Valuable Residents

This post is about my value as a resident of Second Life. I don't feel very valuable, and I was trying to think about how an SL resident becomes valuable. Certainly there are celebrities; but what makes people value them so much? In traditional video games, going back to the 1980s, the celebrities were those with the high scores. Even now, on Xbox Live, various systems make it clear who the great Halo and Project Gotham Racing gamers are. On such games, it is easy to know what constitutes a great player, even if it is not easy to become one.

But in Second Life, the nature of the superior resident is not clear. After some thought, I can offer a guess: The great ones are those that contribute something important (not necessarily good) to Second Life's economy and/or culture: Builders (Aimee Webber), clothiers (Nephalaine Protagonist, Munchflower Zaius), animators (Luth Brodie), subculture community leaders (David Valentino), real estate moguls (the controversial Ansche Chung), trolls (Prokofy Neva), and even professional SL consultants (Satchmo Prototype).

Thus, elite SL status often hinges upon mastery of one or more multimedia authoring platforms, from SL's own simple 3D environment and scripting language to external applications such as Photoshop and Poser. In addition to mastery of these apps, one also has to know how to use them in the context of SL. I guess it is the permeable walls that interest me: elite status in SL can hinge on the interactions between one's professional skills inside and outside of Second Life. In contrast, in Project Gotham Racing the only skills that count (more or less) are in-game skills. As Aimee Webber noted in a forum, she doesn't see Second Life as a "game" (not many do) or even along the lines of the more common metaphor of the virtual "country"; increasingly Aimee Webber instead sees it as a social authoring environment (or something like that--I forgot her exact words).

If I am to have such a value, I need to learn to integrate my real life creative skills (I'm capable enough with image editing and 2D multimedia software) in Second Life, something I have not yet been able to do, probably because I spend all my time socializing instead of creating or even learning how to work with content in SL (such as using prims to do more than make big cubes). The problem is, and in contrast to my RL personality, socializing has turned out to be my passion.