virtual realms

(posts for the week)

On the article about retail drama in the metaverse, I suppose I am having a hard time grasping the concept.  When I purchase something online I expect to receive something in the mail a few days later.  I guess i just don't get why someone would purchase something with no physical return. And for that matter I dont quite understand how people make legitimate money from Second Life.  But it might just be that I need someone to explain this better.  I could however understand how observing interactions on Second Life, when shopping, could benefit real world stores/customer service.  

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On the Ethical Issues/Copyright issues article, I want to be empathetic with those who may have been affected from various "crimes" in Second Life, but at the same time the virtual world itself does seem to invite a lot of these problems. I feel like there are too many unknowns and not enough structure for people to get too upset.  Your avatar doesn't have to look like you, you could be anything and the person behind the avatar could be anyone.  Also I feel like this makes it hard to track down a SL criminal because of all of these unknowns and personalities.  I feel that this brings a lot of sketchiness to SL especially related to the different scenarios mentioned in the article.  You want to feel bad for the person but at the same time it is like well they knew the parameters of SL before they entered the world.  

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To be fair I dont know anything about Second Life or World of Warcraft except that they are massive multi people virtual worlds.  I still dont really see what McGongial was trying to get at with W.o.W in her book, Reality is Broken, but now I can at least see that if you have a team of people, who you know or dont know, you have to trust them to stay in formation and stick to the plan--this requires a lot of coordination and planning otherwise you end up with Leeroy Jenkins,  but other than that I feel that these skills could be learned elsewhere.