Comments on: The Story Box: Second Life & Magic

By: So say I all

So say I all — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:32:58 +0000

[...] Kevin Kelly, courtesy of Dusan Writer: « In SL Y-K-WSecond Life You-Know-Where, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our [...]

By: The great escape

The great escape — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:59:23 +0000

[...] invented, and keep inventing for ourselves. Dusan Writer was right on the fact Second Life is a Story Box — maybe the greatest made yet. Where he was wrong was in thinking the storytelling experience is [...]

By: Story Box

Story Box — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:52:57 +0000

[...] Dusan Writer has done so tonight, and he has done even better, carrying the thought much further than I would ever have been able to : But when I look at Second Life You-Know-Where I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. [...]

By: Chimaera

Chimaera — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:43:01 +0000

[...] one man publications and tabloids, even a TV channel ; anything from consumist glossies to high brow discussions by its very own brand of intellectuals. It has fashions and subcultures. It has a frontier of [...]

By: The great escape « Rheta’s World

The great escape « Rheta’s World — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:34:40 +0000

By: dusanwriter

dusanwriter — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:20:40 +0000

@ Pais – I’ve come to believe that virtuality is no different than other realities, it just uses different tools of expression, tools which, perhaps, tap into some richer vein of storytelling and experience, particularly because it IS immersive, and therefore ‘feels real’, and because in that place which feels real the rules and “words” that we have at our disposal are different. I feel somewhat like we’re at the dawn of perspective in painting – imagine how it must have felt to become suddenly aware, through the canvas, that there was a whole range within our visual language we had been blind to, and what it was like to experience that for the first time. It caused schisms in beliefs and argument, but there is no argument that it was as if we had a blind spot that was suddenly revealed.

More to your point, however, I’m not sure it’s just the pace of chat and typing that creates a little electric change in perspective. It’s the combination of it with the visual environment. As you know, there’s nothing I hate worse than sitting and talking with someone in SL (oops, better check the branding guidelines, I meant “in virtual world of Second Life (R)”) and not facing them….it’s just text chat, but that’s combined with a visual vocabulary as well. As the range of avatar expression increases (lip synching for those with voice, 3D cameras that can detect facial expression and movement, etc) it will be interesting to see how the range of language (text plus expression plus presence plus the ability to co-create using prims, embedded HTML, etc.) the range of stories, their depth or texture, might increase as well.

I’m glad that you called it ‘pseudo-realities’ however – because I’m not convinced that there’s anything *different* about the ’strange loop’ that occurs within a virtual environment…it’s more that we don’t afford ourselves as many opportunities for it to occur. How many of us are part of a writer’s workshop? Or travel to strange places that shake our sense of location or culture or belief? Or participate in meditation retreats? All things where we, in a sense, fragment part of ourselves from our habitual meat space.

Finally, while virtual worlds are powerful environments for storytelling, your quote of Laurie, a cut that I well love, reminds me of another quote:

“Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He’s sure to open the door again for it’s a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.”

By: dandellion Kimban

dandellion Kimban — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:28:14 +0000

I agree. If we stick in naming and defining without experiencing, we’re dead. Nothing is more dangerous to philosophy than trying to think without living.

By: dusanwriter

dusanwriter — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:22:14 +0000

Well put Dandellion. Although I also take Beau’s point that we can spend so much time assessing and naming and trying to define that we forget to just experience.

Thanks for the wonderful comments.

By: dandellion Kimban

dandellion Kimban — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:11:09 +0000

Great post and great point about storytelling.
I’d like to try my luck answering Beau why do we need definitions, even when they turn into camps and even when we are aware that they cannot put the world into a box. We need them because we try to understand and depict the world we are in. We try to tell the story, and we need definitions (whether they are words, images, prims or even music) to do that. there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we are aware that they will change, just as the world changes. And world is changing not only by itself but with our storytelling and our definitions. There is a trap and danger, but if we are aware it is an adventure worth taking. It is not words that turned the world into chaos. Words made the world out of chaos. And they are transforming it in each turn. It0’s up to us if that’s going to be for good or for bad.

By: paiskidd

paiskidd — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:27:50 +0000

Hey Dusan, I think we have only just started to turn the rich soil in the garden of thoughts that PKD provides in his speach. As I saw what aspect that you commented upon, then was also re-skimming it and mentally holding it next to our Metaverse context, I then heard an echo of some of Laurie Anderson’s spoken lyric from a cut named “Born, Never Asked”, that says, “It was a large room, full of people. All kinds, and they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free, and they were all asking themselves the same question. What is behind that curtain?”

She may have been thinking of a different line of allegory than us finding our human-ness in virtual dimensions, but when I press it up against PKD’s one sentence definition, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” and then thread it to why we fragment ourselves out of meatspace to find ourselves again in a metaverse, our eternal braid may look less made up of strange loops when we hold it up to the right kind of light.

PKD also has a tangent saying, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.” I think it is interesting that one one part of ourselves that is literal in SL is our text chat. The mechanism is important, i think as well, and although voice chat exists, I am sure it not simply another way of doing the same thing. The way we communicate with text provides a pace and exchange that causes us to pare down our expressions to short, concise sentences, then wait for a response, then reply… things can happen in that process that don’t happen in other kinds of communication. The first time I met a SL friend in RL, I found conversation seemed way too fast for me to assimilate and respond. I was used to the cadence and parsing of chat with this person.

Of course, this is not the aspect that PKD was talking about, he was saying that with fiction, authors are basing part of their words on truth and part as fiction, but the consumer of fiction is not given that information, so we are in a dangerous situation of “fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.”

If any of us are seeking Truth, or to find our better expression of Being, or a better way to be Human; does our explorations of ourselves in the Metaverse help or hinder the apsects of our current other pseudo-realities?