ajfortin.com

You can take Second Life (SL) in a couple of ways: it’s either a grossly over-hyped major 3D time killer for a declining population of people with limited First Life (i.e, the real world) social skills and nothing much else to do, OR a grand and incredibly interesting social experiment in new media, managed and populated by some bright, creative folks that has simply caught the public imagination (SL boast 9 million residents!).

Depending on whom you talk to, people carry strong opinions and their own statistics on both sides of this not so virtual fence.

My job here is not to declare allegiances — at least not yet — since the fundamental research, that of actually entering into this virtual world, has yet to be completed. More on that in a later post. But I’m interested in what’s happening in SL because the crowd in there wants to play doctor.*

So what of it, why should I or you at all be curious about what going down in SL? Well . . .

1. Some very interesting medical and health education things are said to be taking place in SL. See this description — thanks to Science Roll — of a hematology training simulation or this listing of health related sites in SL.
2. Some very large corporate, university and charitable organizations are making sizable financial and time investments in health care related virtual projects on the Grid (the geography that makes up the SL world.) See here, here and here, for example.
3. Some very deep connections exists between what people do in their virtual lives and what they do in their real lives. So when it comes to medical care or health information, that relationship should be understood or at least respected. In this virtual society one can visit the Second Life Medical Library or go to a hospital for example.
4. And finally, there are some questions of actual virtual life in the SL world that should compel health policy wonks to do a little digging: do avatars (your virtual representation on the screen) get sick — beyond worms and viruses, that is — or injured? Since there’s plenty sex in SL, can they get an STD or HIV? Can they get pregnant? What about mental disorders? Do avatars die? Since they have a functioning economy, do they have a functioning health care system? How’s it organized? Is it expensive? How good is the care there — wherever there is?

You see there may be more here than meets eye and definitely enough to warrant a trip to this metaverse (the synthetic universe of Second Life). So keep an open mind. Maybe we’ll find out what all the digital hubbub is about.

* Second Life is not a game and thus the term playing is somewhat inappropriate. It is a virtual environment in which “residents” interact and create an online virtual society. SL was brought into existence in 2003 by Linden Lab of San Francisco.