Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA

Yes, I can relate anything to SOA.

I was thinking about the experience that Steve and I had with Second Life, which is, we went in, we wandered around, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was for.  There was no game.  There was nothing to do.  We were homeless and impoverished.  (Well, I was impoverished.  Steve has six dollars.)

I think the answer is that it was the wrong question.

Second Life is platform, not narrative.

We were tripped up by assumptions, based on our previous experiences and background.  Computer Science people of my generation are used to being outside of programming environments.  In Google Sketchup, you also create 3D objects, but you don't create them from inside of a virtual environment, you create them from the outside, Godlike view.

Second Life is like the blinking cursor on a Commodore 64 screen.  READY, it says, and you don't say "what is the narrative" you say "what can I do with this?"  Second Life is like the Tron version of the C64, where you're inside the computer looking out.  The fact that you're inside the SL environment is what threw my thinking askew.  I'm used to programming environments where you're outside, looking in.  In my lifetime, rich visual interaction (well, as rich as was possible on the technology of the moment) has been mainly used for games.

Second Life is a hammer and nails, not a book.  You don't ask "what's the narrative of a hammer?"  Our difficulty with SL was contrasted with our immediate understanding of World of Warcraft.  WoW meets our assumptions, in that it fits into one of the visual game assumption slots, the "Dungeons and Dragons on a computer" one.  There are only a few types of computer games really.  I won't list them all, but here's resource management like in Civilization, there's first-person shooter like Doom, there's abstract shooter like Asteroids, these are all narratives that long-time computer users of my generation understand immediately.

Second Life is not a book, it's a World Processor.  It's interesting that we didn't immediately perceive Second Life as a command-line prompt, because that certainly would have made things clearer.  I don't expect any narrative from the prompt of my terminal application.

There is actually a whole set of relationships to command prompts that I think is interesting to explore.  (And yes, we are getting to SOA eventually.)

David Brin got a lot of attention in the CS community with his article Why Johnny can't code, and certainly those of us from the TRS-80 / Commodore 64 / Apple II era have been wondering how kids get into computer programming these days, without that flashing prompt of the BASIC programming language.  I had been speculating that "the new coding" was designing levels using game editors (many of the Doom / Unreal type games include editors to create new game environments).  Second Life would be a natural extension of this.  So maybe "Johnny doesn't code, he creates in SL?"

The path for my generation of programmers looks quite different.  Flashing READY prompt.  Then maybe an Adventure game (text-based).  They're related in a twisted way.  Most of the adventure games suffered from a limited and extremely specific vocabulary, which turns out to be the same "suffering" that a computer programming language has.  As we were decoding the syntax of C64 commands and lines of BASIC, we were typing stuff into adventure games like

"open the golden cage"
UNKNOWN

"unlock the gilded cage"
CAN'T PARSE THAT

"use heavy hammer on cage"
UNRECOGNIZED OBJECT "ON CAGE"

"get the ^%$^ bird out of the *%&^&*^% cage!!!"

and so on

Eventually that led to MUDs, and MUDs are a clear lineal antecedent of Second Life.  In MUDs you could also create objects and do programming.  However, I think few people embraced the platform aspect of MUDs, most people used the narrative of the D&D type quest game.  Second Life is sort of like a MUD without the game built yet.

This difficulty between the abstraction of an empty platform and the immediate understanding of
a narrative is evident to me when I talk to librarians and others about SOA (you see I told you I was getting here eventually).  They always say "that's nice, but give me concrete examples".  In the context of this posting, I guess I would say, "Web Services are a hammer, not a book, and SOA is the architecture of the house you could build with that hammer".

In a similar way, this illustrates some of the challenges between the catalogue and the idea of a general open library technology platform.  The catalogue has narrative.  I would argue it's the wrong narrative, with concepts mis-adapted from the traditional librarian-card catalogue-patron world of paper, but it is as least something one can grasp.

The attraction of narrative is probably one of the reasons that Steve and I have been spending way too many hours in WoW, while our visits to SL usually last about five minutes.

In my next posting, I will talk more about how assumptions can create challenges and barriers, specifically about how extending analogue library paper world assumptions to digital can lead to incorrect conclusions.

Comments

[Jani Syed]

Nice narrative and correlation between Second life and life of SOA :-)

great posting.

Jani Syed