BigShinyThing

Thus far, SL’s excitement eludes us. Which, on reflection, is maybe a bit unfair: SL is a platform (albeit a creaky, laggy, jaggy one). It’s really up to the inworld community to use it to make engaging spaces. Any number of artists are using SL as an environment for their work. But, as very very occasional visitors inworld, we only find out about their stuff when it surfaces on our lists and feeds: we’re simply not engaged enough with SL itself to track what’s going on there.

So props to the Australia’s d/Lux/MediaArts and their SL project, the d/Lux Pony Club:

[...] a new initiative developed by d/Lux/MediaArts to encourage arts practice and critical dialogue in Second Life. Participants are encouraged to climb aboard one of our uniquely designed magic ponies from a meeting point. From there you will be taken on a teleportation trail ride through galleries, installations and interesting new communities in SL.

As we see it, the Pony Club performs an editorial/curatorial role: choosing the best bits of SL-based art and facilitating access to those, like ourselves, who are outsiders to the SL ’scene’ (much like those art tours of London’s East End galleries, which we’ve always found vaguely amusing in their assumption that ‘it’s all a ghetto out there’). And those ponies are cute. Kinda.

We missed the last tour, and are kicking ourselves for the lapse: word is that there was much fun to be had, and some genuinely interesting SL art to be seen on the way. Keep an eye on the d/Lux blog for future events.

It might well be more carbon-conscious to have a meeting in Second Life than hopping on Upper Class to New York — if you can cope with the resulting increase in your business’s ‘naffness footprint’. But have you wondered at the ecological footprint of SL itself? Nicholas Carr has. His conclusion? An SL avatar consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian, or, as a comment on his site notes,

that’s the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles.

For comparison, the server that BST runs on — which also provides our email, websites and much more — consumes a bit less than half the power needed to maintain your average punky fetish elf in SL.

Draw your own conclusions.

[via the iDC mailing list]

So the *shock horror* news from last week was that London ad agencies BBH and Leo Burnett are to open premises in Second Life. Leo Burnett think a virtual office will be a good way to run international business and BBH see possibilities in a virtual creative office. Well whoopee doo: virtual offices ain’t that new. HHCL did it back in the day (1998) with their MOO-based HowellHenryLand [full disclosure here -- BST's designer built hhland and BST's editor worked at HHCL]. As that experiment showed us, there is a valid space for virtual offices, but we would suggest that Second Life isn’t it.

This photo of a Second Lifer from The Economist this week shows why. Folks, the clue is in the name. Second Life is a place where people come to exercise their fantasies, not their reality. Second Life users don’t want this space to look like London’s Soho — they’ve already got one of those.

Maybe, if ad agencies and brands are smart they’ll use their Second Life presence to probe users’ ‘other’ life — the one where they have leather wings and flying rollerskates — to find out what drives peoples’ desires and leads them to want innumerable handbags. What ad agencies have to recognise about SL is that it’s (deep breath) Not Real. If they must be in Second Life, we’d like to see ad agencies get genuinely creative: how about BBH fire-bombing Leo Burnett from flying Llamas?

Anyways, isn’t SL well, just a bit emo? In our idle moments, we dream of the day when ad agencies and other brands try and invade the blood-and-guts online game World of Warcraft. After all, that MMORPG boast an impressive 7m subscribers to Second Life’s paltry 700,000. We’d also love to see who would win in a fight of Second Life users vs World of Warcraft but it would appear for now that these virtual worlds are not mutually inclusive. Shame. Designer Adidas vs. Broadsword +3? That battle would be short but very sweet. Ah well…

Here we have a classic example of ad agencies’ tendency to simply appropriate a new space as opposed to thinking about how to contribute to it. Witness the numerous feckless experiments we’re seen already with street art from the likes of PSP and Saatchi & Saatchi.

As Henry Jenkins tells The Economist, Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments”: it’s not just another territory — like New York — for ad agencies to plant a flag on as a PR wheeze.