Location: UR Island

In honor of National Gorilla Suit Day (today!), I’m going to run a few images from acting silly (Pappy as “Grissly Bar,“ on adventure with Cynthia Barley, Tenchi relaxing with gorilla Iggy) as I reflect on a topic raised by John Schwartz in a New York Times’ article, “The Joy of Silly.” Schwartz praises Richard Knerr, the recently deceased co-creator of the Hula-Hoop, Super Ball, and Frisbee, because these toys encourage non-structured play.

So does Second Life.  It’s a non-game like the toys I mentioned, though like them it can be used to make up games through imaginative play. Just ask any Frisbee-Golf player…

My beef with most contemporary “games” is how closed-ended they are.  Many tasks are mandatory; others must often be completed sequentially.  Cheats abound for computer-enabled tasks, as the time that I figured out how to make a squadron of Nazi capital ships waste their ammunition on a single Soviet destroyer in the otherwise wonderful PC game, Great War at Sea.  Luckily, in competition-based games against other players, there are few work-arounds for defeating another mind.

Even so, such play can become reductive. A friend who plays Lord of the Rings Online, noted for its drop-dead graphics and verisimilitude to Tolkien’s world, offers an example.  One task requires defeating a certain monster to rescue a captive. Because so many heroes are online at one time, they queue up outside the monster’s cavern and wait in line to fulfill the quest.  While waiting to fulfill their identical tasks, they shoot the breeze.

In Second Life, on the other hand, shooting the breeze is the entire point.  In all of my time in-world, I find that socializing IS the quest.  Certainly, some online games are more open-ended than others, and some SLers only want to make money from real estate, make love in sex-clubs, or shoot things in areas like Jessie.

For my part, I’d rather be looking for aliens with Di, posing as “Men in Black,” blasting mawkish cupids out of the sky, or running about in a gorilla suit.  These are the virtual equivalents of Kneer’s wonderful toys. 

I’ve invited another gamer (and kept after “Midnight Angel” to write a follow-up column) defending online games or at least leveling another blast at virtual worlds.  We Second Lifers can take it, and to those of a certain mind-set that takes “gaming” too seriously, we’d paraphrase what King Arthur said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “don’t go to Second Life. It’s a silly place.”

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

lol, very funny post! Enjoyed it =P

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