, and when you report on those worlds, that’s their world, and you’ve just stepped into it, and some of them didn’t like it.
Gerald Tooth: What do you think was achieved through the exercise?
Paul Mason: First of all, it was television history. I understand that nobody has ever broadcast a network program from within a game, so that was one of the achievements. I think a lot of people who contacted me after the program were fascinated by it. I mean revolted and fascinated as well, because of the sheer, probably what they believe is the waste of human energy going into living in an alternative life online. But at the same time, we’re coming to the realisation that for some people, their online life is more real than their real life, or as real.
There are lots of virtuous uses of these things; there’s a depression support group inside Second Life, there are people with cerebral palsy who live as one of them put it, ‘the life I was supposed to lead’, inside this alternative universe. So to me, it just opened up a world of fascination. And most of the people I described it to first basically said ‘This is crazy, I don’t even want to see it’, but most of the people, having seen it, quite interestingly, were fascinated. And anybody who wants to look me up inside Second Life, I’m easy to find.
Gerald Tooth: All right, well thank you very much for joining us on The Media Report.
Paul Mason: Cheers.
Gerald Tooth: Paul Mason, from the BBC’s NewsNight program.
At the School of Media Studies at the University of Queensland, Dr Lisa Bode teaches Film and Television. She has a particular interest in the cultural history of electronic media.
Lisa Bode says the BBC’s decision to broadcast from within an online game would not have appealed to their core audience.
Lisa Bode: It’s not an extremely representative culture in terms of the general population. It’s a visual version of older textual worlds that existed in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, and still do exist, called multi-user domains. And these were created with text, people wrote the worlds, they would just write them, describe them in words. Now you can just render the worlds digitally and visually, and that requires a lot of money.
Before status was indicated by how good your imagination was, how well you could write the world, now your status is indicated by how much rendering time you can buy. So this particular world, Second Life, when you look at it, it seems very concerned with visual display and real estate and fashion, but just rendered digitally, rather than physically. And all these things are for sale. So it’s just about how much money’s in your wallet. It’s really not that different from the physical world in that respect, except it’s less representative, because it’s the techno-elite who are inhabiting this world, rather than the average Joe on the street.
Gerald Tooth: Paul Mason’s report for NewsNight was a business report, he is their business reporter, and he focused on that aspect of it, that while people were trying to escape the real world, they just found themselves in another world where money still was king. He was on the money, so to speak, wasn’t he?
Lisa Bode: Absolutely. It just replicates the economic structures of the real world, and the fact that these people talk about constructing their identity; in the real world, we construct our identity through what we buy. We indicate how high we are up in the socioeconomic scale by the cars that we buy, and the clothes that we wear, the houses, that everything is for visual display and it’s exactly the same in this world, ‘Second Life’. It’s all about visual display of wealth, but just digital rather than physical.
Gerald Tooth: In Paul Mason’s own blog later, he then talked a lot about his physical appearance in that game, and had a lot to say about how he felt bad about appearing like himself, as opposed to the other avatars that were all dressed up and very buff, so to speak. It said a lot about him, as well, didn’t it?
Lisa Bode: His own sort of insecurity. But I think he was kind of having – it seemed a little bit tongue-in-cheek, drawing attention to the fact that he’d created a digital doppelganger of himself, and the thing too is that he would have looked worse in this form than in real life, because digital doubles tend to look like corpses, because they haven’t completely reached a point of complete photo realism. So there’s always something a little bit off. So he probably was even more aware of how bad he looked. But he couldn’t have made himself look like Keanu Reeves, because the whole point of it was for television broadcast, to an audience of his regular viewers, who would recognise him, and so the whole point was to be recognised, but as a digital self rather than an ideal digital self. This was a digital, physical self.
Gerald Tooth: It gets very confusing, doesn’t it?
Lisa Bode: Yes, it does!
Gerald Tooth: And that’s what I think this world was about, it seems to be that there is this crossover between people wanting to escape the real world, but then create another world that is as close to the real world as possible, and a world that now will include news broadcasts within it, about that world itself.
Lisa Bode: Yes. Mainly it seems about the economy of that world. There seems to be a big emphasis on the Second Life website on economy, business, real estate, those sorts of things. So it seemed very apt that it was a business reporter who was actually reporting in this world. It’s much more about the economy. But I should say that not all online role playing games are like this. There are worlds that are created by digital artists for the sole purpose of simulating events like terrorism and international relations in the real world, in order to get the inhabitants of these role-playing games to think about how they might solve those problems in the real world, rather than Second Life, which is sort of in some way, an escape from physical suffering in the real world.
Gerald Tooth: Dr Lisa Bode, who lectures in film and television studies at the University of Queensland.
And just before we go a response to last week’s look at tabloid newspapers. David Evans wrote in with an explanation of where the term tabloid actually came from and according to Mr Evans:
“Tabloid only became a paper sheet-size name after the UK Education Act of 1870 made mass readership markets a reality. Originally it was a trade name for mass-produced tabletted medications that displaced pills that were individually rolled by Pharmacists. Tabloid originally meant “easily taken, uniform, effective dosage tablets stamped out in the millions”.
And that brings us to the end of this edition of The Media Report. Thanks to the production team of Andrew Davies and Peter McMurray, and Sabrina Lipovic at ABC Radio Archives.
The Izzie also finds Cyberia to be a most fascinating place. Not quite sure if we should regard it as a bunch of shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave or some sort of spirit world where distance does not matter and where you get to meet the essence of creatures and exterior factors such as age, gender and ethnicity are mainly irrelevant. Folks can reveal such things but Izzie often has images of teenage chat rooms full of 60 year old men all pretending to be teenage girls.
However, sometimes we get reminded that these spirits live in a very material world. On a recent visit to one of our usual Cyberian nooks - the dungeons of Azkaban - was confronted by a big padlock on the doors and a most unexpected message. It was not a Ministerial Decree but a massive drive failure that had led to the unexpected closure. It also brought back memories of the Ujournal saga as this server also hosted various diary services and has not been backed up since some time in 2004. The evil black hole of Cyberia strikes again. So, while in the world of muggles, this is a minor inconvenience - the loss of lots of squiggles - in Cyberia - it's a major disaster - like being on death row - the execution date being the possible discovery that the drive is totally stuffed up after all and the data unrecoverable.
Another thing the Iz finds amusing - the abilities that are of value in Cyberia are often not much use in the other world. As they were saying about that program - it used to be imagination that counted in the imaginary worlds within Cyberia but now it's who has got the biggest and bestest graphics. Like - in our own case - can potter off downtown or to the local shops to get stuff we need - no Mercs or pearls mind you - just everyday stuff. But online, Izzie is a pauper. Folks who do not have credit cards or choose not to use paypal - no matter how rich they are offline, are pretty low on the pecking order in Cyberia. Mind you - there's lots of freebies out there and lots of places to lurk that do not require loot.
*wonders if the World Webmaster has sufficient back up drives of the server that Izzie lurks in. Everyone gets to crash sooner or later but lets hope there's another fifty years before our files become totally corrupted and unreadable*
I understand that nobody has ever broadcast a network program from within a game, so that was one of the achievements. I think a lot of people who contacted me after the program were fascinated by it. I mean revolted and fascinated as well, because of the sheer, probably what they believe is the waste of human energy going into living in an alternative life online. But at the same time, we’re coming to the realisation that for some people, their online life is more real than their real life, or as real.
Last month, the BBC’s NewsNight program, hosted by Jeremy Paxman, crossed the boundary between the real and virtual worlds.
Program Transcript
Jeremy Paxman: No need to adjust your set, I or some child with access to a computerised paintbox’s idea of me, am speaking to you from inside a virtual reality world as part of NewsNight’s Technology Week. I’m joined here by our resident geek, Paul Mason, or a close approximation to him, who’s going to explain all. So, first of all, where are we?
Gerald Tooth: Where Jeremy Paxman and his business reporter, Paul Mason were, was inside an online game, a virtual world called Second Life. Players assume new identities, or Avatars.
The NewsNight team at the BBC decided to broadcast part of their program from inside the game. That involved building a virtual set and the presenters taking on their own avatars.
Jeremy Paxman: Right, prove you’re not real.
Paul Mason: Well, in this virtual world there’s no gravity, so I’m going to do something you rarely see on NewsNight, and that’s fly off. (BOING)
Gerald Tooth: Back on earth in the real world, I asked NewsNight business reporter Paul Mason about his apparent obsession with online games, that led to this unique broadcast moment.
Paul Mason: My interest in multi-player games comes from the same obsession I’ve got in my reporting, with the way that technology is changing human life. And we started by asking ourselves what can we do to explain to people who don’t get it, and don’t necessarily experience it, just what a big thing this is. So all line role-playing games are massive in the world. If you think about the most popular one, World of War Craft, it’s got about 4-million or 5-million subscribers. These people are playing per year, what it costs to subscribe to an American high quality cable channel, so it’s big business.
What we did is, we went inside a game called Second Life, and it’s quite a unique thing this, because inside Second Life, it’s not really a game, it’s just people represented by these 3D avatars, little images of themselves, doing whatever they want to do, and as long as it’s legal, they can do it. And we went in and we got somebody to build a replica of our set, we got them to make avatars of me and Jeremy. Jeremy, my colleague, is probably the biggest anchorman in British television, and very fearsome as well, when he’s interviewing politicians. So it’s quite a big thing to put him inside a game. And we did an in-studio session, and then I went into the game, and reported on what goes on there, which is of course highly interesting.
Gerald Tooth: Are you still there?
Paul Mason: Am I still in the game?
Gerald Tooth: Yes. Or have you managed to extract yourself?
Paul Mason: Well after the program went out, I went in and had a long conversation with all sorts of people who were bizarrely dressed. I mean you have to bear in mind that inside this game, Second Life, a lot of people like to have avatars that look like glamour models, let’s put it that way.
Gerald Tooth: And I’ve seen your avatar and believe me, there’s nothing glamorous about it.
Paul Mason: The problem is, we decided to make our avatars realistic, so I’m one of the only people in Second Life who has a stubble and wrinkles and looks my age. Everybody else seems to look like Angelina Jolie or Keanu Reeves, and the other problem is that of course they’re all anonymous, you can’t tell who they are in real life, and they get up to all sorts of exciting things that unfortunately I am not able to do, I just have to be me, and sit there and answer their questions, and take the flak. You know, people spend 40 hours, some 90 hours a week at these games, and I met some of them, and when you report on those worlds, that’s their world, and you’ve just stepped into it, and some of them didn’t like it.
Gerald Tooth: What do you think was achieved through the exercise?
Paul Mason: First of all, it was television history. I understand that nobody has ever broadcast a network program from within a game, so that was one of the achievements. I think a lot of people who contacted me after the program were fascinated by it. I mean revolted and fascinated as well, because of the sheer, probably what they believe is the waste of human energy going into living in an alternative life online. But at the same time, we’re coming to the realisation that for some people, their online life is more real than their real life, or as real.
There are lots of virtuous uses of these things; there’s a depression support group inside Second Life, there are people with cerebral palsy who live as one of them put it, ‘the life I was supposed to lead’, inside this alternative universe. So to me, it just opened up a world of fascination. And most of the people I described it to first basically said ‘This is crazy, I don’t even want to see it’, but most of the people, having seen it, quite interestingly, were fascinated. And anybody who wants to look me up inside Second Life, I’m easy to find.
Gerald Tooth: All right, well thank you very much for joining us on The Media Report.
Paul Mason: Cheers.
Gerald Tooth: Paul Mason, from the BBC’s NewsNight program.
At the School of Media Studies at the University of Queensland, Dr Lisa Bode teaches Film and Television. She has a particular interest in the cultural history of electronic media.
Lisa Bode says the BBC’s decision to broadcast from within an online game would not have appealed to their core audience.
Lisa Bode: It’s not an extremely representative culture in terms of the general population. It’s a visual version of older textual worlds that existed in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, and still do exist, called multi-user domains. And these were created with text, people wrote the worlds, they would just write them, describe them in words. Now you can just render the worlds digitally and visually, and that requires a lot of money.
Before status was indicated by how good your imagination was, how well you could write the world, now your status is indicated by how much rendering time you can buy. So this particular world, Second Life, when you look at it, it seems very concerned with visual display and real estate and fashion, but just rendered digitally, rather than physically. And all these things are for sale. So it’s just about how much money’s in your wallet. It’s really not that different from the physical world in that respect, except it’s less representative, because it’s the techno-elite who are inhabiting this world, rather than the average Joe on the street.
Gerald Tooth: Paul Mason’s report for NewsNight was a business report, he is their business reporter, and he focused on that aspect of it, that while people were trying to escape the real world, they just found themselves in another world where money still was king. He was on the money, so to speak, wasn’t he?
Lisa Bode: Absolutely. It just replicates the economic structures of the real world, and the fact that these people talk about constructing their identity; in the real world, we construct our identity through what we buy. We indicate how high we are up in the socioeconomic scale by the cars that we buy, and the clothes that we wear, the houses, that everything is for visual display and it’s exactly the same in this world, ‘Second Life’. It’s all about visual display of wealth, but just digital rather than physical.
Gerald Tooth: In Paul Mason’s own blog later, he then talked a lot about his physical appearance in that game, and had a lot to say about how he felt bad about appearing like himself, as opposed to the other avatars that were all dressed up and very buff, so to speak. It said a lot about him, as well, didn’t it?
Lisa Bode: His own sort of insecurity. But I think he was kind of having – it seemed a little bit tongue-in-cheek, drawing attention to the fact that he’d created a digital doppelganger of himself, and the thing too is that he would have looked worse in this form than in real life, because digital doubles tend to look like corpses, because they haven’t completely reached a point of complete photo realism. So there’s always something a little bit off. So he probably was even more aware of how bad he looked. But he couldn’t have made himself look like Keanu Reeves, because the whole point of it was for television broadcast, to an audience of his regular viewers, who would recognise him, and so the whole point was to be recognised, but as a digital self rather than an ideal digital self. This was a digital, physical self.
Gerald Tooth: It gets very confusing, doesn’t it?
Lisa Bode: Yes, it does!
Gerald Tooth: And that’s what I think this world was about, it seems to be that there is this crossover between people wanting to escape the real world, but then create another world that is as close to the real world as possible, and a world that now will include news broadcasts within it, about that world itself.
Lisa Bode: Yes. Mainly it seems about the economy of that world. There seems to be a big emphasis on the Second Life website on economy, business, real estate, those sorts of things. So it seemed very apt that it was a business reporter who was actually reporting in this world. It’s much more about the economy. But I should say that not all online role playing games are like this. There are worlds that are created by digital artists for the sole purpose of simulating events like terrorism and international relations in the real world, in order to get the inhabitants of these role-playing games to think about how they might solve those problems in the real world, rather than Second Life, which is sort of in some way, an escape from physical suffering in the real world.
Gerald Tooth: Dr Lisa Bode, who lectures in film and television studies at the University of Queensland.
And just before we go a response to last week’s look at tabloid newspapers. David Evans wrote in with an explanation of where the term tabloid actually came from and according to Mr Evans:
“Tabloid only became a paper sheet-size name after the UK Education Act of 1870 made mass readership markets a reality. Originally it was a trade name for mass-produced tabletted medications that displaced pills that were individually rolled by Pharmacists. Tabloid originally meant “easily taken, uniform, effective dosage tablets stamped out in the millions”.
And that brings us to the end of this edition of The Media Report. Thanks to the production team of Andrew Davies and Peter McMurray, and Sabrina Lipovic at ABC Radio Archives.
The Izzie also finds Cyberia to be a most fascinating place. Not quite sure if we should regard it as a bunch of shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave or some sort of spirit world where distance does not matter and where you get to meet the essence of creatures and exterior factors such as age, gender and ethnicity are mainly irrelevant. Folks can reveal such things but Izzie often has images of teenage chat rooms full of 60 year old men all pretending to be teenage girls.
However, sometimes we get reminded that these spirits live in a very material world. On a recent visit to one of our usual Cyberian nooks - the dungeons of Azkaban - was confronted by a big padlock on the doors and a most unexpected message. It was not a Ministerial Decree but a massive drive failure that had led to the unexpected closure. It also brought back memories of the Ujournal saga as this server also hosted various diary services and has not been backed up since some time in 2004. The evil black hole of Cyberia strikes again. So, while in the world of muggles, this is a minor inconvenience - the loss of lots of squiggles - in Cyberia - it's a major disaster - like being on death row - the execution date being the possible discovery that the drive is totally stuffed up after all and the data unrecoverable.
Another thing the Iz finds amusing - the abilities that are of value in Cyberia are often not much use in the other world. As they were saying about that program - it used to be imagination that counted in the imaginary worlds within Cyberia but now it's who has got the biggest and bestest graphics. Like - in our own case - can potter off downtown or to the local shops to get stuff we need - no Mercs or pearls mind you - just everyday stuff. But online, Izzie is a pauper. Folks who do not have credit cards or choose not to use paypal - no matter how rich they are offline, are pretty low on the pecking order in Cyberia. Mind you - there's lots of freebies out there and lots of places to lurk that do not require loot.
*wonders if the World Webmaster has sufficient back up drives of the server that Izzie lurks in. Everyone gets to crash sooner or later but lets hope there's another fifty years before our files become totally corrupted and unreadable*
