Bryan’s got some fascinating thoughts on what he’s calling Third Life, which he imagines as potentially a set of interoperable virtual worlds that would be a kind of 3D, persistent, avatar-driven, immersive Web 2.0 (a crude reduction, but this is a draft for me too). There’s a lot to chew on here, but before I lose the moment I want to think about two of Bryan’s ideas.

One is that Third Life should have different entries for different people.

There should be different entrance points for new people with varying backgrounds and interests: the educators’ gate, the gamer portal, the adult club entrance.

On the surface, this is an attractive idea, particularly given the grotesqueries of Orientation Island and the subsequent Welcome Center in Second Life, but I wonder about the loss of richness when there are no necessary points of shared experience. For example, all ed folks in Second Life, and many outside of education, love to moan about the Welcome Center, and I’d say that this shared experience is nontrivial. (Indeed, in the wake of Chris Dede’s talk at ELI 2007, I’m wondering if we can ever with confidence call any moment of shared experience trivial, especially when it comes to learning.) I’m also uneasy for reasons I can’t quite pin down about the idea of an adult club entrance for some new people. Would we build a dedicated Internet porn client for those folks who just want to cut to the chase without having to use a browser that might, alas, access the news as well as porn? The analogy’s not strong, but perhaps it clarifies things for me a bit.

The second is a genuinely provocative question that I’m already enjoying: what are the offline components of (the experience of) persistent virtual worlds? I think our usual cognitive patterns fall into a rhythm of engagement in the sense-stream and a disengagement in which, in some respects, we take ourselves offline. Paradoxically, “offline” in our waking world suggests contemplation and cognitive virtualization (whoops, just went to Bermuda for a moment there, as Steve Martin used to joke during his stand-up routine), while “online” means engaging with sensory input and conversation and so on, whereas these terms might well have opposite meanings inside a virtual world. That interesting mirror-state or alienation effect is something I’ve tried to work through in my ideas of metaphor and play within virtual worlds.

If we want to counter the unhappy outcome of turning ourselves into brains in vats, at least those of us who can afford to do that because we live in a prosperous society (rapaciously so, I’m ashamed to say), it will be vital that we work out the relationship of offline and online, of virtual and real, in all their manifestations. I think that virtual worlds, particularly in the metaview that Bryan’s ideas about Third Life suggest, can offer us a parable or symbol or allegory of our very cognitive existence in the physical world, and may enable more complex conceptual understandings of what that existence means–and what we might effect thereby. A wiki world that enables richer imaginings, and thus better solutions. An incubator world, a sandbox, a bootstrapping augmentation laboratory.