the sixth anniversary celebrations of Second Life (SL6B) are officially over, though you can still visit the exhibits till around 6 July :-)
[update: i would like to extend a very warm welcome to all visitors who have been directed here by Hamlet Au's very kind mention on 3 July, in New World Notes :-)
update 2: Phaylen Fairchild - the "leader of a phenomenal team that actually made SL6B a reality" has posted a rejoinder, which provides context]
i received an invitation to give feedback on the event (i'm sure all exhibitors - and certainly a great many other participants - would have as well), and here's the gist of what i wrote. i'm sharing it here, for the primary reason of encouraging all of us to take some time to think through our personal understandings of this year's provocative celebratory theme of 'The Future of Virtual Worlds'.
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i don't think we should have striven for a cohesive feeling (certainly not across the entire collection of regions). one might argue that such constraints are good for creative expression, but in this case i felt the theme was ill-thought-through and favoured those with good building skills. further, an unfortunate and unnecessary consequence of the theme was the perpetual night setting, which did not really help newbie visitors (who would have been unfamiliar with client-side environment controls).
participants were (initially at least, in the first call for proposals) invited to "show how you intend to make things in 5, 10 or 100 years". this had two major problems. first, it favoured those who had access to good builders / building skills, in order to render one's vision of one's business in the future. second, if you think about it properly, the future of virtual worlds will actually be likely transparently integrated into everyday life, much like the telephone and television are today. how does one then express this self-same transparency, by making it explicit in one's exhibit? there is a very big paradox here.
third, the tightly defined initial call for proposals, with its unnecessarily distracting metaphor of Dallier's Hope, resulted in at least one worthy exhibit-application being turned down, namely that from the SL Shakespeare community.
the organisers might say that this initial strictness in the first round of application-reviews was relaxed in the second call. but there was one particular blog post on the official SL Blog that pointed to how ludicrously the rigour-pendulum had swung the other way:
"If you make pet animals, that's fantastic, stick an astronauts helmet on them!"
??
why is there this reflexive connection between "the future" and "space"?
this once again highlights that the theme was (a) ill-chosen, and (b) poorly and inconsistently executed.
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