Journal #6

Interaction in a game is one of the most important aspects of game play. Games would be very boring without interaction of any sort. In order to create interactions, game makers have depended on artificial intelligence (AI) to give the players something to interact with. With the increased speed of telecommunications, players are now able to interact with one another along with AI. Second Life is a game that depends entirely on player-to-player interaction along with the financial based game play.
In Second Life, I had found an area with a group of people and I must say, there are quite a few limitations when interacting. Artificial Intelligence does not exist, so without other players, the game is dull. When interacting with other players, the two modes of communication are typing or talking with a headset. The group of people I found did not use the headsets, so I opted out of using what I had. Typing is actually nicer because the messages show up at the bottom of the screen, where all of the option buttons are. Other players tend to be one of two types; the type that will not say much, or the type that are rude. I tend to be rude when I receive one word responses when I am trying to have a conversation. There is a large variety of players within Second Life; I met one man from Denmark. The feature that allowed me to communicate with him was a translator. The instant message would show what he typed and then showed the translation into English. Second Life seems to want players to communicate from across the globe, but after a forced conversation there is very little to do with another player.
When interacting with the environment, a player can purchase items or collect items that are free. When purchasing an item, the player has to put it in the items list, much like a folder in Windows, and from there must open the folder, extract the item into the world, and then collect it again. This process is quite tedious and if a player had to buy a lot of items, this would take up most of the play time. In order to get around the massive landscape, the player can fly and/or teleport to coordinates much like a map works. Within the map function, there are filters to find locations with large populations, free items, etc to help the players get where they want to go. The environment is not much like a busy city in real life. In real life, you can bump into people and they will respond, possibly even start yelling or fighting. In Second Life, the most someone can do is type-out their aggression or leave entirely. I am not sure if the designers made it this way to try to create “the perfect society” where fighting does not exist and players have to be nice to one another, but this is what inevitably happens.
The quote from Lynn Hershman: “Interactive systems require viewers to react” is absolutely true. In order for a system to properly function, the player needs to make reactions to what he/she sees on screen. Second Life seems to ignore this rule; there is nothing to react to unless there are other players interacting with you. Even the other players interacting with you are most of the time, dull. If Second Life had some artificial intelligence to take up space when there are a specific number of players are not engaged in the game, they would greatly improve the playability of the game. Without interactivity, there is no game.