Antonio Giano recently wrote and posted this SL variation of the famous defenestration meme on a private Facebook group for Second Life users — and as you probably would have guessed if you read New World Notes on the regular, it provoked a long back and forth of outrage and argument.
Which as Antonio tells me, was what inspired him to make the meme in the first place: "[A]s you can see, people are always fighting a lot on that topic." In fact the post got so heated, he finally disabled his notifications.
As I observed on the Facebook post, the argument inevitably breaks down between longtime gamers who know Second Life has many similarities to many games — and those for whom SL is the first online game in which they've devoted serious time, energy, and emotional investment. Here's why:
Non-gamers take umbrage at the idea of calling Second Life a game because to them, that implies their activities in SL are unserious or "not real". Whereas seasoned gamers know that playing online worlds often leads to real life friendships and romantic relationships, not to mention real life careers.
A generational gap is at work, too, between those who grew up on games, and have always seen them as an integral part of their social lives (playing with childhood friends, college dorm mates, and so on) — and those who came upon games relatively late in life, after decades of considering games merely as "something that kids play".
Anyway, here's my take on the topic as someone who helped launch Second Life — and here's my American Chopper version of this meme.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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