Another Damsel in Distress -- Saving Madeline

Entering the House of Usher I met Roderick and Madeline with their friend Margaret for a few brief introductions before Madeline literally ran away from us to rest. I quickly followed and left Fierce to speak with Roderick. She quizzed him discretely and tried to find out more about what was going on in Roderick's dreams and how his thoughts were degenerating, but he would not give much up to her besides that he had nightmares of his mother coming back from the dead. By following Madeline for a ways, I got the chance to explore the house for a bit and made sure I knew how to get around quickly from the bottom of the crypt to the top floor. I noticed only a few things that explained how crazy the family was, but traveling quickly, I may have missed a few things. The first thing I noticed was the rats running around on the floors and the random old Spanish painting throughout the house. There are a few thing that I would love to see added to the house and that would be more devotions to their mother. He said that she had been haunting his dreams and even pointed out a wreath he had made of her hair but it would be more effective if she were bearing down on him constantly.


If the walls had pictures of her and maybe even had it right over his bed, it would be much more convincing that his mother was haunting him. Also more old boxes would contribute to there insanity if they were lying around and when you opened them the items inside were junk that may or may not give clues to the avatars as ways to get Madeline out of the house or trick Roderick to go outside. This would add more to the house as there would be more options for how the story could go. One more thing that I felt would add to the house it maybe the participant could get buried alive and the other person would have to stop dealing with Roderick and Madeline and save the person trapped.


Back to talking with Roderick, he made it clear that he was terrified of his mother coming back from the dead even though she had died ten years ago and he had seen how dead she really was. In the crypt, I found his mother's skeleton out of it's casket and the poem he wrote and this very well may have contributed to the madness as he may believe that he released or disturbed her spirit. He wouldn't give up much about his thoughts except when speaking about the painting, especially the Goya, The Sleep of Reason. This is when Roderick finally opened up a little about where his madness was stemming from, saying that it was in his dreams that his mother haunted him and because of that the little sleep he got drove him to madness. He continued as Madeline shrieked, saying that her screams kept him up and did nothing but caused further damage to his mind.

I wanted to dig deeper into Roderick's madness but Madeline was found on her bed presumably dead which set Roderick off the deep end. This is when Fierce and I had to step it up and distract Roderick from going down into the crypt, and figure out why the random woman Margaret was there and the agenda she was plotting. Roderick was only calmed when I rescued Madeline from the crypt even though Fierce and I kept him from ever finding out she was trapped in the crypt, unless of course, he put her in there!

Call the doctor!

This went on way too long and the servants didn't even say anything about it, but someone had to knock Roderick down a few rungs. He's fairly sickly so how hard would it be to trick him into something that would distract him for a few minutes and just go down to check on Madeline? The guy has to sleep sometime, and I would just go down and knock on the crypt door. The worst thing that could happen is I hear echos but if Madeline had been knocking on the door for even a day, I am pretty sure she would quickly answer with resounding cries for help.

And there were plenty of servants who technically serve her too, why couldn't they call a doctor? Roderick has obviously gone mad, so their paycheck is probably up in the air anyways! A good word from Madeline couldn't hurt anything. But before we even get to trying to save her from the room I helped bury her in, I would have checked to see if she was actually dead!

If the culture has caught up enough to know that the deceased should get a wake or at least a string around their finger would indicate to me that I should give this a few days to see if she wakes back up. I'm no doctor but I assume if a person is breathing, they are alive, but then again I don't have a medical degree.

Problems in Communication within SL

Second Life has gone from a computer geek's dream to a social network and now its become communication between educators and business people but where does it go wrong? When does the communication run into problems and maybe even cause some problems of its own. While I have not used Second Life as a serious communication device, I can speculate on the possible problems that one could run into from my own limited experience.

Maybe this is because I'm a newbie to the program but using the voice application I ran into some problems. The first was trying to talk to another avatar. I could not seem to find the keys to turn on the microphone for SL and ended up having to type while a French man spoke to me. Once I had found the voice control I had to hold down the keys, which for the life of me, I cannot remember, in order to keep the microphone. Overall the voice controls were difficult to find, use, and evidently, remember.

The only other problem I can foresee in Second Life would be a question of etiquette. If all the participants in a conversation are typing than the chances of them overlapping in quite high. Especially if someone is talking and the other is typing, the one talking has full advantage of the other and can run the conversation to their benefit. But this is not new, maybe to SL, but not new to conversation, as people have always seen the benefit of over running another person's side of the argument, just look at political debates. This is not a problem that the makers of SL can solve but rather something the users can control; play by our rules of etiquette or we won't play with you.

Alpha Testing Heritage Key

Working in Heritage Key's King Tut exhibit, I began with much enthusiasm but soon found more problems than would allow for the mobility and usability of Second Life. I had high hopes for the program but there were several things that came up immediately. First, the clothes were unfortunately very scattered. My pants enjoyed revisiting the 70's much too often and my sunglasses sometimes forgot they were sunglasses. It was nice to have different outfits at the beginning for some variety in the avatar but some of the of the kinks need to be worked out before this becomes a major educational tool.

The second problem I ran into was much like running into a wall in that I would be suspended and stuck floating in the air waving my arms and legs in all directions. I found this especially annoying because I was using a wired connection, that usually means I have no problems moving through Second Life but Heritage Key could not keep up.

Although I did find these problems in the program, I did find many positive sides to Heritage Key. The First was the interactive nature, providing audio clips with almost every part of the land exhibits and in the museum the virtual artifacts were proportionally correct to my avatar but could be enlarged for a better view.

Another thing I enjoyed was the attention to detail. All of the artwork in the actual tomb was quite photographic, almost to the point that it didn't seem like a copy at all. Not only in the exhibits, but also in the landscape, details could be seen that are very rare in Second Life. Take the Hippos for example, this made me realize that Heritage Key does have one up on Second Life in that the landscape is part of the exhibit. In Second Life, much of the educational material in simply placed in without regard to the surrounding area as the owner of one property cannot control the actions on the island next to him.

Overall, Heritage Key does have what it takes to become an educational site that many educators will be able to use but not yet. There are too many problems making the program cumbersome, but I feel that it will not be long before this catches on.

Meeting people just gets easier, especially when you can find them...

Walking through the remnants of Burning Life, I ran into two women, meandering around just as I was. They were quite nice, very interested in the class I was taking asking many questions after I mentioned my enrollment here at the University. In conversation with them I asked for a picture of the two of them and they more than obliged, even posing together for it, asking if the camera could still see the fire in the background. Also, they were excited to here about a collegiate class studying how virtual worlds, such as Second Life, were being used as the newest form of communication between professionals and educators alike. I met a few people on this trip, all of them involved in Burning Life, some of them adding vehicles to the entertainment after the crowds had left, just as something else to do.


Encouraged by the friendly nature of these Second Lifers, I decided I should go exploring! Bad idea. This was probably a good idea and simply a bad approach, as I simply began teleporting all over the map hoping to run into some fun subculture, but all I got was backyards and do not enter signs. How is it that I teleported five times and everytime ended up trapped on private property? I would pick a place on the map that had plenty of green dots, hoping to find more people but somehow when I got there, everyone had left! I want to explore Second Life, but next time I want a guide because obviously I'm doing something wrong. This virtual world is a lot of fun but I want to get past the surface and dive into something more complex. This is an opportunity to see how people behave when their actions are less connected to negative consequences. I say this because there is less peer pressure in SL and it is easier to find a group of people that share your values. This means people's true values, beliefs and wants will come out as the opportunity to express one's self increases while their actions are tied less to their reputations than in real life.

Checking out Burning Life, after the Party's over

I never thought that a virtual party would require clean up, just a few clicks of "delete" and all of a sudden you have a new canvas to play on. But when I visited Burning Life after the festivities, there were plenty of people still milling around. They were playing with the attractions still up and driving cars through the empty streets.

Some of the attractions were still up and in use including the bubbles in the space pod and the serpentine fire exhibit. The bubbles were fun to sit on and bounce around inside the spaceship, just a cool part of burning life that people were able to enjoy after the fire had gone away. Also it was interesting to watch how the colors overlapped just as the would in real life.


Given the option, I would love to ride on bubbles and just spin around into other people and flip upside down. I also enjoyed creating my own music and streams of images in one of the other Burning Life exhibits. One thing I noticed a difference in going after the actual party is that there was absolutely no lag! I could interact with every exhibit and had no trouble with lag. I will admit that I tried it while I was on a wireless network and that did not go well but tied up with an ethernet cord, there were no problems.


Overall it was weird to think that in a Virtual World people still have to clean up after parties! There are still exhibits on the ground and people can still find a way to have fun with the area that they have. If Linden Labs have already charged people for the land, why not enjoy it as much as possible?

Hallucination Simulation

To put it bluntly, schizophrenia scares me a lot more than I thought it would. Until I walked through the hallucination simulation and realized how little I know about the disorder. The first thing I learned was that with schizophrenia is not something that you slip in and out of. I was under the impression that a person with schizophrenia would simply flip personalities and have no recollection of the other side when they switched back, it is weird to think that someone could have two thought processes going on at the same time.

To have no control of an entire train of thought in your own head would be incredibly hard to fight. If I had those voices going on in my head, first off, I wouldn't know that they we not supposed to be there. If you are born blind, and never view the world, you cannot comprehend the idea of a picture. If there were voices in your head for most of your life, without a trigger or warning, telling you that you were worthless or better off dead, what signs would have that this was not normal? This scares me again because, although hurtful, the voices would seem to be part of a normal life.

Going through the Second Life version of a hallucination was disturbing to say the least, and I'm glad I was able to go through with the option to stop the voices. If that were my life, seeing myself die in mirrors or having the TV speak to me would drive me insane, if I were not already. This experience in SL opened my eyes in a way that was in no way offensive to anyone with mental disorders. The producers from UC did a very good job and I do commend them for the quality of work they have done.