Final Project Draft

For my final thesis I am going to relate my personal experiences with Second Life to those experiences of Dibbell in Play Money.I will examine and discuss the idea of "flow" from the book Play Money by Julian Dibbell, and look at how it is a motivating factor in programs like Second Life or Ultima Online. At first, I had the same reluctant and somewhat naive attitude as Dibbell did when I first began Second Life. I had doubts about the point and purpose of the game and felt that playing or "living" in a virtual world was really taking away from peoples "real" lives and experiences. After my first experience with Second Life, all of my doubts started to swindle away tho. I almost immediately felt that this was a program that I could enjoy and could see myself getting more involved in, yet I too still did not understand how and why people would make actual money from these programs that they could either use in their actual life or put back into their alternate life. Unlike Dibbell I have not and will not travel the country looking for the biggest gamers on Second Life, but my thoughts were similar to his.
Looking at some of the ideas we have talked about in class I see Second Life as being a "real" world for people, this class has really opened my eyes to see that technology is happening all around us, and technology is forever getting faster, smaller and more detailed. There is just no stopping it, so like the old saying says "if you can't beat them, join them," and that's what I am taking it as. The same as how Dibbell was unsure about all of it but decided to join in and see what the big deal was with UO. Once he began he realized it was not work. He even began making money from UO himself! So it shows that the virtual world is just an extension of oneself in a different realm, so to say,like that of Stelarc's extension of himself. In relation to Stelarc, programs like Second Life are extension of the real, making the unnatural, natural and the unreal, real. Dibbell chose to make the unreal, real by driving to the real people of the virtual ones and deciphering the greatness behind virtual worlds.
Looking more into Play Money and the idea of "flow," Dibbell, like myself, realized that it may seem time consuming and unusual to other in many ways, whether that be by making money from it, having relationships in the life or whatever, but if it is something that one enjoys doing and it satisfies them in some way then it is really not work it is their entertainment, their "life." The idea of flow is an "exhilirating and uniquely fulfilling convergence of attention and purpose(PM,37)." Which breaks down too, these programs are not something that is forced upon people, they willingly engage in them and it becomes a part of their natural everyday lives, "flowing" along with the other daily routines.