It seems a lot of people is weeping for AM Radio installations’ virtual execution six months in advance. I guess it’s like an expiration notice: six months and the unreal dead man walking will rot and become empty. The waiting period is pretty short as it’s been announced; the demise can potentially take only a second. Yet I wonder if in six months real time people will remember their laments. More than real life, the simulated existence has proven to be extremely ephemeral and instantaneously replaceable.
Anyway, it’s good to remember that this situation is just another example of how cruelly important this space –or having the rights to forge in it objects, goods, looks and entities– is for the creative process in virtual worlds. Furthermore, when you don’t own it, there’s a high risk of turning into a passive avatar with no way of developing a sense of belonging. That volatile self hardly becomes rooted in the world and abandons it with ease, never to return because nothing justifies the urge to log back in. If the world can’t produce those needs, it become unstable, unprofitable and disposable.
The sustainability of a virtual world partially lies in the mirage of immersion achievable inside a grid with limited resources. The bigger the room, the easiest to convince the brain of that artificial reality. But, as we already know, that medium is costly, and money hurts. I wish there was a way to offer more space for less in order to retain population and stimulate inworld creativity again, but I’m afraid those times are over and we’re just watching the disappearance of yet another remnant of a once flourishing sponsored-godfathered era. Again, it is but another example of how Linden Lab is failing to keep people’s interest in virtual worlds, by letting people walk away so easily. But that’s just one side of the coin, the other being how users fail to sustain their out-of-body binary selves, when their real counterparts, for whatever the reasons, can’t support their idealistic brethren. Of course it means AM Radio and all others just need to pay to stay; how to accomplish that is another story. Maybe it’s just time to dream in small parcels as many others have always been condemned to do since time immemorial, as fame depends on how fast this mainframe helps to spread the word.