{"id":484,"date":"2006-08-29T23:27:58","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T03:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/29\/telus-plywood-art-and-second-life\/"},"modified":"2006-08-29T23:27:58","modified_gmt":"2006-08-30T03:27:58","slug":"telus-plywood-art-and-second-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/29\/telus-plywood-art-and-second-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Telus, plywood art and Second Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things I find fascinating about virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims Online and There is that in many ways they are very much like the real world — right up to the point where things start to get really weird. The fact that the laws of physics, morality and even life itself can effectively be re-written on the fly has a way of making things very interesting (and in many cases confusing) for non-players. I’ve written about<\/a> this kind of thing before, and I recently came across another example — and one with a Canadian flavour, no less.<\/p>\n

In a recent post on Second Life Herald, a writer named Pixeleen Mistral tells the story of what happened when she went to get a new cellphone for her avatar (yes, she felt her in-world character needed a hot new cellphone) at a new store set up by Telus, a Canadian wireless provider that has — like T-shirt maker American Apparel and several other retailers — opened a virtual version of one of its real-world stores. Unfortunately for Pixeleen<\/a>, the store had been completely encased in plywood by a “griefer” artist trying for a Christof kind of look (griefers are like in-world hackers and troublemakers).<\/p>\n

She came back a little while later to find the plywood removed, but then watched as another griefer (this one with a gun fetish, and an avatar whose clothes were covered in long spikes) first shot a customer (another journalist) and then waved around a sword to show off his script-writing skills. Sparkle Dale, who works at the Telus store, reportedly handed the whole affair with aplomb, and even managed to sell another customer a phone — all while the griefer was busy shooting another customer, a “trend consultant” from PSFK.com named Brighton Giugiaro, for standing between him and the door.<\/p>\n

Juvenile? Perhaps. A waste of time? No doubt. But fascinating nonetheless.<\/p>\n

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One of the things I find fascinating about virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims Online and There is that in many ways they are very much like the real world — right up to the point where things start to get really weird. The fact that the laws of physics, morality and even … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Telus, plywood art and Second Life”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}