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: Still on the virtual road

Earlier I ran a column of my students’ mid-semester’s observations to Second Life ®  . Now I have some from the second part of their journeys in-world.

I added more structure to the experience for this class, as compared to one I taught a year and a half back.  We had Second Life residents who served as mentors, the students had more structured tasks, and we had a few gatherings on the university’s island, such as the fly-in that student Drax Marksman did for me one day (pictured on left).

As in an earlier class, students’ initial reactions were mostly negative.  They felt that there “was no point” to Second Life, unlike for a goal-oriented online game.  On the other hand, some students—out of laziness or loathing—simply refused to go back in-world for one required part of their final projects, even though they lost a full letter-grade for this omission.

I was disappointed that more students did not learn to build, though we provided a sandbox area, yet I was also excited to see some of the students venturing into Steampunk and other roleplaying sims.  Overall, if the students I teach are representative, theirs is a rather timid demographic when it comes to online engagement. They love being in social networks, but mostly these involve individuals they already know.

But on to what the students said!  The reactions will run for two consecutive entries here. More may follow later…as well as more student columns.

Reaction #1: Gamers find more to do these days in SL™ and SL-style interaction in games matters more now than it may have recently:

Role-play itself is a rewarding activity for many people, of course, but why this setting? There are plenty of other more positive settings in Second Life….I doubt many people who visit Midian would really want to live there - whoever they are in real life likely would not survive the experience - but they all go there in Second Life, to get a taste of the darkness.

and this:

The concept of socializing in virtual worlds seems like nothing out of the ordinary; many people in our world regularly visit clubs in Second Life in the same way that characters in Stephenson’s Snow Crash frequent night clubs in the metaverse.. . .Globalized social gaming is also a major factor in today’s video game industry; although this feature was originally associated with computer games, the rise of Xbox Live and Playstation’s online community are redefining the demands for game development.

Yet gamers remain gamers:

The joy of Second Life is that you can be Santa Claus. . . holding an M16 and a laser-pointing brigade of weapons and yet not know how to shoot.

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