NMC Campus Observer

Should You Find Yourself in a Corn Field…

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : May 3, 2006 09:22am

The April 2006 issue of Discover Magazine features an interesting article about Second Life.

In Brave New World: Virtual Law and Order, Steven Johnson writes of SL citizen Nimrod Yaffle, who had found on a visit to Second Life, his avatar as trapped in a strange place:

… his avatar had been sequestered in a surreal, isolated landscape: infinite rows of corn, spread out under a dark sky, with nothing else in sight except a small red tractor and a black-and-white television set playing the 1940 film Boy in Court. Yaffle was completely baffled. “At first I thought it was a joke,” he says. “But I realized that I could not teleport out of that area, and I wasn’t sure what to do.”

This highlights one of many interesting, and unexpected social situations that happen in this virtual civilization. There are protests going on, social causes being advocated, places you would likely not want your kids to go… is Second Life a mirror, a lens, or some distortion of Real Life?

The reason for Nimrod Yaffle’s confinement is revealed by Johnson:

In fact, Yaffle was exiled to the cornfield for three days for reverse engineering a bit of computer code to steal virtual items from a vendor in Second Life. “The cornfield is not used often, and it is only for white-collar crimes,” explains Catherine Smith of Linden Lab, the San Francisco–based company that created and maintains the Second Life site. “It is supposed to be funny more than anything.”

So there is crime and punishment in Second Life. We very much hope we do not need campus police here at NMC!

Story filed under: Second Life News

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