Comments on: These Great Urbanist Games

By: altug isigan

altug isigan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:27:01 +0000

This vision of a play-city visited by a “civilized” city leaves the impression that it follows Huizinga’s vision of culture which visited play at some stage in history and did not leave it anymore. It’s striking how both writers believe that one will be “lifeless” without the other. The wane of the play element in culture is not less problematic than the wane of the culture-element in play. It’s not only the serious which defines itself as the opposite of play and thereby declares itself more important; but the commercial game reproduces this divide when it promotes itself as an experience which allows for a temporary escape from the real (and burdensome, less valuable, serious) world.

By: altug isigan

altug isigan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:10:44 +0000

“Play as experience” made me think of some of Victor Turner’s studies in anthropology, as well as his conception of the symbol as an event. New Babylon, on the other hand got me immediately think of one of my favorite novels, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. You probably have heard of the story of Sophronia in it:

“The city of Sphoronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the
Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-
city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is
permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant
lots of another half-city.

And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry,
the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary. Here remains the
half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it begins to count the
months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.”

A complete life. In the sense of not only a second life?? ;)

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:14:44 +0000

Yes, I think that’s a strong parallel, Moses. Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, is an enormous fan of Burning Man, and has attended most if not all of them, if I recall correctly. That idea of contriving open-ended circumstances for creativity undergirds Burning Man as much as SL and New Babylon.

By: MosesW

MosesW — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:10:30 +0000

I have to say on finally getting a full read of this article, Thomas, that more than ever I see the parallels between Second Life (and New Babylon) and Burning Man. While I’ve only been once (all the way back in 1996), I know a few of the folks in the organization, and one thing that has definitely been in evidence as the event has developed over the years is the inherent contradictions that have to be wrestled with in architecting a space for play. Given that play on the playa for many participants involves the consumption of illegal (and often dangerous) substances, you can well imagine how this challenge developed legs as the event grew and acquired less intimacy and more attention from the authorities.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:50:08 +0000

Agreed, Prokofy. These imaginings of the human on the part of both Constant (who was “constant” about this project, for all his earlier jumping about — he worked on New Babylon for twenty years straight) and Linden Lab are all the more notable for the vast chasm which separates them from how people actually seem to live.

By: Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:29:07 +0000

This idea would be more persuasive to me if in fact people behaved in Second Life like Constant — who sounds anything but. And I realize this issue I’m responding to may be a minor one in the scheme of this entire article about technology and authority — but I think if anything, one of the ways actual users of at least this virtual world technology fight the authority of the VW makers themselves is persisting despite their vicissitudes — price rises, instability, etc.

In fact, most people in SL want absolute stability and versimilitude to Real Life. They make a building *just so* and they leave it literally for years just that way, never changing it. While a handful of high-profile artists are constantly building and destroying architecture-as-art, and doing so casually because they can copy it and put it in inventory to rez out some other day, the person who makes a home doesn’t keep changing it in the normal course of things, and even becomes upset if some exigency like a server crash or Linden patch makes it disappear or return to inventory. Unlike that architect, he may not have a copy.

It’s funny how for some people, Second Life, which you would think would be endlessly fluid and ephemeral, becomes a place of rooted persistence for people by contrast with their real lives. Let’s say they lost their home in Katrina, or they lost their home to foreclosure, or they lost their job — but their pixelated SL homes are still *exactly* the way they left them, and able to be preserved for, say, a mere US $25 a month in maintenance fees.

It’s interesting to me to look at the map and the landmarks over the years I’ve been in Second Life and see how persistent they are. For example, the Clocktower of Tan had to be taken down because I think the owner didn’t pay the tier anymore. Galaxy, the ship spanning 3 sims, has to be taken down because it couldn’t get the rentals and events to pay to justify the tier. But the Ivory Tower of Prims, a building tutorial site, remains. I have had Ravenglass Hall standing exactly as originally built for four years.