Dear Mr. Humble: We're buying "little dreams..."
Through-out the holidays, Dusan kept muttering that he was working on a blog post, and on January 9th he published "Second Life Next: 2011" consisting of some thoughts which he thought Rob Humble, new Linden Lab CEO might find interesting.
He did his research, citing Create, a game product that Humble was involved with at Electronic Arts.
"I picked up a copy of Create, the game that Rod Humble, (the new CEO of Linden Lab) headed up while at EA (amongst other jobs). And it’s not such a bad game – but even better is the box, which has headlines that read:
- Spark Your Imagination! The game that rewards you for being creative
- Create your own scenes
- Use your imagination to unlock rewards
- Experiment to solve fun challenges
- Open up more ways to play
"All of which is to say that Create is a sort of cartoonish version of the Second Life value proposition (although it’s probably a lot closer to a more complex version of Little Big Planet in terms of what it actually does) aimed at a much younger demographic."
For Humble's benefit, he tackles the challenge of attempting to condense a Second Life lifetime into mere words. He quotes Metanomics guest, Tyler Cowen's take on digital goods and creation:
"…I think we’re usually buying little dreams. We not only buy food and shelter, but when we choose styles or when we buy clothes with any kind of fashion, when we decide how we’re going to have our hair cut, we’re all, in a way, buying virtual goods because their importance exists only insofar as they are interpreted by other human beings. What’s important about them it’s not like their physical attributes, but, again, how they are interpreted by other people within this common framework of meaning.
"So what Virtual Worlds do is, they take that common framework of meaning and somehow make that more explicit technologically, like there’s an actual virtual space. But I think it’s copying something we’ve been doing all along, I think that’s a big part of why it’s powerful, actually very natural. It’s very biological, I think. People think of Virtual Worlds as like contrary to biology or contrary to what they call atomic space.”
And he cites Second Life Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on creation and craft, also from a Metanomics appearance:
"So when I try to, tried to sort of step back from this research I’d done in Second Life, to step back and say okay, what were some of the really big picture issues that might be interesting, even to people who could care less about virtual worlds or you know, to anyone sort of interested in contemporary life. What can we take home from virtual worlds, take home to think about things more broadly?
"So after just reading around, thinking about things, because this is about technology, I started, you know, what does technology mean, where does that word come from? And so I got interested in this idea that technology is rooted linguistically in action, in the term techne, meaning something much more like craft or arts.
"And so that was interesting to me, that techne is about art or craft. I immediately started thinking about how important building and making things is in Second Life. And then I started looking at – there’s as whole range of philosophers and thinkers who for a long time now have been talking about how in the original formulation, techne’s opposite is knowledge, or episteme."
It's well worth your time to read the entire post, (http://bit.ly/hNiNQD) addressing "Fast, Easy, Fun" and past strategies from the Lab. It attracted over 50 comments, many of some length and all imbued with matching thoughtfulness.
And Tom Boellstorff suggested having coffee to discuss it further, so Dusan snagged him for the Metanomics show on January 31. Please plan to join us a week from tomorrow, when Metanomics returns for the launch of the 2011 season, at 12pm SLT, in the Metanomics Studio and at Event Partner Locations. This Thursday, January 27th, the Metanomics Community Forum will host a Welcome Open House for those joining us from the Teen Grid, and our regular community of course. Also at 12pm SLT, in the Metanomics Studio.
