PHOTO: Prof. Ginnis Bareccannita’s teaching assistant, Ornrey Mulsteef, arrives at her office to help her grade papers.
I tried to sign up for a Second Life but I was denied one.
Why doesn’t that surprise me?
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PHOTO: Prof. Ginnis Bareccannita’s teaching assistant, Ornrey Mulsteef, arrives at her office to help her grade papers.
I tried to sign up for a Second Life but I was denied one.
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Why doesn’t that surprise me?
I’d chosen a name, a sexy avatar, and I was looking forward to visiting virtual campuses. But I can only assume that fate, or my guardian angel, or the Second Life administrators decided I already spent too much time watching clips of bands from my youth (have you seen Emmy Lou Harris sing “Luxury Liner” in the ‘70s?) and snippets from Hoarders to be permitted any more time on the computer.
Actually, the only reason I wanted a Second Life was because I discovered only yesterday that such a thing existed.
I’d heard about it, but only the way I’ve heard about “football” or “knitting.” You know, I’d heard about it in a way that meant it would always be something other people were interested in but that I would ignore.
And for those few of you who inhabit the same level of ignorance in their first lives as I do, Second Life permits you to inhabit a world or, as far as I can tell, even create a world, and then fill it with characters, buildings, and merchandise, as well as to create institutions and form relationships.
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I learned about this from the IT-Master, if I might call him that, at UConn, who is an enormously engaging and intelligent young man named Tim. I’m not even sure how we got onto the subject—I’m always begging Tim to come down and help me with computer problems in my office and we end up talking about all kinds of topics—but once he started telling me about SL, I was intrigued.
The first thing I wanted to know was whether or not there were versions of Second Life dedicated to universities or colleges. Given that, as Tim described it, what happens in Second Life is free form, lawless, and doesn’t necessarily adhere to the usual structures or inherited patterns of actual life, I wondered what an SLU would look like. Tim’s first response, one he gave without missing a beat was, “It would be Animal House, except with nuclear weapons.”
Fabulous Kerri, my undergraduate assistant, suggested that perhaps there weren’t any virtual universities because they would in fact be too boring.
Tim disagreed, claiming that the Internet demons from the Id would appear and make John Belushi’s character Blutarsky look like Billy Graham. I questioned whether this would be something like Dexter goes to College or The Walking Dead—on Campus or 28 Days Later—Into the Semester, but they shook their heads. Clearly I wasn’t getting the point.
“No” said Tim. “If you created a SLU, you would have people putting volcanoes next to the dining hall,” He then corrected himself: “No, no, they would put the volcanoes under the dining hall. And the IT would of course run the university with the most insidious criminal mind of the department in control.”
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The three of us got into the spirit of the thing. Apparently, students would stalk, rob, and perhaps terminate other students in order to steal their credits and class rank.
They would have to wrestle one another for admission into the most popular classes. A Roman style arena would be built where graduate students from various disciplines would have to fight to the death for funding and for postdocs.
The faculty would be able to place bets on them.
But only tenured faculty would have this privilege.
The junior faculty would not have any time to indulge in the pleasures of sport, they would be doing something known as “grinding”—which is not as interesting as it sounds, as it was explained to me—because “grinding” is a term used for all the tedious repetitive activity the game mechanics force players to do in order to get ahead.
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What would happen is that the inventive minds (in contrast to those “grinding”) would spend their time exploring the system in order to design new ways of manipulating the process in ways never intended or foreseen by the game’s originators. They would work the system mercilessly in order to assume leadership roles themselves. They would become increasingly ruthless.
I learned, too, that there are people whose primary goal is to thwart the success of others. These people are known as “griefers.”All they want to do is wreck the success and happiness of others; they no longer have any real ambitions themselves.
Money would be spent on the most absurd projects.
Speaking of which, my own university’s board of trustees just hired a consulting firm to try and figure out how to cut costs. We are paying this firm close to $4-million dollars in order to save money. Personally, I’d suggest cooking dinner over the volcano in the dining hall.
Here’s my question: would SLU really be very different from what actual universities are now?