BARTLE BE THE SCRIVENER

I missed last week's Second Life appearance of online world innovator Richard Bartle, but the agile advocates at SL Future Salon quickly posted the full transcript here, while Ren at Terra Nova heroically spelunked through the 53 page deep transcript to emerge with 12 pages worth of silver ingots, posted here. I don't get the impression that Richard was given a prior demonstration of Second Life, in all its non-text intensive glory, which makes the discussion between him, the host, and numerous SL Residents seem fairly abstract. How can you really have an honest compare-and-contrast between virtual worlds described purely by text, versus worlds that are also described by 3D animation and stereo sound-- when it's all done in text?

Another thought occurs to me, reading through this: ironically, the transcript of Richard Bartle explaining the virtues of text-based worlds itself illustrates their greatest weakness, too.

Consider: the full unedited transcript of Bartle's talk runs over 14,000 words, while the painstakingly pared-down after-the-fact edit clocks in at a still-substantial 4,000 words. Judged in terms of pure text, this is a staggeringly large, inefficient signal-to-noise ratio. And this is the transcript from a graphic and audio rich online world, where all the visual and sound cues are absorbed intuitively and effortlessly as percepts! Consider how much longer the transcript would have been in a text-only MUD, where every object, noise, avatar, action, and reaction is given a line or two of text description. 14,000 would easily become twice that or more, growing to the size of a short novel. (And even the vastly abbreviated 4,000 words is the size of a long New Yorker-style magazine article, taking at least 30-60 minutes to fully read and digest.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but Richard's advocacy for text-based worlds implicitly asks us to imagine a virtual world that unfolds in our mind's eye with every evocative haiku-like line of text. But that's the platonic ideal. In actual practice, even the most vivid text in a MUD is buried by cross-chat, emoticons, Instant Messages, administrative info, and all the other detritus that clings to the medium like ASCII barnacles. If text provides us a deeper, more cerebral experience, text also degrades and detracts from it every step of the way.

But leave that all to one side for a moment, because Bartle is a master of this field, and so you come across insights like this in it all the time:

"There are valid reasons for some virtual worlds to be part of the real world, just not all of them. You need to be able to maintain a conceit that the virtual world is not the real world in order to gain the freedoms that it offers. If it were just part of the real world, you'd have to be the real-world you, rather than the real you in games."

Which strikes me as profound, because it perfectly puts into words (ahem) an issue I've been wondering about recently, myself. What happens when Second Life gets the Mozilla functionality promised by Linden Lab, so it'll eventually be possible to browse the Web from within the world? For that matter, what happens when Second Life follows through on its promise (threat?) to become the successor to the Web? At what point does there get to be so much interaction between the metaverse and the real world-- and paradoxically, the Web, AIM/IRC, e-mail, cell phones, and PDAs now constitute the "real world"-- that the magic circle is broken, and the illusion of freedom collapses?

Thoughts to keep thinking, and Bartle's furious storm of words is a good place to start.