Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Hair Fair 2008

I discovered Hair Fair last year, a showplace for some of the most clever designers in SL.  I went there a bit tongue-in-cheek, first with my stock-avatar “hair” and the second time as a gorilla (hair all over!).  It seemed trivial, but hair is important in SL.

As I’ve discovered, so is the cause Hair Fair supports.

I’m pleased to report that 50% of the income from Hair Fair’s vendors goes to the real-life charity Locks of Love.

You can find out a lot more, including teleport links to vendors, at the Hair Fair 2008 blog, but rest assured. While I cannot grow enough real-life hair to interest Locks of Love, Iggy did buy a bandanna and will doff his fake dreadlocks on Sept 7, the final day of Hair Fair.

Please visit these vendors and show your support.  More on the styles at Hair Fair 08 soon.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: The weather.com Web Page

As a weather-obsessed person (odd, given that it’s “drought and more drought” here), I often check this site.  For some time I’ve been meaning to write about the little women doing happy dances along the sides of this and other commercial sites. They often advertise mortgage specials, I suppose to those 10 Americans still solvent enough to consider buying a house.

They also tell us quite a bit about the intrusion of the virtual into our workaday lives.

Yes, she’s an avatar.

At first, these little dancing women (never men) were from video clips.  Then I began to notice that slowly, avatars made with the Poser software were doing the boogie-woogie in the boxes on my screen.

It’s inevitable that such applications of avatars would appear. I first encountered this notion of the avatar while in grad school about 20 years ago, not as a 3D being but as a bunch of code resembling a rudimentary AI to do things for you when you slept or were busy in real life. Avatars might search for news headlines of interest, chart the weather or stocks or sports scores. These faithful servants would put information at your virtual doorstep when you asked.

You do not, of course, need 3D dollies to gather and sort information: RSS feeds do some of this. In those Cyberpunk-infused years of the late 80s, however, we all imagined our avatars--both small applications and 3D figures out of Gibson’s fiction--taking some drudgery from daily tasks and streamlining a too-busy world.

Instead, for now they hawk iffy mortgage offers and car loans, or they sit on camping chairs for absent creators.  Oh, tepid new world that has such people in it!

Yet in virtual worlds, the people behind the avatars are usually present. In game worlds as opposed to social worlds like Second Life (thanks go to Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar for giving me those terms) one cannot easily leave an avatar idle. In some games, unless guild-members were standing guard, leaving the keyboard might result in an avatar being impaled by an Orc’s sword.

In Second Life, a virtual business--the extension of the avatar’s inventory--qualifies as what we imagined in the 80s. It earns money while the owner and avatar are absent.  It’s sad to see how some wannabe Donald Trumps set up “businesses in a box” and then check out of SL, expecting money to flow in that never arrives. I’m told that to run a SL business well, the owner must invest time and talent to keep clients happy.

Thus it’s both amusing and sad to show the next image. It comes from a once-thriving Japanese shopping mall that used to offer generous camping of the sit-on-a-bench or swab-that-floor variety.  Last week I went there to poke around for a cool (and cheap) male Kimono I’d seen.  Iggy might need it explore Hosoi Chiba after I investigate Ida Keen’s vanishing.  In any case, the mall was clearly failing, with most of the stalls empty and lots just torn down.

The owner, possessing a morbid sense of humor while his business goes under, parked dozens of fire-engines that sprayed water on virtual fires throughout the empty place. I suspected a griefer attack until I checked one of the vehicles. Its owner also run the mall.

And in their midst, this:

The fellow blithely mopped the floor while the place burned down. He didn’t even bother to pick up a free mop!  Another afk avatar strummed a guitar nearby for 1 Linden Dollar every 10 minutes. Perhaps their owners would do better to get Poser to design dancing mortgage-women for a debt-ridden, economically foundering nation.  Or maybe these camping avatars are just the metaphor we need as America’s economic house burns down?

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Favorite Reading Chair, Cranking Nirvana and Fighting Panic

Showtime. Classes begin tomorrow.

Designing a how-to guide for Second Life® is a tricky thing. Students need to learn the basics to avoid a bad “first hour” experience.  Given my experience that Millennials want lots of guidance AND won’t read anything linear, I used a wiki for my syllabus, putting together a number of linked handouts, rich with snapshots and a few embedded videos.  It’s designed to provide just-in-time help in a segmented, hypertextual manner. I’ve also embedded Linden Dollar rewards for completing a scavenger-hunt, so the goal-oriented writing students I teach will have a game within the lesson.

Readers can now walk through the evolving draft of “Getting Started in Second Life.” Major topics are:

--First Steps: Welcome to the Metaverse
--Your Avatar, Clothing, Equipment
--Leaving the Nest: Going to the Mainland
--Communicating
--Having Fun
--Trouble...and Avoiding it
--How to Act Like a Pro With no First Life

I will apply every lesson I’ve learned with students, and I’ll try to remain upbeat, if not perky with this third class to use SL™.  They need help seeing the “point” of this gamelike non-game.  I’m not sure I’ll succeed. My Xer cynicism sneaks in, “Nevermind” blasting while I write this. There’s so much work to do...they probably think Iggy Pop is some weird energy drink.

I ask one favor—the pbwiki software lacks a spell-check, so as I proof it please send any sentence-level corrections to iggyo-at-mac-dot-com. And if I have missed any major needs for novice avatars, please let me know.  I’ll send you virtual T-shirts featuring Iggy Pop and the “Damascus VA Moonshiners” mascot (and hound-dawg).

Tips o’ the virtual hillbilly-hat to Tenchi, Di, Cynthia, Terran, and others who contributed ideas to the wiki.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: HippiePay Island

James Dean…I mean Pappy Enoch, has committed an act of malicious wounding, if not attempted murder, in the virtual world.

He shot “Campy,” the Muppet-like walking tent that Anywhere Camping uses as its mascot and at sites that support their “free-roaming” camping system.

When his sister, Jezz Enoch, began complaining about the system being broken, Pappy sprung into action, perhaps to protect himself from the wrath of his hellion sister, who seems to have figured out that Pappy cheated her of money (and got her beheaded, sawed in half, electrocuted, and drowned in blood after being skewered on a big hook) at the Cave of Doom Funhouse.

Pappy showed up at HippiePay Island armed with his double-barrel “scatturgun” an let the “purple rascal” have it at point-blank range.  HippiePay Manager Twyla Tomorrow saw the entire sordid crime, as did her pet bulldog (who temporarily distracted but did not stop the wrathful moonshiner).

Have Pappy’s new-found good looks gone to your head?  This is worse than mere murder!  Campy provides income for hundreds of layabouts!  They might come gunning for our hillbilly correspondent. Armies of bots may march on Richmond Island now…

I think a Jimmy Stewart avatar might have been a better choice. Pappy is living up to his bad-boy appearance.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Virtual Office In-World

My concerns about how Millennial-age kids react warily to open-ended “play” prompted me and my colleague Beeble Baxter (that giant raccoon) to write an article about these students that is now under peer-review at an academic journal.  During the research phase of this project, virtual journalist Feldspar Epstein interviewed me about our work.  Her blog entry on this topic summarizes our findings.

Have a good look at Feldie’s entry in Metaverse Journal. I think that we may be on to something about why the ambience of SL™ is so often “grunge” and free-form (from its Burning-Man roots, in part) instead of goal-and-rule oriented, characteristics of the generation born after 1982.

Not all of that demographic are so cautious and task-driven. I had a fun meeting today with my Millennial-Gen Writing Fellow who will be assisting a group of first-year students with the drafts of wiki projects about SL.  And for one of the first times ever, we used my virtual office, because my Writing Fellow is at home in real life. 

Both she and I wonder, however, how well first-years will take to this world. A lot more on that topic will come to this space soon.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Ortaköy Island

I’m fond of the real-life Ortaköy, a neighborhood on the European side of Istanbul and up the Bosporus from the chaotic region around the Blue Mosque and other major attractions.  To American ears, the name of his village-within-the-city sounds like Orta-keh. It’s the sort of crowded-but-neighborly place where crazy (yet amazingly talented--you are or you die) Turkish drivers will slow down to let a befuddled tourist cross the street. That’s not a small favor in city that may have 25 million citizens and the worst traffic, after Cairo, in that part of the world.

So with some hesitancy I clicked a link to visit ”Ortaköy in Second Life®.” I expected a replica of the famous mosque there, one of the most photogenic spots in Istanbul.  Its image often accompanies any story that contrasts the old/new vibe of the city.  The Atatürk Bridge looms above and behind the real-life mosque, and the path to the quay is lined with tourist-trap places selling overstuffed baked potatoes, evil-eye charms, and other essentially Turkish delights.  Right on the water, I found some very fine seafood places. I think the second-best sea bass I’ve eaten in Turkey (the prize goes to a place in Izmir) came from a little restaurant in Ortaköy, where the head waiter, with a flourish, let me (a picky Lebanese-American who knows good fish) peer into his ice-chest and select just the right fish for dinner.

None of those details, of course, awaited me in virtual Ortaköy.  Even the Atatürk Bridge was nowhere to be seen. And the quay, thronged with children playing, men smoking and drinking coffee, people of all ages playing tavla (backgammon), tourists drinking rakı and acting foolish, were gone. Second Life’s Ortaköy is to the real thing what I Am Legend‘s New York is to the Big Apple (well, no rabid bio-war survivors attacked Iggy in virtual Ortaköy).

Like the virtual New Orleans sims I’ve visited, the eerie emptiness weighed on me, but at least in the Big Easy the illusion was sustained. Wander a few houses off the virtual Bosporus and you are in an ultra-modern Turkish shopping mall, with a ubiquitous Second Life outdoor disco nearby. The real Istanbul is full of such old/new juxtapositions, but the seams are tightly sewn, and often hidden, between them. In Second Life, the seams show.

I can certainly see the appeal of creating such spaces for education. Those learning Turkish could meet real Turks at the virtual coffeehouse and practice using the voice client. Fill this illusion with the noise of human voices, even though a computer, and some magic would happen. That’s a wonderful use of technology for making global connections and teaching languages.  And for places like the virtual Globe Theater, the prospects are bright for doing something students and faculty cannot easily do in real life.

But it’s still only a second-best option. Until Second Life can add the smell of the sea, the murmur of a crowd, the feeling of the breeze from the Bosporus, the aroma of good food, and 400 or 500 avatars in one place, it won’t rival the real place.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Shopping Until Pappy Be A-Droppin’

Actually, Tenchi delivered the goods, in the form of a shopping list, with amazing speed.  Nearly all of his wardrobe came from one store, D2TK, and Pappy got sucked into a dance party right away with the owners and their friends.

After cavorting and shopping, Pappy was quickly able to find a skin and shape on his own. He got just the right shirt on his own too, at Bailer’s Outfitters, where another dance party, a line-dance this time, was in progress when he arrived.

Pappy avoided another dance marathon, though a virtual dog named Booger followed Pappy around the shop, looking hopeful.  Pappy also just had to throw some Lindens down at Mystikal Hair, the maker of my own dreads.

Tenchi’s ability to find the right boots, jeans, and hat for Pappy’s (temporary) new look astounded me.  Consider this a blatant endorsement.  It’s a blog, so journalistic neutrality? Fiddlesticks.

For 1150 Lindens, Pappy Enoch, that full-figured guest writer for In a Strange Land, “transmogrified” himself into a pretty good replica of James Dean’s character “Jett Rink” from the epic (and often hilariously dated) film Giant. I love that film, camp and all.

Pappy actually spent 450L more, but he found that a free shape worked better than another shape he bought from Million Dollar Skin Lab, a locale for celebrity look-alike shapes I mentioned here some time ago. Kudos to the company for giving away such nice freebies. I don’t think the 450 was wasted after all--consider it a tip!

As good as Iron Man was, as well as the cool Iron Man avatars I kept seeing in-world, we need some old-school Hollywood avatars running about the metaverse. Filmmaker Cecil Hirvi is correct. As this technology improves, old actors will never die. They’ll live on in virtual worlds, doing new work.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: State of Mounting Panic

The semester begins in a few weeks, and readers will see, from the fragmentary state of my syllabus, how long the road ahead will be.

While picking a rhetoric text is easy, what should I have my writing students read as an introduction to SL™?  What videos to view?

I have been reading two books on the blossoming of virtual worlds, Wagner James Au’s The Making of Second Life and Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar.  I recommend them both to educators, but neither of them quite do what I want for a class about academic writing that makes heavy use of Second Life®.  Au’s chapters “The Avatar as Entrepreneur” and “Investing in Utopia,” however, come closest to what I need. They merit students’ attention for their close look at marketing and corporate bumbling in-world.

In crafting my online syllabus, I surprised myself by assigning videos about SL before giving the students readings.  When they do read instead of view, I want them to encounter SL as I did in late 2006: a Wired article about Mischief’s Janie Marlowe and another about Anshe Chung (read her press release from those heady days).  It was this news that real people were using “game characters” to make real money that so captivated me then (and often, now).

A few imperatives stand out:

--To orient students to SL beyond the media hyperbole that so often depicts it in a negative (and facile) way
--To provide some sense of the virtual economy (useful fodder for a later assignment on marketing in-world)
--To give goal-oriented Millennial students a coherent starting point for formal writing assignments.

With these in mind, I invite educators and other readers to have a look at my class schedule and suggest more readings.  Have at it, profs and curious readers! Post your ideas and links to anything online in the comments section.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Worried Silly on Richmond Island

When I was just a noob in Second Life®, I ran across a reference to Ida Keen’s blog Baedaker, a travel guide to the curious and interesting in-world. Ida was gracious enough to let me interview her and to work with my students.  Her blog never covered adult topics, so it was a safe introduction to the world of virtual journalism and travel.

Now I fear that:

1) Ida has encountered real-life problems preventing her from being in Second Life
2) The sinister totalitarian state she covered in her final blog post imprisoned her
3) She has run off with the virtual circus.

I hope it is #3, because when Iggy and Ida last chatted, she was preparing for a dance routine in The Show Must Go On, a performing troupe in Second Life.

Okay...I’m worried that she may be in that virtual jail after all.  As soon as the “brains” involved with this blog get the Pappy-James Dean transformation sorted out, I am heading to Suffugium, a dystopian roleplaying area where we last know Ida to be.

Sounds a bit silly to non-SL folks, and maybe to many who are in-world, but when a virtual person with an active writing life just vanishes, I worry.

Is this all part of Ida’s show? There are two little green dots on my map of Suffugium tonight....could one of them be the intrepid reporter, Ida Keen?  Stay tuned.  We got Pappy Enoch out of jail in Tombstone (and he didn’t even want to leave).

We can do it again.

I have a fast fake car, a bunch of fake firearms, and a bunch of real friends who are as nutty as I am.  Let’s do this thing!

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Sucking Money Out of The System

I’d reported, some time ago and much after the fact, that Linden Lab® had changed the traffic “metrics” in Second Life®.  Now popular places are part of a “Showcase” voted upon by residents. Mere presence of camping-zombies and bots will not help a location bring in active avatars. None of the old camping spots show up in Showcase’s top listings.  As a result, camping rates have fallen off sharply. The old “Free Spirit” group at HippiePay once gave out 2L every 5 minutes.  Now avatars try to crowd in anywhere that offers 2/15.

Pappy Enoch, who covers the freeloader-and-layabout (dead) beat for “In a Strange Land,” went around to check on the status of camping these days.  He was in a grim mood when he came back.  He handed me a faded “fotygraph” of the good old days of camping and began his lament.  As he put it, “them was sum times, Wiggly. I camped on mah tractur a-cuttin’ grass (n’ smokin’ sum) wif them-thar Hippies at Woodstock I-land.  I luved chasin’ wimmin, like that-thar purty gal in knotty britches in my fotygraph. Yu cood scoop in 100L in a night, ol’ son’!”

Pappy got all misty-eyed at this point, so I translated the rest of his report, below, from the original hillbilly:

Land owners are trying a series of strategies to get visitors to their locales to spend money.  Zyngo games are popular draws, as are Sploder balls. For those new to Second Life, those are virtual versions of Bingo and a type of “office pool” that disburses money randomly after avatars have put in a certain amount.  Treasure-hunts, cheap or free items, and lucky chairs of all sorts still abound.  Pappy spotted a large group of avatars at one spot, crowded around a cluster of lucky chairs, hoping the chairs’ letters might match the first one in their names.

Pappy just shook his head and walked off.  These avatars did not talk or interact in any way. They were just there, desperate for a few Linden Dollars and the chance to be the first to sit down.

A system that permits avatars to do other things while camping, and not using pose-balls or camping chairs, comes from Anywhere Camping. In theory, the avatar can earn as much as 10 Linden Dollars every 15 minutes.  The trick involves completing marketing surveys, though the bonus is the ability to leave a camping sim and earn money anywhere in the metaverse.

It’s clever, but will it prove a sustainable business model?  Without visitors paying something back to sim-owners, it cannot last. Yet time will tell, and Pappy, who does not want to do anything productive, will be on the scene to tell you.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Stuck Between a Wiki and a Hard Place

It was simple to come up with a first detailed assignment for my class.  I think it accomplishes a major goal in the service of Tenchi’s Law: Break the Ice.  I want students to state one claim about SL and defend it, after seeing a series of videos and reading some articles about the virtual world.

The next step is trickier. After the writers have an initial impression of SL, how do I get them to navigate to key locations?  Do I provide them with landmarks or do I embed SLURLs into every page of the Wiki?

In the end, students can be easily overloaded, but providing multiple ways to complete tasks is not a bad idea. Read the expanded entry about why I decided to give my class both landmarks and SLURL links.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Pappy Enoch’s Still, Guzzling Shine

Can you manage it, Tenchi Morigi?

First of all, the women on my SL friends list--Cynthia and Di--have impeccable fashion-cred.

But Tenchi has set up a service, Styles by T, for shoppers who have an idea but lack time to put together the perfect look.  She’s available as an expert shopper.  Let’s see HOW expert.

I will pay Ms. Morigi’s fee if she can figure out how to transform Pappy Enoch into the spitting image of James Dean, as shown above in a scene from the epic film Giant. And the photos will run here. Can we do it for under 2000 Linden Dollars, Tenchi??

Pappy becomes “Jett Rink”?  Wait and see, gentle readers...there’s real money in this for you, Tenchi!

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: STILL at Real-Life Desk, Pondering Syllabus for Fall

I wish I were driving my virtual car...but I’m working and cannot be in-world today. Fall is breathing down my neck!

I did not realize, after answering a query by e-mail, that I’d become the poster-boy in a New World Notes story about educators, SL™, and Millennial students.

One point is clear to me: these students need consistent instructions.  That’s my qualm about using the otherwise strong Onrez client.

I’ve loved Onrez because, unlike the Linden Lab® product, it does not require constant updates.  That confused students both semesters I’ve taught with SL.  So why NOT use Onrez?

Instructions, instructions....every bit of advice at LL’s site and most third-party SL sites is written for the default Linden Lab client.  The Onrez client, while sleeker in many regards, lacks that sort of back-story. 

Or would college kids even care? How much time will they, on their own, spend “goofing around” with SL? I’ll be giving them more defined assignments now and prepare a “just in time” help wiki for them....yet as Intellagirl (a teacher who’s well known for her work with SL) responded in a comment to the NWN story, “Until I gave them a specific goal to accomplish they weren’t motivated to spend the time to play with the tools.” She’s talking about the advanced building tools embedded in SL, but the point is broader.  My students are strapped for time and set a list of priorities.  They do not have the luxury, even in classes that motivate them, to just “play around.”

Back to the drawing board...any advice out there?

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Real-Life Desk, Pondering Syllabus for Fall

College teachers often ask me where to begin in Second Life®.  I say “Sarah Nerd’s Freebie Paradise,” then realize that they have no avatar yet and consider me insane.

Then, with my teacher’s hat jammed firmly on my head again, we discuss lesson plans and a general philosophy for a class using SL™. Those will vary by the subject and students’ ability. 

Still, most classes can begin with a principle given to me by Tenchi Morigi, who served as a mentor for my last class, “Invented Worlds.” She wants to get 18-22 year olds past their initial loathing for the metaverse. She and I, over virtual tea, have discussed this common problem. In this installment of Iggy’s Syllabus, Tenchi rides to the rescue, and I provide a first lesson plan…Read the expanded entry.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

by Dianna Defiant, Guest Writer
Location: Our Virtual Advice Desk

Dear Di,

What is the polite way to deal with pesky visitors who drop by your virtual house, unannounced?  Some are strangers and some are friends.

Some of them, even ones I know, have NO manners and I want to orbit them.

Grumbling and,

Put Upon

Dear Put Upon,

I don’t like unexpected guests either! It’s not polite even in SL™. One good thing about SL - if you own your land, YOU can control who is allowed on it. You can only allow people you know and ban all others. You can also R click and eject/ban them. Now if you don’t own your land that’s another problem. Unfortunately in SL, if you aren’t around and have no device to boot people from your place, any one can come in. If you are there I would ask them what they want and see what they say. Usually asking them to leave works, or you can report them if they harass you. Now if your friends are “dropping in” they apparently LM’d your place. Tell them if they see you online to please “call” before dropping in. If they continue, I would find a reason to leave every time they came by unannounced - if they call, then have a visit - they will get the hint (I hope!)

And a note to the “drop in-ers” If you see a stranger while exploring - that is NOT an invite to drop in and have a chat. If you would like that - ALWAYS IM the person and ask first. If you show up at someone’s occupied house by mistake (via an old LM maybe), apologize and TP out fast. You would never walk into a house in RL and plop yourself on the sofa and start asking questions of the tenant - don’t do it in SL either…

PS - If you want some cool “booby traps” IM me in-world I’ll hook you up!

XXOO
Di

Questions for Di? Iggy will forward them to her! E-mail iggyo -at- mac -dot- com

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Linden Estate Services

Second Life® celebrated its fifth birthday and…I missed it!  So I went to a Linden Lab® sim today, sat at a Linden desk, and penned some birthday wishes.

I want to make a few wishes that I hope to see realized by the sixth birthday next year.

1) Fewer mandatory client updates: Universities tend to update their public labs annually using a template installed from a server onto all machines.  This means that most of the time we have to lock in clients once per year.  With the OnRez client I’ve been using on and off for several months, I’ve not been forced to download a single update. I plan to use it with my fall class, not the LL client.

2) More structure for new avatars: The banal tasks on Orientation Island are necessary, but why not make them less juvenile?  If the experience were designed to be an Indiana-Jones-style adventure to solve a mystery, with consequences such as falling boulders and runaway locomotives, new avatars would have something better to do that talk to a silly-looking native idol and a reason to pull the torch out of their library. Finding it to fend off a giant spider would, however, be fun.

3) Better physics and more gamelike games in-world: My recent driving adventures, and comments from Tenchi Morigi, convince me that SL™ is not there yet.  I should be able to drive my car from point A to point B without silly crashes of the computer or the road simply disappearing.

4) Beyond camping: I have defended camping in this blog, because it gives newcomers an easy way to earn some mad money.  Without sitting on a pose-ball or sinking into the adult economy, how can newbies earn enough to begin their second lives?

5) Room of one’s own: With apologies to Woolf, it would be lovely to see paying residents again get a tiny piece of their own land, even if it were in some condo stack. This would not hurt land-barons because the plots would be modest. The fabled “First Land” era is an ancient myth for most of us.

6) More stability: It’s getting better, in my experience, but it’s not there yet.

Next year let’s see if any of my wishes came true!  Share yours here or drop me an e-mail at iggyo – at – mac – dot- com.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Lokashun: Mistophur (boss feller) Kevin’s desk, Richmond I-land

This are a test o’ that-thar blob tu see if’n I kin eggspand them entries.

The part right bee-low the sum’ry am called the “body.” Say, am that whar they dun hid Jimmy Hoffa?

I’m a gonna repeat it in that-thar last part.

Hoo-whee! I dun found mee a photy-graphy o’ that Latin gal, Salami Hi-yak, on Mistopher Kevin’s corn-puter!  Talk about “body”!  Whee-hoo.....

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Richmond Island

Where do you begin to focus the wayward attention of first-year college students in a writing class making heavy use of Second Life®?

I have the luxury, as my school’s writing program director, to do pretty much what I please in my section of first-year writing.  My only mandate, beyond a minimum number of words and a few assignments that require outside sources, will be to meet the program’s goal of assisting new college students make the transition from high-school notions of writing to discourse appropriate to the professorate at a selective liberal-arts university.

And if possible, I’ll keep senior administrators visiting class from seeing students play SL™ golf while dressed in banana-avatar suits.

Actually, my biggest challenge is as old as the coming of written argument to Western culture. Socrates decried this new technology when it began to appear among young scholars in Athens nearly 2500 years ago.  He feared that no one would be able to recall facts, make logical connections, or communicate gracefully once writing replaced the spoken discourse of the Agora.

Guess what? He was correct. 

Writing formally is alien to most college students.  The very process can make thinking sloppy, so my largest task every year is to get writers to untangle their thinking before they type.  Surprisingly, the metaverse, as subject-matter and new medium for embodied communication, doesn’t complicate this process too much.  Whatever the course or content, students face the same difficulties when writing.

Having taught with SL twice before, I can confidently state a few principles educators need to consider.

1) Provide a Good Orientation Experience. As New World Notes readers know well, the first hour in-world can make or break SL engagement. For my students’ first hour, I will offer one-on-one conferences so they can set up an avatar, log in with me nearby, and get my help IRL or in-world.  My avatar is a Linden Lab volunteer mentor, so Iggy can teleport to the Orientation and Help Islands.

2) Assign Discrete Tasks. My first class merely wandered about the metaverse. What a rotten idea! Free-form exploration is good for later tasks, but at first my group of writers will analyze why they chose a particular default avatar. I will require them to post successes, failures, and questions to a discussion board integrated into our class wiki.

3) Focus on Academic Content. Students quickly discover SL’s adult content on their own. Beyond a general warning, I won’t dwell on this part of SL. Each editing group will get a dossier of in-world tasks to complete, along with SLURLs to places such as Svarga, The International Spaceflight Museum, even the Cave of Doom funhouse!

4) Track and Connect the Work. Each assignment must, for this Millennial Generation, involve documenting changes observed since the last visit, new tasks learned in-world, and reflections on the writer’s perceptions of the invented world of SL.  This will get my students past the aimlessness that marked earlier classes’ exploration of the metaverse.

My four principles work in service of a big question: what role will virtual worlds play as communications tools for business, research, education, and entertainment? Future installments of “Iggy’s Syllabus” will follow my students and me in-world as we try to provide some answers.

And, of course, answer another hot question: where can I get a banana avatar?

Photo courtesy of Hennessy Harbour, virtual golf-pro and tasty source of potassium.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Marion VA and Orientation Island

Being away from SL™ can be as disorienting as being in it, when worlds collide.

Outside of Marion, VA, if you drive east toward the Grayson Highlands three-quarters of a mile above your head, you’ll pass a number of single-wides, cabins, and small businesses. More than a few have seen better days.

One house caught my wife’s eye, as we roared up the mountain.

“Oh my God!  He’s been here!”

“Who?”

“Pappy Enoch!”

Pappy, a Grayson County boy who got sucked into the “fake wirld o’ Secund Life” got a reprieve from virtuality last month and was permitted a short “vakashun” to visit his home-folks and still.  Little did I know that he’d be setting up a money-making scheme as soon as he got to the real world again.

I put the Honda into the tightest U-turn it would ever see, outside a test-track.  Then I had to stand in several inches of water, mud oozing over the tops of my hiking boots, to line up this photo.

The curious or foolish can visit the Ask Pappy Web site themselves. In no way do I endorse this.  A rich Pappy Enoch is too much to contemplate.  I don’t want him buying a mansion in Windsor Farms, then putting chickens and goats in the yard “tu keep the grass down around mah Rolls Royce (that wun on the see-ment blocks—I gots to get ‘er runnin’ agin).”

I imagine the backhoe tearing up the rest of the lawn so Pappy can put in “wun o’ them-thar fancified cement ponds, so I kin go a-swimmin’ like a citified boy wood du.”

Then again…maybe that’s just what the real world needs. William Faulkner’s con-man and scoundrel Flem Snopes got a mansion (until his brother, Mink, shot him dead after walking 40+ miles to do the deed).  If old Flem got a big-house, why not Pappy?  And why not in ultra-sedate Windsor Farms?

My God, gentle readers! This is in the great tradition of American literature…Faulkner is the South’s Shakespeare. Maybe Pappy can be it’s Prospero…or Caliban.

I don’t know how many of you have had surreal moments where incidents or avatars in-world began to seep into reality. If you have, let me know and we’ll run that news here.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Every Awful Mall in the Metaverse

Early this year, I wrote about Iggy’s quest to find the perfect pair of combat boots in Second Life®.  At the time, I had discovered more offbeat items than I ever thought possible.

Now my friends and class-mentors Cynthia Barley and Tenchi Morigi have gone and done it right, with their blog ”Absolutely Amazing Second Life Discoveries.”

Yes, you ladies will find a “rideable man”; NO, it’s not an X-rated product, just a goofy-looking fellow who trots along in horse-fashion while the woman rides in comfort above the gritty virtual streets.  There is the “catpig” chair that must be seen to be believed, and there’s a pistol that shoots....oh, I had best let you see that tasteless item for yourselves.

Thank you, Tenchi and Cynthia, for reinforcing my ideas that humanity not only is doomed, but will go down laughing at whoopie-cushions.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Any number of Steampunk Regions

Student Seraphine Larkham spent a good deal of time in Caldedon, Solarya, and other regions of Second Life® dedicated to Steampunk, a subgenre of science-fiction based on Victorian futurism and sheer fantasy.  Now that the New York Times has reported on the emergence of a real-life Steampunk urban subculture, the term may enter common parlance as “Punk” and “Goth did decades back.  Partly out of pure fun, mad inventors are creating wildly original devices to do everyday things (imagine oak-and-brass computer keyboards). To get a sense of this, see The Steampunk Workshop Web Site.

In Second Life, one need not blow glass and turn brass for the desired effect, and as a result the creations wild indeed.

Seraphine wrote about the philosophy and aesthetics of Steampunk:

In modern times, technological showiness tends to come in the form of sleekness, a smoothing away of mechanics. Steampunk, on the other hand, often glories in mechanics. Inner workings are sometimes only partly concealed or even, on occasion, left entirely exposed. . . .This glory in complexity, mechanics, and parts is one of the hallmarks of steampunk technology.

Seraphine’s entire wiki project for me is worth a look. Begin with her ”Link to Seraphine’s Wiki” page and enjoy!

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts