' Verse

We may have lost the battle...okay, even the war...but you STILL can't take the sky from me. You can't even take my patriotism away. Like it or not, thousands of veterans pressed for this monument, our last stand, oddly enough a place I'd never visit (but love to know is there).

I could so easily get drawn into RPG's. Long ago, there was a little game we played on the big floppies called ZORG. It required one to have several disks on hand, to swap them out on command. It was purely a monochromatic screen with interactive text, but it wowed me at the time. I worked my way through a series of levels of that game, and had it not been for a computer failure, I might still be at it to this day--absorbing.

I do not know what it is that makes one so susceptible to such gaming, where one takes on a persona, lives and breathes in-character. Maybe it's a sort of frustrated acting urge. Maybe it's some dissatisfaction with real life (RL). In my case, it isn't either.

I think in my case it's that I like fiction. I really like being immersed in a good read, and for me, one step further is being interactive with a fiction. That's likely what the springboard has been that's stimulated my interest in Virtual Worlds, namely, currently, Second Life.

I am going to do some research on this whole thing, from RPG's to VW's overall.

Meanwhile, an update: I have now discovered how troubling it can be when one's avatar goes bad. Well, it was no one's doing but my own, of course, but it seems my avatar is forever changed. I was tinkering with various "looks" and now cannot return (without a great deal of rework and time) to his look of over a year. (I should have saved his likeness in-world, in my inventory, I now know.) Anyway, I'd read of how people became attached to their avatars, how they even developed relationships of a kind with them. When one finds too much of his/her identity in a cartoon (as my skeptical friends call them)likeness, something is, indeed, amiss. I would not say that I am mourning Gawain's lost appearance, but I am disturbed by it. This, too, would be a great area to research and report on: self-image and avatars.

For now, I will close with a thought (redundant for anyone who is a regular reader, I fear, or anyone who is a meatspace friend) on corporate greed. I have a deep, abiding dislike for corporate ownership, franchising, branding, naming...the works. I wish everything were mom and pop operations.

How refreshing to encounter, say, variations in our food at fast food restaurants. How great it would be to stumble upon the unexpected gem among greasy spoon cafes. I love to do this, but I am always out-voted in my family; they favor eating food in paper wrappings in a laminated environment that is likely cleaned with a garden hose.

Already advertising creeps into our every pore and pixel, and that is the first wave of corporate branding. Already some parents whore out their children to be branded by major corporations, models of theirs, sponsored by x, y, z company. The exchange is that the kid wears company gear, talks the company talk, etc. Already space launches have been sponsored by corporations--space, the final frontier! Space above countries is "owned" you know, and there are already lawyers who work exclusively on issues of air space and space law.

Some companies are so vast we are not commonly aware of them. They have ownership and market controls of everything from food products to auto parts, from pencils to porn (I'm just speculating on the porn). Altria, PepsiCo, Sony...

In my 'verse, there's an even bigger corporate presence, Blue Sun.