Went and had a look at the much-vaunted Second Life “Burning Life” thingey the other night.
Burning Life
It’s very much all the buzz in SL at the moment amongst the more avant-garde in-crowd of that virtual world, and based on the real-life Burning Man festival, it does rather encapsulate the general utopian free-spirited zeitgeist of the more creative portion of SL’s population, not least of all including Philip Linden himself (see previously linked podcast).
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting to see, but slapping ‘Burning Life’ into the search window soon found the place. It consists of 12 specially set aside Sims, with a sand motif, presumably to mirror the deserts of Nevada where the real thing is held. Each Sim is further subdivided up into about 16 smaller square plots, which are allocated to various SL residents, on a lottery basis. Then, each resident gets to try and impress the world with their imagination and building skills.
It’s not actually a competition as such, more a massive collaborative art installation – building and showing off just for the sake of it. Vendors and commerce are banned, and none of the plots generate ‘dwell’, or traffic listings, so the area is refreshing free of the more typical mercantile crassness that blights a lot of SL, but after arriving and flying about a bit, the sheer chaotic nature of the thing became quickly apparent. There is no tour guide, or programme, or map, and the staggering diversity of builds, in such close proximity, makes the place very confusing to navigate, let alone appreciate. While individual plots are indeed often impressive, and mostly make consistent sense within themselves, the sheer density of prims in view, and their variety is quite distracting.
Still, if you can focus, and take enough time to look in detail, some of the plots are quite inspirational. Of course the whole place does rather resemble a more regular Sandbox on Acid, and despite the preparation time, and planning, like the Sandboxes, some people just aren’t that good at building, so the Signal-to-Noise Ratio across the event could be better. Largely the exhibits are mostly ‘dumb prims’, rather than complex scripted machinery – mostly out of consideration for the neighbours – one Sim has to support an awful lot of plots, and the scripts all eat into that shared server. Even so, lag in these popular and complex areas is quite difficult to fight through.
12 sims is an awful lot of ground, and I didn’t manage to see more than three or so in the trip I took, so if you do want to see it all, plan for several sessions, and try to plot out a methodical route through it, or be overwhelmed. New World Notes (left), the Official SL Blog and the above link are all good sources for particular highlights and must-sees. If you do want to see it, you’d best get your skates on though – the event ends on 18th September, when all 12 sims will ceremoniously vanish into the Void.
All in all, worth a look for an example of some of the more imaginative aspects of what Second Life can be. But is it Art?