I am reading Zippora's SL is not TV and wondering how comes that virtual environments, like second life have so high productivity level. Most of us are doing our virtual activities in the evening or during the night, in the periods of the day while we are already tired and need rest.
Physically we are probably relaxing indeed, but our thoughts go on and on and we won't give them a break. We don't give our grey cells a chance to start slumbering as long as we are chatting or building, even if they'd like to. We ARE tired but tend to ignore the symptoms – do your eyes ever itch after logging off? – or even laugh about it: haha typonese!
Still, forgetting the tiredness, we are reaching the peak of productivity then.
Let's not full ourselves. Many things we do in second life require exercise of skills, concentration, imagination and memory. You know, fresh and working brain. And we get all those out of nothing, when it's supposed that we're dead tired and uncapable of serious mental activity.
What makes us so concentrated while we are inside the virtual world? Why writing a LSL script in-world is so harder to interrupt than writing PHP off-line? I doubt that has anything to do with LSL and PHP. It's something about the environment. What is the magic that keep us going for another meeting in-world while we are hardly capable of another phone-call?
One of the first answers would be that virtual world is so much more interesting that meatspace. And that in second life we are doing the things we always dreamt of. Those two are highly inspirational so helping us to forget about the fatigue. While it would be silly to neglect the influence of those two, there might be something more. After all, not all the things we do in second life are our dreams, nor even interesting.
Are we projecting our tiredness to the avatar which can't be tired, so the feeling gets lost in the dead end until the brain burns itself? Is it the colorful environment of the perfect sunny world that keeps us going for one more, long after we should have been in the state of rest? Is it just the flickering of the screen that jamms our brain-waves and keep us active on some kind of electro-drug?
I think this must vary quite a bit from person to person. I am if anything *more* distractable when writing an LSL script inworld than when CGI hacking or something out in RL. In SL, there’s always a party starting, or someone sending me TP requests to come see something, or IMing me wanting to discuss theology, and any of those can easily pull me away from whatever productive scripting or building I was doing. Heck, I get distracted just by starting to sort inventory. :)
OK that. Sure that SL offers much more opportunities to be distracted. But what is interesting here is that it gives an extra fuel to do something in the moments when we are tired or not willing to do the similar thing off-line.
Sometimes you want to finish it NOW and other times it can take ages.I don’t do any business in SL. The only "work" I’m doing is fiddling with prims in behalf of myself.( And I’m easily distracted as well.) I see it like decorating your house in FL: you only do it when you feel like it. I actually wonder if I would still like to do it – and could bring up the energy – if it would be more obligatory.
I’d love to hear the opinion about this from someone who’s doing "real" business in SL!
Huh, that first line was supposed to be somewhere in the middle of the comment?!?! (after "feel like it" actually). *blames monday morning*
Its the creativity, the individualism, the freedom of the id. Its you, your computer and the magic that we encounter that sparks so much energy to stay inWorld for ungodly hours when you should be asleep recharging mind and body. But how much of an electrical high do we all encounter inWorld? How many times have you logged off feeling a type of satisfaction that SL brings?
I think thats the answer. :)
I think that in "freedom of the id" might be the answer. Also, feeling that things are not obligatory to be done has it’s share.