Simulacra and Simulation AKA World Of War Craft

http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html

http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/09/gaming-addiction.html

The above posts are a salient warning to those who are drawn into the world of simulation. Some simulations – online computer games – are so seductive that they can consume the user. Simulations can become a narcotic with the user wanting more and more, but more is never enough and the simulation consumes its users. The greater the number of users that are consumed by the simulation the greater the power of the simulation. The users simulated/virtual self, embodied in an avatar, increases in importance and within the world of simulation the real self is subjugated by the virtual self.The virtual self initially a doppelganger to the real self consumes its host, the real and virtual self meld into a chimera.

But when does the relationship between the user and the simulation become chronic?

Virtual Environments

Originally uploaded by Nathans Virtual Adventures

Ok, so I have had a look around Secondlife and it was pretty good although it got laggy at times. One thing about Secondlife that makes it difficult to use as a teaching tool is the amount of adult content. TeenSecondLife is now online – a few of my students have tried this but linden labs have been slow to respond to their emails – and may provide a more porn free environment.

I have also tried activeworlds which was a lot less laggy and looked reasonable although the free account does not alow much modification of your avatar. The graphic were smooth even on my 512/128 ADSL connection. Unfortunately activeworlds in world navigation is not as good as secondlife or there.com, they should really work on this because overall activeworlds is pretty cool.

Second Life, The new classroom?

Downloaded the second life package last night and logged in. It reminded me of Adobe Atmosphere which was in development around 2000, at least thats when I tried it.

From an educational view point SL could provide educational events in an environment that many students are already familiar with as many students have spent 100’s of hours already with 3D virtual spaces. However the issue of creating learning content could be a problem because it would take vast amounts of time to create the required 3D content.

However some teachers have begun to created second life learning spaces, as the image below shows a second life learning space for ESL.