From Life on Mars to Linden, addendum

In the last few weeks, the post “The truth and change, 3a:  From Life On Mars to Linden” has been getting a lot of hits.  Its spike in the data has pushed it to the most-hit post of all time for me, past the old standards of “The truth and us” and “The truth and unicorns, parts 1 and 2.”  I am really interested to know how and why this spike is occuring from those visiting.  Feel free to email me (jguidryDOT7ATgmailDOTcom) or Twitter (@truthandrockets) or leave a comment here.

I started to put this addendum together right after fininshing the Life on Mars post a few months ago.  I had uncovered so much interesting stuff and, as it always happens, realized how much I had missed once I had published the posting.  In spite of all my good intentions, I let the addendum lay in the to-do tray whilst writing up other things of interest to me.  I continue to be fascinated by the way that virtual spaces and so-called “real life” affirm each other’s essential meaning in our world.  I’ve also begun to write a longish story about organic/avatar relationships and welcome any interesting comments or links from people about their own stories or interests in the phenomenon.  So here are some fun things . . .

The Arch is a blog about design and architecture in Second Life that goes into great detail on the kinds of Houses of Tomorrow that can exist today in the virtual world.  They’ve posted a great short video on YouTube, and if you follow the “related videos” you can drop into a whole new world virtual vouyerism.  Enjoy!

Elle Kirshner’s Second Spaces is an interior design blog that highlights the newest designs for your home in SL.  Elle is a designer herself, and by just clicking through her site you can see a lot of the interesting concepts and designs about space that are important to virtual life.  From Second Speaces, you can also link to Elle’s friends and other businesses, learning a lot about SL’s economic and social life.

One of the interesting and most wonderful consequences of my original post “From Life on Mars to Linden” was that I picked up a new Twitter follower (and presumably blog reader):  Botgirl.  Botgirl’s Tweets (@botgirlq) are a veritable library of hyper-current thinking on storytelling that have become a great source for me as I write and think.  Should you Tweet and link through Botgirl’s world, you’ll realize that this Avatar and her RL typist brings into focus a whole world of multiple and parallel ontologies that really do get at (what I see as) the really important things about life.  If you’re a storyteller then you need to become friends with Botgirl.

Virtual existence brings into high relief the way in which storytelling truly becomes part and parcel of being.  Call it an auto-ontological environment, in you will, in which stories become magically real.  Lanna Beresford’s blog “Avatars in Wonderland” takes up these themes and helps us see how to live on these parallel planes.  In “All the virtual world’s a stage” she interviews role-player Salvatore Otoro.

Finally, the interest in the economics of virtual worlds is something I find truly captivating, not so much from the standpoint of getting into biz myself but rather from the perspective of learning how we create value.  Intrinsically, there is no value in nature, and then we come along and begin to create value.  Sometimes we create value out of scarcity, sometimes out of thin air.  Eventually, it always comes to scarcity and control, however.  With the Virtual Economy Research Network, you can keep up with a group of people doing some pretty serious study of virtual economics.

There’s much more to see.  Much more to look at.  Many more stories to create.  We’ll keep writing . . .