This new series of posts is intended solely as a quasi-academic diary, documenting my progress with a paper I am hoping to write on fashionand fashion designers in Second Life.
I have an interest in creativity and innovation and I am writing my dissertation on Fashion & Technology (more on that later). The idea for this paper on fashion in Second Life comes from the eternal problem of not having enough space to cover everything you would like to cover in a dissertation. I would have loved to have been able to deal with Second Life in my dissertation more extensively than I will actually be able to do - so this paper will have to do instead.
Below you may find the abstract as it stands so far.
Creativity in Second Life
Virtual worlds as areas of experimentation for fashion start-ups
Business opportunities and computer gaming were not two phrases frequently used together, at least when talking about the players. Even in terms of game play, before the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) the players were more or less restricted in their movements and each game had a clear target and end result, whether that was to solve a puzzle, without which you could not go forward – what was termed ‘adventure game’ – or to kill as many enemies as possible before they kill your character – what was termed as ‘shoot-em-up games’. A player would start the game, learn the ‘rules’ of the universe and finish the game some time in the future. This process changed dramatically with MMOGs like World of Warcraft which saw players, or rather their avatars, being able to travel a relatively expansive online world and play in a more free-form fashion, choosing quests and deciding how to go about them or who to play them with.
Apart from the change in game play though the basic business model remained the same, with the online gaming industry requiring players to sign over their intellectual property rights in order to enter into the virtual world (Herman A, Coombe RJ, Kaye L:2006). The radical new approach of Linden Lab’s – the company that created the online world of Second Life - was to recognise that the creative contributions of players belonged to them. In Second Life any creation – be it an item of clothing, a body, a piece of furniture or a whole house – belongs to the player that has constructed it both in SL – second life - and in RL – real life. This approach had as a result an unprecedented number of Second Life entrepreneurs dealing in such diverse professions as land, architecture, design, fashion, dance etc. Quickly, a variety of articles and profiles made their appearance in the press describing some instances of businessmen and women who made their fortune in Second Life.
One of the first things that a user does in the Second Life universe is to create an avatar, an online virtual creation which is designed to look human – or in some cases humanoid. There is a significant number of professionals in Second Life who offer ‘ready-made’ packages of not only clothing but also complete bodies. Effectively the user can purchase a box which includes a body, skin tone, details such as eye colour, skin colour, length of arms etc – even going as far as genitalia. Most of the popular fashion shops in Second Life (as the system itself calculates them according to footfall) include clothing and complete body makeovers for the avatar. The fashion designer therefore does not have to limit creativity to clothing but can ‘branch out’ to all areas of the avatar’s appearance.
In an industry such as fashion, where it is arguably difficult and expensive for a novice designer to start out, there is a possibility that Second Life offers a plateau for experimentation at least in terms of design and marketing – since the designer does not have to deal with actual fabric. This papers is a first attempt to think about the possibility of using Second Life as a spring board and/ or training ground where a designer may test the limits of their designs and their ability to gain popularity with customers. The paper starts with a broad description of Second Life and goes on to give an observational presentation of the fashion industry in Second Life, presenting the situation in terms of prices, variety of creations and marketing both in Second Life and outside it. It goes on to argue for the positives and negatives of using Second Life as a plateau for a fashion business – examining the possibility that customers’ tastes and social behaviour differ vastly between SL and RL. In this section we will also examine the problem of copyright and how online creations may be protected from copying or theft – or even if protection is the solution to this problem faced by many digital designers. This paper will also present some thoughts and conclusions from a variety of discussions held in Second Life with customers and designers in Second Life, following a loose script exploring the attitudes to styles and the differences in tastes between the virtual and the ‘actual’ self – even though the problematic nature of the ‘self’ will have to be noted. Finally –since virtual games and worlds are areas with scarce research so far – some broad suggestions for further research into the issue of creativity in Second Life will be given.
If you stumbled upon this post and have ideas about Second Life and Fashion please IM me in SL (SofiaGk Weatherwax) or e-mail me in RL
Technorati Tags: fashion, fashion designers, Second Life, intellectual property rights, Linden Lab, Second Life, entrepreneurs, avatar
