Second Life Article Now Available

I just noticed that my article on Second Life, World of Warcraft and other "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games" from Salvo 3, is finally available online. They currently have it up as the featured article of the week. You can read it here.

My Published Writing

Here is list of all of my published work (print and online), with brief descriptions:

February 2005-February 2008: I was a regular contributor to the Crux Project blogs “New Adventures in Sci-Phi,” “Situation Critical,” and “Signs of the Times” (all three now defunct), and to the second incarnation of “Signs of the Times,” which replaced them in January 2006 when Crux became Salvo. [Except for what I have reposted here and what archive.org has preserved, the original three blogs are no longer available, but the newer “Signs of the Times” is here.]

February-November 2006 and June-July 2007: “It’s Greek to Me,” a monthly column published in First Edition, the newsletter of my local church. [This was a series of Greek word studies, 300-800 words each, written for a lay audience; they are not available online.]

June 2006: “Interior Design: DNA and Its Complex Specified Information” (plus two sidebars), in Salvo 1, pgs. 76-79. [A moderate-length article written before the Dover trial, it maintains a more positive view of the Intelligent Design movement than I currently hold; it is available here.]

April 2007: A review of The First Edition of the New Testament by David Trobisch, in Canadian Evangelical Review, Spring 2007 issue, pgs. 83-86. [A critical review of Trobisch’s revisionist interpretation of the canonization of the New Testament; it is not available online.]

August 2007-Present: C. Orthodoxy.

August 2007: “My So-Called Second Life: Born Again into a Virtual Reality” (plus a sidebar review of Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson), in Salvo 3, pgs. 38-45. [A lengthy article on the social impact of Second Life and other “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games”; it is available here.]

August 2008: A review of the film Atonement, chosen as Runner-Up (Second Place) in the Looking Closer Review Contest. [Focusing particularly on the film's presentation of the corporate nature of evil. Click the previous link to read the review, or for an earlier version than that submitted, see here.]

September 2008: “Sex, Drugs and Reproduction: Birth Control is a Messy, Messy Business” (plus “Decoding Contraception” sidebar), in Salvo 6, pgs. 32-36. [A critical look at the moral and social impact and implications of contraception; available here. As the previous links indicate, this article was substantially revised by the editorial board to make it more one-sided than I intended, leading to my resignation from Salvo.]

I was also a Contributing Editor for Salvo from January 2007 to September 2008.

The Real Life Impact of Second Life Confirmed

Last summer I wrote an extensive article on Second Life for Salvo 3 which, among other things, argued that probably the most important aspect of such virtual worlds (or “metaverses”) is the fact that who we are inside them will inevitably influence who we are in real life. According to a new article in TIME, I seem to have been right. Recent research being done by Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has confirmed that one’s appearance and activities within Second Life can have a direct (if only short term) impact on one’s real world attitudes and activities:

Jeremy Bailenson, head of the lab and an assistant professor of communication at Stanford… has found that even 90 seconds spent chatting it up with avatars is enough to elicit behavioral changes offline — at least in the short-term. "When we cloak ourselves in avatars [that is, virtual representations of ourselves], it subtly alters the manner in which we behave," says Bailenson. "It's about self-perception and self-confidence." But researchers are still trying to figure out the psychological mechanisms at work, and which way the effect flows: "Do you consciously wear your power suit to feel confident, or is it that you're in this suit and you're feeling up, but you're unaware of the reason?" says Bailenson.

The article goes on to describe a series of experiments where groups of people were each assigned either an attractive avatar or an ugly one, then allowed to interact with one another in Second Life. As expected, those with more attractive avatars showed more confidence, approached others more closely, and spoke more freely than those with less attractive avatars, quite regardless of their real world appearance. Then, an hour after they had signed off, the participants were told they would be participating in a separate study which required them to choose a potential date out of a group of photos. Once again, those who had recently inhabited an attractive avatar showed greater confidence in their choices than those who had less attractive avatars.

In other experiments, people given taller or shorter avatars were found to display greater or lesser confidence respectively – both in Second Life and after leaving – and people who spent five minutes watching an avatar version of themselves exercising were more likely to exercise in the next 24 hours than those who spent five minutes watching “themselves” lounge around. The article concludes:

"The most stunning part is how subtle the manipulations are and how difficult they are to detect," says Bailenson, "but how much it affects real life later on."

Of course, the effect could potentially work both ways — for good or for bad. "In a therapy setting, we could use these virtual environments to get people to become more confident," says [Lead researcher Nick] Yee. "But they can also be used in advertising and as propaganda."

Yet the most significant conclusion that one ought to draw from such studies goes unmentioned: If even short-term exposure to virtual appearances and activities can have such an impact, how much more of an effect must our long-term virtual choices inevitably hold, for good or ill? If we choose, as so many do, to treat these worlds as a “safe” medium for expressing our darker fantasies, can we really be surprised if our virtual lives begin to spill over into our real ones?

My So-Called Second Life Article

Since Salvo 4 is finally wrapping up (you can read a few of the articles here), it seems a good time to post my article from Salvo 3, focusing on the social impact of virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. It's much too long to include in the post itself, so click here for a text-only version, or here for the full-color PDF (this is a large file). I'd love to hear your comments, whether you've tried anything like Second Life or not. Here's an excerpt:

The truth is that, more often than not, I find Second Life depressing. Perhaps it’s just my introverted personality (if only I could change that with a click of the mouse; I must have missed that section of the character creation page), but most people I meet here are wandering aimlessly, shopping, or sitting quietly in one of the many casinos that pay you to occupy their chairs. Regardless of when I log on, the world map always looks the same: a mostly abandoned landscape, speckled with pockets of a dozen people or so. Teleporting to one of these gatherings, I usually find everyone "dancing" to pre-programmed moves—another activity for which you can earn a small fee—not saying a word to each other. The picture of a meaningless existence? Well-to-do adults pole dancing in an empty bar for 25 cents an hour.

In our culture, we tend to think freedom is the highest good, but the empty cities of Second Life suggest otherwise. It’s not freedom we crave, but rather purpose. More even than the absence of physical sensation, Second Life proves surprisingly dull because there’s no goal—nothing needs to be done, so the freedom offered is meaningless. Game-focused MMOs, such as World of Warcraft, are better populated, in part because they have more constraints. Completing quests and winning battles provide a semblance of accomplishment. Compared to our world of dead-end jobs and unending housework, the possibility of being a hero, even if only in some artificial reality, can be enchanting. Sure, it may just be the illusion of meaning—the world is no better off afterwards than it was when you started; indeed, the very same quests await the next player—but it can be surprisingly addictive.

One additional note: Since this was published in August (and written in May), it is likely that some of the facts and figures are out of date (e.g. subscription totals), but hopefully my overall impressions and conclusions remain valid.

The Sickness Unto Death

I’m finally reading Kierkegaard’s classic treatment of human nature, and the following lines stood out as a perfect description of American pop-culture:

The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities (here again the infinitely comical). There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality. So when the externals have completely changed for the person of immediacy and he has despaired, he goes one step further; he thinks something like this, it becomes his wish: What if I became someone else, got myself a new self. Well, what if he did become someone else? I wonder if he would recognize himself. (The Sickness Unto Death, pg 53)

The tendency to define, and redefine, oneself according to external appearance has become so common that it’s almost a cliché, but what is really surprising is how often this is now embraced as a positive good. We can see this especially in the rise of virtual worlds like Second Life (on which I have much more to say in Salvo 3, due out this month). Here we find thousands of people who really believe that if they can just find the right look, or the right environment, it will somehow reveal their true self. Yet is it not instead the self, the real person beneath all appearances, which is lost in the shuffle?