Last week I appeared “live” in the virtual world of Second Life to promote my new book. (Have I mentioned it?) My avatar (a character that looks like me) answered questions in a theater packed with other avatars. Then I let them come on stage and kick my in the ‘nads.
The scene was captured by a viewer and posted on youtube. Now you too can enjoy watching me get pummeled.
About 60% into the video, an avatar that looks like Dilbert appears and attacks me. It was art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me. Truly weird. If you know any Dilbert readers, they might enjoy this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh_28EI4sME
There is also a Dogbert in the video, but when he is in kicking mode, he grows giant frog legs so it’s not so obvious it’s him in this particular clip. And there is a chat going on that you can't see, so it's quite a party on stage. In the end, I dance with Dilbert.
Second Life is already nerdily delicious, but as computing power increases, and the images become increasingly photorealistic, it’s hard to imagine wanting to travel in real life to have a meeting. You might want to meet people once just to be sure they exist. But after that, the avatar would do.
And with a bit more programming, those avatars can have the illusion of being sentient. They could interact online without your guidance and learn things and make friends. They might even be programmed to believe they have free will. I give it ten years.
In Second Life, they have a currency called Linden dollars. You can earn them and trade them for real money. In theory, someday you could program a little Donald Trump avatar and have him go earn money for you in the virtual world and wire it to you in the real world.
My theory, as regular readers know, is that you and I are already avatars in someone else’s virtual world. Whenever we think we are losing money, say by gambling or investing or paying taxes, we are really just wiring money to our overlords.
Special thanks to Aimee Weber for creating my avatar and managing the Second Life event. Her whole team was great.
Aimee Weber
AIMEE WEBER STUDIO
WWW.AIMEEWEBER.COM
And thanks to Second Life embedded journalist W. James Au (www.Nwn.blogs.com) for hooking me up with Aimee’s studio and making the whole thing happen.
I dont know about second life. I may just be lame, but I cant get off the first island. I just fly around randomly looking at things. I'm glad you have had success with it.
Posted by: Kate | November 29, 2007 at 10:49 PM
Did you see this: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202803015&cid=nl_IWK_daily Gamers (via gaming consoles) are donating CPU power to cancer research. 670,000 Playstation 3's have contributed to the world's most powerful distributed computing network (per Guiness World Records), which is used to simulate proteins folding. I've donated a lot of CPU time to this project, but I don't keep my PS3 on all the time, because it's noisy and I'm afraid that it'll overheat.
Posted by: Joshua Jacobsen | November 07, 2007 at 07:08 AM
Scott,
Looks like your shameless and blatant self promotion has finally paid off ;)
Everyone in my office is talking about the "revenge-of-the- character-thingy" .
Well I think we need a new word for this kind of marketing added in our lexicons.
(Forgot to add ... Everyone is waiting for the first print of the pirated-scanned-online-version )
*grins the evil-grin*
Posted by: Tom | November 07, 2007 at 12:21 AM
I am currently reading a book called 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson and it is very much like what you were talking about - the whole.. using avatars to do real life things...
I haven't finished it yet, so I can't tell you much more, but so far it's very interesting... Plus, it was written in 1992 and it's pretty cool that he was writing about this so long ago, when avatars were not popular or really considered much.
Very entertaining video, too! =)
Posted by: Carolina | November 06, 2007 at 11:34 PM
Gosh, missed the second life thing ... and probably won't go there soon. Did look at Colbert's book at Borders the other day ... and probably will be missing his show during the writer's strike
..
http://givemeamomentblog.blogspot.com/
Posted by: QwkDrw | November 06, 2007 at 10:25 PM
Damn, I still think you could have taken down the small white humanoid avatar. Although it looked androgenous, you could still have taken a shot at its wedding tackle area.
Posted by: Bsquared | November 06, 2007 at 03:27 PM
Wow. That was like -- really, really pointless. I just can't get over how pointless that was. I mean, a George Bush speech defending how water-boarding may (or may not be) torture is also pointless, but that's just peanuts to how pointless that Second Life 'event' was.
Thanks for posting it to YouTube, by the way, otherwise I might have had some lingering feeling that I missed something. Instead I can heave this huge sigh of relief.
As always, you da Man!
Posted by: AllanL5 | November 06, 2007 at 03:12 PM
If we are avatars in someone else's virtual reality, why do we sleep?
Posted by: CRS | November 06, 2007 at 01:44 PM
I just wanted to say thanks for doing the event, Scott, and thanks for pointing to the video. I greatly enjoyed the Q&A portion, but the server was so overloaded I couldn't get close enough to the stage to even see what was going on afterwards.
Posted by: Jewelle Outlander | November 06, 2007 at 01:12 PM
The great thing about Avatars is everyone is always hot, even if they are at home in Pajamas...I hope I am not the only one strangley attracted to some of these 3-D cartoons...
http://www.awritersblock.com
Posted by: Johnski | November 06, 2007 at 09:51 AM
Thanks. I love Dean Martin.
Posted by: Sondra | November 06, 2007 at 07:13 AM
After that I checked my BT Broadband speed and the results are:
Date02/11/07 20:39:48
Speed Down464.06 Kbps ( 0.5 Mbps )
Speed Up234.40 Kbps ( 0.2 Mbps )
People who were shouted "Move!" should test theirs too and write a strong letter to The Times (if you live in the UK) or The New York Times in the states.
What you actually need is the optical fibre infrastructure to enjoy any Second Life events, intit?
Sob.
Posted by: Suki the Ocicat | November 06, 2007 at 05:52 AM
Scott re your comment : "
.. They might even be programmed to believe they have free will. I give it ten years."
Check out the artificial intellegence guys :
http://www.singinst.org/media/interviews
if you haven't already.
Posted by: Chris | November 06, 2007 at 04:30 AM
Funny film! Too long, but funny…..
I tried to get into SL, but it took me too long to become competent enough to get to your presentation in time. Like real life I suppose :-)
SL world is entertaining as a learner. Chatting with a variety if fantastic looking women is fun (they are probably in reality elderly gay guys or huge ungainly women :-).
Helping people is a major activity (getting started is not so easy) so that presses the "rewarding" button for a lot of people. You cheated as someone set it all up for you!
I think the SL novelty will wear off, although there is apparently a lot of learning activities etc - so maybe I will hang around some more.
Posted by: David, Hungary | November 06, 2007 at 03:19 AM
What?
Bri, do you think your funny? cause your not. I hope your not "funny" like this in real life, or your family must be so embrassed of you.
Posted by: syn | November 06, 2007 at 01:00 AM
I read your feed from LJ, so I don't usually come here to see the comments on your blog. But now it makes so much more sense the way you say some of the stuff you do... you have a whole bunch of trolls in your comments, who, by the sounds of things, post attacks all the time.
I didn't think much of this particular video either, but really. Smack 'em down.
Posted by: Avatar | November 06, 2007 at 12:17 AM
Imagine when there are avatar with free will. Your avatar goes to a meeting with the publisher and make unrealistic commitments about timeline and the fee for it. They you would be slaving hard to meet the timeline commited by someone who is not even real.
Posted by: Navin Harish | November 05, 2007 at 10:12 PM
I also watched a couple of the others that came up afterwards of you speaking to a group. Strange, I hadn't realized until now that I'd given you a way of talking in my head, which, just like imagining how someone looks before you've seen them, was completely wrong. No worries; you're real voice is even better than the one I'd invented for you.
Posted by: Nomi | November 05, 2007 at 09:17 PM
There was an article about "your" idea I read a couple weeks ago (linked from Gmail). I will try to find it for you. The guy that thought it up said he thought there was about a 1 in 5 chance it was true (and admitted he only gave that low an estimate because he was optimistic).
Posted by: RunningFool | November 05, 2007 at 08:25 PM
in second life, would britney spears be into kabbalavatar?
Posted by: brad | November 05, 2007 at 08:21 PM
Nice event. Wish I could be there.
Off topic: this is totally your news. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2789073.ece
Posted by: Ricky | November 05, 2007 at 06:53 PM
hm, there is no me
i remember clearly that Dilbert was kicking you, but that Dilbert was like taller and bigger than this one
i am not sure about my perceptions now
but may be this all was before me entering the stage
soooo, you did not notice me, story of my life :(
next time, if there will be the next time, would you look for the green haired mute femidas prone to crashing into the basement, please
though i don't know for what, just smile may be
those females kicking you without context were disgusting
i would so slap them back
speaking of cats in the shower, i recalled another old joke
a woman complains to her neighbour:
- your cat is so loud, what do you do to her
- i wash it everyday
- i bathe my cat everyday too, but my cat is not crying as loud as yours
- do you squeeze water out of it?
- out of what, who - the cat?
- sure, what do you wash in the first place, hellooo?
Posted by: rd | November 05, 2007 at 06:37 PM
Wow, Dilbert really took you to the woodshed. Must be all that pent-up rage from cubicle purgatory.
Posted by: Konrad Hughes | November 05, 2007 at 06:07 PM
Ick! I say, and again, Ick!
D. Mented
Posted by: D. Mented | November 05, 2007 at 05:15 PM
That's pretty funny, but what is funnier is the link to one of your speeches. It's amazing how well reading out a comic on stage works.
http://thisdevilsworkday.wordpress.com/
Posted by: Luke | November 05, 2007 at 03:33 PM