| ![]() |
|
a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment
ABOUT About This Site - RSS Feed Ian Bogost (editor) Gonzalo Frasca (editor) SPONSORS
COMMUNITY
|
Will there ever be politics in Second Life? December 30, 2007 - by Ian Bogost Those of you who keep up with game industry news already know that Cory Ondrejka has left his post as CTO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. Cory is a respected friend, and I will be interested to see what he does next. On Friday, Cory mused on his last day on his new blog, Collapsing Geography. That may be one you want to add to your readers. More directly related to our interests on this site, however, is Cory's discussion of one of his 2007 predictions, which have become a Terra Nova tradition.
6) At least one Presidential candidate will use Second Life to build a community around issues rather than simply holding a single press conference
4.5 for 6. This is a tough one. On the one hand, many candidates have had multiple events and built communities within SL, but I haven't seen a real commitment to building an ongoing issue discussion. On the other hand, NPR's Science Friday and SciIslands have built an ongoing, regular science discussion, use of SL to host global warming discussions is heating up. So, giving myself a half-right. I spent a good deal of time in Persuasive Games talking about the difference between politicking and politics. In too-brief summary: politicking is campaigning; politics is policy. Campaigning is what we mistake for politics. That's why we pay much more attention to elections like the one going on now. The vast majority of what we see in Second Life, in terms of candidate to citizen interaction, is politicking. It's not just press conferences, as Cory suggests, but rallies and other simulations of the nearly politically meaningless events of real-world campaigning. Of course, facilitating discussion can't be all bad. But there's something missing from Cory's evaluation of this prediction. Virtual worlds like Second Life offer the potential to model policy proposals themselves, to allow people to experience a world constrained by the new rules of a fiscal or social proposal. But realizing that potential requires building more than just projection screens and amphitheaters out of prims. Of course, that amphitheater looks a lot better on a press release than some computational model of a new social practice. Comment from Dakota Reese on December 30, 2007
I assume you've seen this: POST A COMMENT
|
SELF PROMOTION
My new column: Texture
Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on how videogames are tactile. But unlike paintings and plats ... Liz Losh on the NASA MMO Fail Recently I made some strong remarks about NASA's decision to pull (or "reconfigure") the funding plan for their long-planned educational ... iTunes App Store can reject you for any reason Following my occasional series of gripes about Apple openness (1, 2, 3, 4), I thought I'd share a part of ... Boxing Politician Games. Again. It happens every election cycle, it seems. Games that allow players to make their favorite candidate box against their least ... Me on Advertising and Games in the Guardian If you read the Guardian, you may have noticed that they are running a series of articles and opinion pieces ... Libery City Satire I am a Gorilla NASA MMO Update: Brains Pulled, not Funding NASA MMO Budget Cut from $3m to $0 Air Traffic Chaos FAVORITES Does expression come in HD too?
Food Force
A Force More Complicated
PSP and Performance Intelligence
A Review of the Leapster
ALSO VISIT
|
RECENT COMMENTS
Ian Bogost on
Libery City Satire
tanner on Libery City Satire Tele3dworld on NASA MMO Update: Brains Pulled, not Funding Tele3dworld on NASA MMO Budget Cut from $3m to $0 Ian Bogost on NASA MMO Budget Cut from $3m to $0 ADVERTISERS
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © Ian Bogost & Gonzalo Frasca, unless otherwise noted. Re-printing for commercial purposes by permission only (contact us: ). Re-printing for educational purposes is allowed with proper attribution. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||