Second Life/Sports Cars*
Bear in mind that as usual I have no clue what I'm talking about.

I ran into an article about English sports cars just now, and there were some things that reminded me of SL. In the comments:

"...they weren’t soft enough, easy enough. Reliability being a part of that failing. Society will no longer tolerate being let down or inconvenienced..."

"...personality-driven design... lack of mechanical reliability that you get from personality driven design."

"I think they were defined largely by the directness of the experience. Your butt might be numb, but the steering wasn’t. Remember being chased by snarling dogs with their teeth at the height of your face?"

"Today the typical driver is so accustomed to being insulated from the environment in which he/she travels that they would be offended by our wonderful old cars. And you can’t survive in the marketplace without a product with either broad appeal or incredible exclusivity."

This is far from being a perfect analogy. It has value to me because I am (apparently) a time traveler and the way people think now is not the way I think. Which I am just starting to understand. To me, the fun is the whole - each part contributes to that raw directness of experience and any part left out diminishes it. If I understand what people are saying now, they want only certain parts of the experience, not including hard suspension and tinkering, as they are accustomed to being insulated and coddled.

*As far as sports cars - part of the pleasure was the endless tinkering and now hardly anyone seems to have what I consider ordinary skills in that area. In part that's probably due to the super-complicated-computer-balanced manner in which cars are fashioned at the moment. I often think about this: In, say, the 1700s any person could look at any machine or object and understand how it worked, but now almost everything is far beyond the ordinary person's ken.

Labels: Cogitation, Second Life