Socially|Mundane

You've undoubtedly heard about the furry communities, science fiction communities, militia communities, childrens communities, griefer communities, educational communities, philanthropic communities and a host of so many others.

We've even heard about how Second Life helps those who are handicapped in one way or another. How Sl is great for corporate meetings or educational lessons and even scientific study.

And we've heard how terrorists are training and practicing in SL and how the fire department, paramedics, police, F. B. I. and a host of other public service agencies all the wy to the C. I. A. are using Second life to study whatever it is that blows-up their respective skirts.

In the Seattle area, not all that long ago, and rather often as feasible, they exercised an emergency situation. Real Life role-play of some catastrophic event in order to give emergency services the opportunity to test their emergency plans and theories, enact a massive rescue and recovery effort and basically go all-out in terms of training and assistance.

The problem is which scenario do you practice? Earthquake (yes, seattle area does get those, too)? Terrorist bomb explosion? Poisoned or otherwise tainted water supply? Volcano eruption? The practice is far too expensive and time-consuming to do this kind of thing once a year, much less once a month or week.

Enter Second Life.
Really. Literally.

I've heard of Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, Rivers Run Red and a few other virtual world aftermarket consultants, but I've not heard of Centrax. Makes me wonder if they specialize in Second Life or virtual worlds in  general or if they simply specialize in this kind of practice: recreating the real world in a virtual way in order to make as real as possible some kind of massive training event.

Children's Memorial Hospital (not specified where, but assuming Chicago as the story is in the Chicago Sun Times,) has hired Centrax for this very purpose. Create some kind of emergency where aid services are needed en-masse at the hospital.

One of of the questions has to do with peripheral effect: what happens to the traffic around the hospital, for example? How will that affect the surrouding areas? Will it prevent additional emergency services from getting in? Evacuations from getting out? How will the 'world' of the hospital and the emmidiate area... and by extention, the rest of the city be affected?

The cost, time and effort in role-playing such a thing is prohibitive. not to mention actually causing the problems that could occur if it were all real.

I repeat: enter Second Life.

Second Life is called and known as, by many, a 'game'.
Second life is know as 'social experiment'. It's known as an MMORPG Role-Playing environment. A 'virtual world', a scientific laboratory, and artists canvass and so on.

Now add "tactical training simulator' to the mix.
Okay, uncle Phil: yes, SL constantly suffers growing pains. yes, Linden Lab has received some bad press, most of it undeserved, yes, there are some pretty raunchy parts of SL you'd really rather not be the focus of what goes on in here.

And yes, your vision, whatever it really was in the begining, grows on it's own. Unfortuantely, bad news is sensational and grabs the attention of the throngs. The whole 'fashionista' scene proves that daily with ridiculous drama and the wave-makers.

But sometimes, the good news slides-in quietly.

Sandra Guy quotes Judi Smith: "Someone will find the backpack in the virtual hospital. He or she will pick up the phone to call security. A command team forms and decides to call the fire department," Smith said."You cannot play this out on a tabletop, not from the context of walking down Orchard Street, seeing 10 ambulances sitting there and realizing they are blocking traffic," she said.Mock accident drills are not as effective as virtual world immersions because they are expensive, one-time efforts that cannot be repeated or broken into segments, Smith said.

Source