As you noticed I missed the CSI:NY in Second Life hype. To be honest I have never seen a single episode of CSI, though I am planning to watch this one… one day… probably. This one is not much about SCI as much about marketing in this strange new world. As NWN writes
dozens of Resident entrepreneurs to add "CSI" to their location description, so that anyone searching for SL areas related to the show see theirs, too. (And presumably, teleport to them, mistakenly thinking they're locales part of the "CSI:NY Virtual Experience".) In fact, there's now so much gaming of CSI as a search term, the official CBS-sponsored sites are not even among the top ten search results.
I guess that exploiting the holes in the second life's search tool is one of the most popular in-world games.
And now that "CSI" itself has been gamed, they're in for an even stranger adventure, with more false leads, conflicts, and bizarre encounters. Like an emergent alternate reality game, a fictional story has been inextricably intertwined with an existing world, albeit a virtual one.
As you probably know CBS built 440 islands to welcome the flood of SCI fans that will play detectives in second life (I cannot find the link but that number has fallen drastically last week). OK, CSI players need their own Orientation Island different from the regular LL's. But was it a clever idea to place the whole game on the CSI's islands exclusively? Obviously not.
As we see, the game got from the islands to the rest of the grid. Beside that, those residents are ment to become the part of second life, not to play the CSI game a bit and then forget the second life? Or am I wrong on that? Wasn't it then, a better idea to incorporate the CSI world into the rest of second life from the start? To make smaller number of CSI islands and place the part of the story on the mainland and other islands? To cooperate with the rest of the world?
It would be easy. Just call sim owners and offer them to place all the dead bodies, trails and clues on their property. Like other place their newspaper machines and ATM's all over the grid. Everybody would profit. Land owners would get hell of a traffic, CBS would save on land (US$1,675 multiplied by 440…) and get additional advertising all over the grid and blogosphere, virtual detectives would get more interesting game.
But no, they wanted to do it all by themselves. We still have much to learn about how this world should be used.
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