The sketcher proposed the medium of "video series, using actors to recreate moments". I think this would be a decent way the present the material.
I think it would be more meta to make the intended audience create characters and recieve the information contained from a combination of experiencing the game (participating in the commerce, relationships, etc.) but also receiving virtual lectures in a virtual classroom by the author/presenter's character.
I share an interest with the author and the sketcher on virtual reality, the rules therein, and what we can learn about about human behavior from how they behave in a virtual world so I found the entire sketch fascinating.
Some key elements that resonated me:
"this did not stop players from being offensive, racist, or discriminatory in anyways in fact some saw it as a challenge, creating multiple accounts to keep harassing residents in the world," would have extraordinarily informative information on bullying behavior and the persistence of predatory behavior.
I'd also love psychological profiles of avatars versus their creators. Are their avatars braver? Clever? What does the mask say about the wearer?
I'm also interested in the LGBTQ aspect of finding subaltern or subversive modes of expression in virtual space where the costs for expression in the real world may be too high.
It also raises an interesting question about capitalism: what is an economic system where you don't have to eat, drink, or subsist? Does it raise the symbolic floor of a welfare system?
There's really quite a lot here that drew my interest and I'd love to have a deeper conversation on the topic.
The cover depicts a digital character on a white background with the author's name in a a text bubble very like what one would see in a virtual chat medium. The title and subtitle are also depicted in a virtual "dialogue option" screen with buttons depicted to minimize, maximize, and flip forward and back. The commanding figure on cover is a darker skinned, feminine avatar. This is interesting in light of the original annotator's statement that, "many players of color found Linden’s options of diversity to be lacking and thus made their own skin colors. However, this took a high level of computer skill or the money to purchase such creating a skin economy within Second Life."
The original annotator also described Second Life's mode of expression for the LGBTQ community; the author's name is Tom which would lead one to assume a male-identifying character, but the subject of the cover may indicate that he chose a feminine person of color in Second Life.
The cover seems to promise that the virtual life will challenge expectations and also previews some of the content.
The text begins with its theoretical foundations, establishing the importance of techne as a lens to view the activities of Second Life. It then enters a phase of thematized chapters such as "sex and gender or digital economies." It seems like it transitions from justification to example in a deductive fashion.
Coming of Age in Second Life depicts imports ethnographic methodology into the digital platform of Second Life. It uses performance, theorized by the author using the Greek concept of techne to describe how meaning is made through action/practice within the bounds of a virtual sphere. In essence, it's a classic ethnography applied to a community that exists in a virtual space. Using this virtual world and its occupants as a subject does present the problem of an extra layer of removal: it's like studying the world of a puppet that's controled from a meta-entity. Equally, and not to disparage the community in Second Life, the stakes are different and there are formal constraints built in to the fabic of the game that may not translate as well into ethnographic terms.