The Dopey-ganger world they are planning for us

Just a quick reaction to Virtual World Plans Expansion Based On Real-Life Cities. Citing such virtual world wisdom such as, and I quote, “We wanted to base it on a real world city because that’s the environment the average user is familiar with,” is either Web 1.0 publication InformationWeek’s take on virtual worlds like Second Life or some marketing firms vision of virtual hell.

Whatever? But it certainly doesn’t leave much room for those of us who still have hope that the new territories of social and spatial experimentation that virtual worlds are shaping up to be, are an opportunity to actually build better cities than in the real world, and not simply mirror them. I didn’t need a graduate degree in Architecture from MIT to realize that the “principles of urban planning are really useful,” only to wander around the utter banality of developer based contemporary urban environments as I pine for the potential energy and intensity of virtual worlds.

I hope that their business model for developing The Music Lounge is sound, because I’m sure that, as an artist, builder and frequent occupant of several synthetic environments and virtual communities, that their social-aesthetic model is quite tired.