Uh… No.

Posted on June 24, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 24 Comments

Daily Telegraph: Second Life ‘could replace real relationships‘.

Baroness Greenfield wondered whether people who inhabited virtual worlds would come to regard real-life sexual relationships with some queasiness.

“Could it be that in the future they will say, ‘A real relationship! Urgh, how horrible,’ ” she said. “The messiness and squalor of the real world, and the real-time element, might be offset by the more sanitised, two-dimensional reality of Second Life.

Clearly, all of you need to get out more.

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  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    This is the key disconnect that I’ve read in the writings of many key MMO developers.

    The thought that people in real life won’t bring their “messiness and squalor” to a virtual world, purely on the opportunity to make things better for themselves and their peers.

    So it’s OK to design a world based on how you want people to behave, even if you have no real reason to believe that they will behave that way. Just let them make their own fun! It’ll be great!

    Methinks the Baroness needs to read more Warren Ellis reports from Reuters about how Second Life cybersex isn’t messy.

  • John Arras

    Maybe it depends on the accessories you have? =D

  • Aufero

    It always amuses me to see a social scientist assume that billions of years of evolutionary pressure to reproduce are going to be undone by some random recent development.

  • brent

    In the future, all restaurants will be Taco Bell.

  • Staryx

    You know, it’s funny. Whenever I see screen caps of Second Life attached to a news story or video of the “game”, it always looks like a pile of dog vomit.

  • http://www.pkurflax.org Hermes

    Finally, someone who understands! I don’t know about *you* guys, but the thing I always hated about sex is the fact that it’s in real-time.

  • http://azaroth.org Azaroth

    Yeah, but it’s so hard to get a woman to wear a fur suit IRL.

  • Aufero

    Yeah, but it’s so hard to get a woman to wear a fur suit IRL.

    Date hairy guys.

  • Engels

    sex is real time? I coulda sworn it was turn based :P

  • Ironwood

    Clearly someone read way too much Asimov in their youth.

  • Trife

    Yeah, but it’s so hard to get a woman to wear a fur suit IRL.

    That’s the purpose of the Internet, for furries to meet up and fall in love.

    … surely a digital suit is cheaper than one IRL, unless you steal one from some school mascot.

  • http://www.edgecase.net/devsite Rich Bryant

    The real issue with RL sex is that foreplay is repetitive but not scriptable.

  • http://www.unleashthefury.com Alex Weekes

    This aired on Australian TV last night:

    http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=274428

    Shoulda seen the gameplay clips they used. They must have been trying to run the games (Second Life and Entropia) on pretty poor machines given how much video stuttering there was.

  • http://www.gamingtrend.com Jason

    Yeah, because after a long day of looking at Hobbits, the LAST thing I want to see is a naked woman…

    Or whatever the OPPOSITE of that might be.

  • http://www.onlinegamers.org Rasputin

    Hey, as a hairy hobbit-looking guy I resemble that remark.

    AND I’m near to having spawned.

    On topic though, it reminds me of that scene in Demolition Man where Spartan and Lenina “have sex” with those neural-helmet-things. “What do you mean, without helmets? You mean fleshsex? Ew, the fluids!”

    Sleeping in the wet spot totally sucks, though.

  • http://www.plutospage.com/wow/ yunk

    That’s the second Demolition Man reference I’ve seen in the past week.

  • Orrey

    “That’s the second Demolition Man reference I’ve seen in the past week.”

    Third – see Brent’s post above :)

  • Wanderer

    No Sleeper references yet?

  • http://www.onlinegamers.org Rasputin

    ““That’s the second Demolition Man reference I’ve seen in the past week.”

    Third – see Brent’s post above ”

    Damn, I thought I scanned the comments and made the first reference.

    Oh well.

  • nerd gone bad

    While it’s easy to scoff at such a comment now, and I think SL is a pile of doggy-doodoo, I do think from a futurist perspective that the integration of man/machine/internet is definitely going to get far more elaborate and weirder than we can possibly envision today.

    RL Ugly transforming into VR Beauty will be pretty powerful stuff. And no STD’s!

  • bullet

    “And no STD’s!”

    Yeah but could you have a worm or a trojan horse come through the virtual sex machine helmet thing and turn you into a zombie?

    Cause that would be cool.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    Yeah, but it’s so hard to get a woman to wear a fur suit IRL.

    Not really.

  • http://thesongoftheday.com chabuhi

    Seems like every day I am asking myself the question: “Self, how much more could you hate Second Life?”

    And every day the answer (to paraphrase Spinal Tap) is: “None. None more hate.”

  • Boanerges

    You know, it’s funny. Whenever I see screen caps of Second Life attached to a news story or video of the “game”, it always looks like a pile of dog vomit.

    Actually, I wonder where in the world they get caps of “normal” looking SL people not engaged in furry or sexual activities.