Julian Dibbell in Second Life

July 31, 2006 on 7:51 pm | In General Gaming, Playstyles, Industry

Today, Raph published a link and a quick quote from an interview event in Second Life with Julian Dibbell. For a man with so much history and commentary on the genre, and a new book, I found his interview very readable and entertaining.

And it's not just because they talk about RMTing.

The part I liked:

KT: So, you think any social space is fair game for people who want to make money?
JD: These are great questions, though, that people in virtual world studies are constantly hashing and rehashing. Open game? No, obviously not. I Just think the nature of these games is that they were never so innocent to begin with. They're built around the leveling treadmill, for starters. What is so utopian about that? And once that's there, the snake is in the garden.

I always like debating RMTing with the dogmatic zealots so opposed to it But the point I keep trying to make is that RMTing itself is not the root of all of the problems in these games. It's the very nature of the imbalance, the point that games about advancement will always have those who have, those who have not and those who want to bypass the arbitrary boundaries between them and their goal of the day.

To me, a "leveling treadmill" is the same as farming. The former is about advancement of character and the latter of wealth, but the motivation behind each is fundamentally same. The focus shifts on playing for fun to playing for gain, morphing the experience from one of game to one of effort ("work", to some).

The imbalance becomes not about time so much as it is about focus. Those who focus on one thing can sometimes make up for any deficiency they may have on time. Of course, those who focus on one thing and have time, well, they win.

And from the comments on Raph's site, Michael Chui quotes:

Chris Lake [from the audience]: Land is the one scarce resource, so yes, there is money to be made there. But it toally misses the point here that one TRUE scarce resource we have in SL is TALENT! And that’s where money is to be made. Creativity
JD: No, again, fun is also a truly scarce commodity. The Linden’s can’t arbitrarily decide what the sweetspot between too easy and too hard is.

The point about the scarcity of talent in SL is also interesting. For a game built by the sheer will of the players who, by their nature, seek to be more creative than most people, I find the game itself iterates life more than explores what's possible in a world system with very few rules. It is almost as if some folks advance to master the tools and then sort of get stuck there.

I am not one to criticize of course, as I am not even an amateur-level creator in SL. Further, with a background in Industrial Design, with a brain attuned to what's feasible long before I even knew what ID was (as evidenced by my earliest drawings), I am not the most creative person in the CAD-osphere (can we get enough "ospheres"? ). It just seems odd for a game as nice as SL to be populated by so many who find what is arguably the mundane real world to be so interesting as to emulate it in a space that in no way requires them to do so.