The House&Home section of the NYT today has a Second Life story that had me checking my calendar to see if I'd fallen into a space time continuum and been transported back 9 months to the height of the SL hype and madness. It profiles people who are building houses in SL, in excruciating detail, with gobs of pictures and MORE THAN A PAGE OF NEWSPRINT. Seriously, it's worth a read, just because it is so mindblowingly banal. There are a couple of parts that move from bad to so bad they 're almost good, if you follow me. Check this out:
Second Life’s hundreds of thousands of users can teleport at will, transform into dragons and radically change their appearances with a few clicks. They have built cities, created clothing lines and programmed their avatars — the characters that represent them in the three-dimensional space of Second Life — to ride horses, dance and have sex. But in a land where residents can do nearly anything, many seem to be craving more mundane pursuits. After a few months of dancing the night away in clubs, sowing their virtual seed and role-playing as creatures from “The Lord of the Rings,” they are settling down: building virtual houses, planting gardens, shopping for furniture and electronics and decorating. They are getting serious about creating make-believe homes.
If that is not a ball of hype wrapped up in a set of bad images, I don't know what is. And then later:
It was June when Mr. Ainsworth’s affable avatar, who has shaggy blond hair and chest hair popping out of his permanently unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, decided to buy a “house” after months of hanging out. “I was just gallivanting around Second Life,” he said in an interview on his virtual roof in Jalisco with DonCamilo Rodenberger, this reporter’s avatar, who identified himself in interviews as a writer for The New York Times. “A place to call home didn’t really matter. But after a while, it seemed like a nice idea.”
Love the descriptor of the avatar, which would never make it past a copyeditor in the real NYT, and love even more the stilted identification of the reporter (bold mine). Dude, you are a reporter for the NYT named Seth Kugel, writing in a reputable newspaper in the real world, have some dignity! You know what your avatar should be named? Seth Kugel. You can use your nom de plume when you're engaging in what you call "N.C.L (Naked Congo Line)" in the lede of the story.
Two real points to make about this fake story. First, the NYT moved to a smaller paper this week to save newsprint costs, and then wasted a page and a half of this precious territory on this. Oy. Second, some of the interviews were conducted via IM -- this is the second time in the last week that I've seen NYT reporters use this -- the first being John Markoff with the FSJ outing. My question -- how do you know, in an IM interview, who the subject really is? I remember my then 10 year old daughter engaging in a long-ish IM session with a co-worker when I forgot to lock my PC. Interesting question for identify experts.
Updated:
Oops, real names not allowed in SL. Seth gets a pass here then. Sort of. ;)
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