On the Media Does Second Life

This past Sunday I heard the tones of Second Life coming from my real life radio. Brook Gladstone of On the Media had two segments on Second Life.  In the first, called "Second Chances", she talks with former Virginia Governor, Mark Warner about why his presidential campaign will include Second Life; and in the second segment she talks with Jane McGonigal and Edward Castranova.  McGonigal is an “immersive play” expert and Edward Castronova is author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and blogger over at Terra Nova.

The segments are fun to listen to – the transcripts and audio are available here.  In the "Second Thoughts" segment Castronova said something in fun that is probably worth thinking about seriously:

Let's look at this Iraq war as a game designer would. Let's say we're making a part of the game environment of our people, and we want them to be happier. And then you might think, gosh, that's why Iraq I was more fun than Iraq II. Iraq I had a victory condition. You know, it was limited in time. It didn't go on forever, [LAUGHS] and so on and so forth. And I'm not suggesting that we really should do policy this way right now. What I'm suggesting is that over the next hundred years, as more and more people grow up familiar with game design as a part of their policy environment within these games, we will see increasing pressure and new insights in real-world policy, where people go, hmm, now, is that the funnest inflation rate that they could have designed? Don't we want a more fun one than that? And we're going to have to deal [LAUGHING] with this.

As we move into immersive environments for learning and work, they will have a naturally profound effect on the way we deal with real world problem-solving and our expectations of our own world control/experimentation.  This will bleed over into what we expect of our work and public policy environments.  And "play" and "fun" may be assigned a higher value and become far more essential elements than they are now - because well, we can.

On The Media is produced by New York Public Radio and is available on local public radio stations.

Photo credit: Lizbeth Marlowe