Review of "The Second Life Herald"

I just did a short book review of Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace's "The Second Life Herald" for Science. It's just been published and so I can make it available here. For those who don't want to read a one page review, I'll give a mini-review of the review over the page, and ask a couple of questions of y'all.

So, "TSLH" is a really good book. It works on a number of levels, and it provides what are probably the most elegantly-introduced-and-handled explanations of basic VW concepts. (The relevant technology and topics are seamlessly introduced and explained without the usual clunkiness that you see in writing for n00bs). You have probably read it, and if you haven't you should. But a review for Science is necessarily for a different audience than the one that congregates here. The basic issue in the review--do you buy the magic circle?--is something that everyone here understands and can use as their means of parsing whatever Ludlow and Wallace say. So the types of questions that this group has of the book are different, and for me the most obvious question is whether anyone remains concerned about the class war that animates "TLSH".

TLSH is all about the injustices of devs against users (or Peter, actually) which is a useful and fun way to sell books, but it struck me as basically false. I didn't get the sense that the authors really did feel aggrieved about the problems that devs generate. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but it seemed like the kind of reportage we see in Fox's "current affairs" programming: "And tonight we will show you how eating healthy foods can make you FAT and give you CANCER and make your BRAINS EXPLODE!!1! And then we'll have an interview with Lindsay Lohan's breasts."

Yet if we take VWs seriously there is an obvious Chickasaw problem that we have to confront at some point. Ludlow and Wallace take this seriously, and I don't know why I don't anymore. Is it just the standard 'voice and exit' answer? Beats me. Obviously this is something that my therapist and I have to confront.

There are lots of other issues that TLSH raises but which I don't have time to kick around here. I'm especially interested in how we write about these worlds and their issues, because Peter and Mark's approach is interesting and idiosyncratic. But this, like I say in the review, is a story for another day.

Comments

[Adam Ruch]

1.

I came to the same final conclusion about 2 chapters before the book that the authors did: you can't 'sell' community as a product. Not until there is a technology to run rendered virtual worlds in the open source domain, as fundamental as HTTP type protocols, will we have a open and free virtual world to wander around in, 'potentially' un-influence by the agendas of a corporation. We'd be able to create avatars and environments with the same more-or-less liberty as we can now create websites. Its that ownership/liability/psychotic-corporate complex that creates the tension.