Today, I checked out Tim Hortens, as usual nobody there, but I love those camping chairs and so i sat there for a little while. Suddenly i thought, why dont I put my flower house here? Though the Myst Flower House is not in the North American Tim Horten style. Tim Horten is set in a truly Canadian space, vaste, clean air, wide sidewalks with generous lawns. Not all jumbled with shopping centers, or cute details, or a gothic castle right next to your nose.
As I consider all this, I think it is hard to change peoples learned patterns of logics: some places want people to camp and pay people for it - these places think this would increase public flow and augment the "business value"? However, most of sl is empty - whether its beautiful or not so beautiful. What kind of places would intentionally want to keep a place empty? Even a private residence left empty looks sad, doesnt it?
The one place I liked very much will be closing in a couple of days, because it is expensive to keep a team of people who gathers at a tea house artificially to generate an appearance of life, busy, active normal life.
The team was building events for television broadcasting purposes, so its a kind of theatre, a stage setting of a sort, so actually the people we see as clients in sl are - are really marionnettes - their real job is on the keyboard, behind the scenes elsewhere. After Aug, there will be no more marionnette positions, so I talked to some of them, who happens to be around, they are all going to be doing something else - no time to come to sl. Sl presence was a job, and the job is finished. The place suddenly feels abandonned.
Most of sl is empty. Whats most precious in any place is not the building nor the setting up of the "hardware" (scenearios) - its in the software. Both in sl and in rl. Its the people, the brains, the conversation, the ideas, and quality interchanges between people that are rare to have, it takes many many years to cultivate an intelligent context in hope of something original to happen.
We know about Dubai in rl, due to the new money, there are islands created artificially for people to pamper themselves, a lot of sl reminds me of "The World" in Dubai. Except that in rl, the land is better developped, the sun is shinier, and the sea is truly beautiful. In both sl and rl, both suffer from an emptiness. But in sl, when there are no people interaction, what else is there?
When you are sailing, is it the sailing that is fun, or is it the sailing with others that are fun? Why is it, if you dont like the avatars style... you really dont want to "date" them...? Is this sl dating the same as rl dating? :) I mean, if you wont bother in rl to spend time in a particular activity, would you do it in sl? Just because you want to "change and live another life"?
Princeton campus is beautiful, and Princeton is mostly empty. I didnt spend much more than a few seconds... no reason to.
A true experiment would be to create, design, an sl experience that - somehow makes use of sl strength to enable a lasting experience in rl; this would be much more ambitious than the current general uses which are : puppet play, Mental Romance, Cartoon sex, and business in the sl scale.
Stand alone virtual building, creation of virtual objects using existing softwares without sl are equally good - and without the "prim" restrictions - so why do people want to build like crazy in sl? For viewers, spectators? To exist, to have a public presence, to have the possibilities to interact in a public 3D world.
Now, after so much fuss, dont you care if anyone visited? Dont you want your big bang to have a few people in it without having to constantly kick start it with some preprogrammed events?
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