For me, it all started out with role-playing games. This kind:

I would get together with friends and play Dungeons & Dragons (or similar games) until the wee hours of the morning.  At its most basic, tabletop role-playing games like this one are made up of random die rolls and statistical number-crunching. You meet a Bugbear, it has 30 hit points. Your sword does 1-10 points of damage. Roll a ten-sided die. [roll] You roll a 7. The Bugbear has 23 hit points left. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But tabletop role-playing games were always more than just a numbers racket for me.  Sure, you can play any of these games, and get a great deal of enjoyment from just rolling the dice until the monsters drop dead.  But most nerds (like me) play this games with just a little more panache.

“Foul beast!” said I, “Thou willst taste the steel of my mithril blade before sunrise!” and with that I swung the sword of my father at the creature’s fanged visage. Next to me, I saw the elf-mage Karislok assume a steadfast pose and mutter the arcane words of an ancient binding spell. I knew that the monster would not defeat us this day …”

For my friends and I, the game was not about rolling dice, it was about the storytelling. We would get together every Saturday night for the social interaction and the immersion.  Rolling dice and doing arithmetic was not our idea of a good time. Running through forbidden forests and vanquishing dragons was what got our blood pumping.

As time went on, however, it became more and more difficult for us to get together for our Saturday game nights. We went away to college, met actual girls, got married, some of us started families. Keeping up the old contacts just became more and more difficult.

Sometime during the mid-90s, I discovered Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Most people just call these (MMORPGs) The first one that I experienced was EverQuest. The user (that’s you) would create a character and enter a 3-dimensional virtual online world. It was just like playing any other fantasy-based video game, but in this environment, you could interact with other players. If you saw a monster that was too tough for you to fight alone, you could team up with a few of your friends and gang up on the poor thing. Then you split the treasure and go on to the next monster.  The monsters were all controlled by the computer, so there was none of that tedious die-rolling or statistics.  You just click on “Attack” and your character keeps swinging. If you want to do something fancy, you click on a spell, or an item, or some kind of specialized attack. But at the end of the day, you get to virtually spend time with friends while hacking monsters into little tiny bits.

But even in these new online virtual world, gameplay was not limited to depopulating the region of monsters.  Games like this allowed people to have social interactions as well.  If you play at the same time every day, maybe you start to see a few familiar faces.  Maybe that Dwarf Paladin you keep seeing in Freeport would like to help you take on the Crushbone Orcs this Saturday.  You start to build friendships, you get to talking, and the next thing you know, you’re actually building a social connection with someone you’ve never met in person.  People would have virtual weddings and funerals in Everquest. I’ve had friends who would go online just to sit around and chat with other people. Monsters would be running rampant as players would have a heart-to-heart conversation in the middle of a forbidden swamp.  In newer games, such as World of Warcraft and City of Heroes, some people form lasting connections to the people that they meet online.  Despite being some of the most popular games ever played, much of the enjoyment that people get out of these MMORPGs has little to do with gaming.

"Demented and sad, but social"

Second Life was an attempt to re-create this kind of virtual world from a purely social standpoint.  Rather than construct a world full of monsters and magic, the creators of SL just cleared a lot of open space for users.  Immersing yourself in Second Life was not meant to be a “game” by any stretch of the word.  Even now, many of Second Life’s most strident advocates cringe at the word “game” in reference to their beloved virtual environment. Second Life allows people to create their OWN world. Through the use of simple building tools, you can build your own house, design your own clothes, and even animate your own monsters.  Your in-world “avatar” is not limited to such quaint genotypes as “Elf”, “Human”, or “Halfling”. You can literally look like anything you want. The designers of this gam- … er, environment-, encourage player- … I mean residents, to create their own spaces, and to interact with the many other denizens of this virtual space.

For this reason, many educators and librarians have developed a love for Second Life. It allows you to meet students and/or patrons in a virtual environment that carries none of the limitations of e-mail and text chat.  You can “see” the person that you’re speaking to, and interact with them. You can create 3-D models of anything you can dream up. You can create classes online, you can re-create other worlds and time periods, and you even socialize with people from around the globe.

This free-form playstyle of Second Life makes it ideal for people who want to immerse themselves in a virtual world where they can look however they want and meet exciting new people. The problem with this paradigm is that not many people “get it”.

For a gamer, someone who looks for the excitement of slaying monsters and gathering treasure, Second Life looks boring.  Most people’s first experience with Second Life is a crudely rendered wasteland with a few buildings looming haphazardly on the landscape.  In an environment like World of Warcraft, the cities are created by professional game designers who know how to create an aesthetically pleasing environment. In Second Life, anyone can create an object of any size.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some brilliant Second Life designers out there who have made some truly breathtaking creations. But the more elaborate a design, the more it drains upon the system trying to render it. So you often have buildings half-created hanging in the air as you’re waiting for the rest of it to appear. This is called “lag”, and it happens when your computer is straining to process all of the details of the virtual world. In other MMORPGs, you are limited to a single server, and only so many people can sign on to the server at a time. So although lag does happen in these games, it is not nearly as frequent.  A video game enthusiast who comes to Second Life sees an often poorly-rendered world with too much lag. When this gamer attempts to find something exciting to do, they are usually disappointed. They need to go find their own monsters to fight, since there are none waiting for them as they log in. :(

For those who are unfamiliar with MMORPG environments, Second Life is a big scary confusing thing. Many library patrons remember a time when the most complex video game environment was Donkey Kong.  Navigating a full 3-D virtual world is like learning to walk for the first time. The typical gamer can usually figure things out very quickly, but for non-geeks, the great wide open spaces of Second Life are just slightly terrifying.  Being immersed in a virtual world in which at any moment you might be approached by a full-scale winged dragon or an anthropomorphic fox sounds like something out of Hunter S. Thompson’s nightmares.  Especially since most non-gamers would much rather just pick up a phone and ask you directly how to find scholarly journal articles.  Of course some people feel that Second Life is nothing more than a childish video game, that has no business in the world of scholarly pursuits, but we won’t talk about them. ;)

For all the rest of us, Second Life is wonderful.  The people that enter Second Life every day do enjoy the bizarre, whimsical characters that they meet, and the rolling psychedelic scenery.  I have become good friends with many librarians purely through encountering them in Second Life, and I treasure each of those friendships.  But I understand the uphill battle that many librarians face as they attempt to advocate Second Life among their institutions. The true gamers would rather be playing WoW or Call of Duty.  They’re not going to want to mix their gaming with their homework.  The non-geeks don’t understand why they need to learn how to play a stupid video game just to talk to a librarian. And anybody ON Second Life is too busy doing their own thing to make it over to the good old Info Archipelago.

Second Life, I love ya, but I think we need to find another way of integrating virtual worlds and library science. What way is that? That way is a subject for another post. :)