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: 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