Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times: it's been two years ....
Our award nominated SL/ACNH documentary examining social isolation and digital communities during the COVID-19 pandemic is (IMHO) as relevant as it was when it premiered April 2nd, 2022.
Favor: before you read this post, watch the movie? And perhaps even chime in with your story about COVID-19 and how your particular digital tribe helped you cope during the years 2020 through 2022 (and beyond)?
Thank you👇
I know you cheated coz y ou just kept reading …ah well … I forgive you!
Watch it later though? In solitude, with no additional screens pinging?
🙏🙏🙏
On with the post now: so I was invited to speak to students at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University in Orange County last week. The topic was my style of Second Life centric Machinima documentary. A participating student asked me what my favorite game console was and I immediatly said that I never owned one in my life until I realized WAIT A MINUTE: I DID own a Nintendo Switch for 2+ years (after which I sold it on eBay!), just so I could make the above 👆movie.
So there! I stood corrected. And speaking of the movie, I also stood quite humbled by following Tom Boellstorff and his research team from UC Irvine for these 2 years, taping interviews in both worlds (Animal Crossing and Second Life), fly-on-the-walling with my virtual camera at many a group gathering: I, as a non-gamer, who spent his teenage years in a room without consoles, albeit with loads of guitars, amps, and notation paper/pencils, I had to admit that the creativity on display in a commercial (corporate made and extremely popular) game like ACNH can in fact be astonishingly beautiful and even sophisticated.
And equally surprising to me was that the motivation behind making art in AC quite often seemed to run counter to the (expectedly) constant nudging of the gamification elements built into the product by the Nintendo people: players (or should they perhaps also be referred to as residents, like we are, in SL? I am still not sure!) routinely shared items and tips to help newbies advance so they could express themselves more freely without the limitations of certain game levels.
Communities shared objects that would enhance other people’s builds. Discussions, events and entire islands were often centered around current “real world” issues and so on.
In this sense AC felt similar to the algorithm-free universe of my choice, Second Life. I know, a lot of fellow Second Lifers would disagree here, regarding feature sets (no voice in AC, OMG no alts? What about collab building in real time?) and there is a lot of nuance to be debated of course not least in terms of the structural limitations of AC, its delivery format, the specific level design, etc, I GET IT!
But for me as a gaming n00b an eye-opener was that in both worlds (games, universes, WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL THESE THINGS JUST DON’T CALL THEM PLATFORMS WITH CONTENT ALL CAPS) …
… they (the makers/LL/Nintendo/providers of digital services/capitalism/the MAN!) thankfully have not been able to kill off the very important human need to freely play and create without a goal or aiming for price/clout/money/a cookie.
And the impetus to learn! Grow. And maybe even teach. And certainly to converse?
Below a teaser clip featuring Gandalf, sorry, I meant UniVirtual’s William Prensky, finally setting the record straight on why he feels one world is NOT enough for a passionate human sponge I mean being 😅
I also realized that I was perhaps a bit unaware of my own privilege as white male Second Lifer who - while not independently wealthy - still flush with enough bread to buy a high-end PC.
To ensure my reputation of utmost documentarian objectivity I invited artist Jules Rivera, a woman of color who loves ACNH, to set me straight:
But back to how the restrictions to social gatherings in the physical realm, implemented in various different ways/degrees by governments, impacted folks, because this was obviously the most interesting aspect of this project.
Spoiler alert: nobody enjoys Zoom calls aka “virtual meetings”. As an aside: you can imagine how, as an ideologue, this re-branding irked me (possibly even more irking than when Zuckerberg hijacked the term “Metaverse” OMG I AM SO IRKED!)
Anyways: for the film we spoke to people from all over the planet and, as you see below, even tinies from the Luskwood area of SL, hate Zoom!
The irony? A lot of interviews for the movie were conducted via … video call …
I often told folks during the intense periods of total lockdown that nothing really changed for me in terms of my daily routine: me as in a (albeit precariously employed) “knowledge worker” who has lived in a home office of sorts for well over a decade, next to his beloved bookshelf and upright piano, connected to friends from all over the world via Second Life but also grounded with RL family in the physical world. Someone with enough leisure (timewise!) to reflect on world events, someone with a regular sleep schedule …
But my privilege became very apparent to me, very quickly, through working on this project but also through these strange recurring (limited by lock-down) conversations in our Munich area neighborhood (usually while walking the Gustav, who is also in the movie), with (usually) white German middle-class folks, who showed NO SIGN of recognizing THEIR privilege AT ALL.
Matter of fact the view most often expressed was that this pandemic puts “all of us back in one boat because we are equally affected!” A variation of this point I heard at an almost daily basis in casual small talk conversations.
I wish I was kidding but alas I am not!
Not breaking any news here by stating that nothing could be further from the actual facts and that the pandemic laid bare our unequal society for all to see, the contrast between the ways to mitigate it for people of means and so-called “essential workers” (a term that offends me to the core), the ones that keep the capitalist machine going, impossible to ignore.
But for the affluent the heroic contribution of mostly not very well paid wage earners was worth (at the most!) a bit of clapping at the end of their workday, when the downtrodden were leaving their place of exploitation.
Yes you guessed it: I am an anti-capitalist (from waaaaaay back, maybe even more radical than Peter Watts 👆) and I was only reaffirmed in my conviction that the main function of this economic system including the state apparatus managing it is to ensure the unhindered flow of capital plus relentlessly disciplining workers so as to have their labor power available at all times to grease the wheels of said system …
So while I was gathering at least 100 hours of interviews and many more hours of b-roll footage during the 2-year production of this movie, I became further radicalized and I am glad we found a good conclusion of this film, the final chapter, a conclusion that many may find too “normie” but I felt it fit the project perfectly: a Metaverse for all is demanded, one that does not rely on gamification gimmicks to manipulate people and mislead not only users but also investors into obsessing over issues of scale.
A Metaverse that is publicly owned and run, one where micro communities are not only allowed to exist but favored, because SPOILER ALERT issues matter regardless of size, a Metaverse where the daily/weekly/monthly spreadsheet analysis of metrics like the so called “engagement” becomes an activity of less and less importance.
A Metaverse of REAL engagement, between people who care about mutual aid, growth in the sense of interpersonal transformation and societal change, digitally or physically, in other words: a Metaverse with people actually engaging WITH each other!
(intermission: a song is in order, originally released on the “Login2Life” soundtrack👇)
Such a Metaverse is certainly not the SOLUTION TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS ALL CAPS …
… but as we spend more time in virtual worlds we must demand that they are NOT corporate owned and run, especially not via a ZuckerMusk-ian “big data” model where your mind is colonized by opaque algorithms and you are being kept in a “Infinite Jest”-like loop of feeding the machine with “content” (another term I hate) while you yourself are being eaten alive, reproduced only to keep that feeding loop going indefinitely, a kind of death from having bought into capitalism’s #1 sales pitch that you can outrun that death by buying and posting and posting and possibly buying some more ….
And now that I have done MY share of longwinded posting, please go henceforth my friend, watch the film, leave a comment and don’t forget to subscribe!
Do it!
Post, so the machine that you and I hate is satisfied!
Sigh …
There is no alternative just like Maggie said one day.
Dang …. I thought I could solve capitalism with this post … I guess I FAILED !!!
What now? ICE-CREAM? Or …. MERCH? Jaaaaaaaaa 👇👇👇
So now what next? What is the remedy to the malaise?
I recommend you pick up a good book, like Mike Watson’s forthcoming “Hungry Ghosts in the Machine” if you like it concise, or (I know you saw it coming!!) David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” if you like to go into a 3-month self-induced lock-down with one insanely big metaverse in paper form.
Also, I am sorry: the book I used to make the big point in the movie (“and a metaverse for all!”) - it does NOT exist in REAL life 🥹
Either way: resist the machine folks, RESIST!
Except of course when it comes to donating on Ko-Fi!
THANK YOU!
i forgot: the movie is nominated for awards at 11 international festivals. If you like the poster with laurels on it = d/l here https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/unn8s6tj08m8lm6cjcftx/VC_movie_poster_11laurels-SMALL.jpg?rlkey=hl9yx48qylwejbluyqit823ct&dl=0