IWith the increased improvement upon social interactions within a virtual world, Second Life allows for a new medium of relationships. With relationships comes conflict: it is an inevitable situation that is always present with relationships…

With the increased improvement upon social interactions within a virtual world, Second Life allows for a new medium of relationships. With relationships comes conflict: it is an inevitable situation that is always present with relationships. Though this be the case, as of now, there are no methods for resolving these disputes online. For example, suppose someone in Second Life purchases a piece of property, this piece of property will invariably be next to someone else’s piece of property (unless of course you are of the ‘lucky’ few who has purchased your own island). What happens when one person dislikes the goings-on of the neighbor? There are no virtual courts that you can bring someone to, moreover, there are no dispute resolution wizards flying around to allow amends to be made. The only solution SecondLife has to offer, at least in this stage of time, is for an official sanction to be made by one of the admins requesting the instigator to desist their annoying actions, otherwise the person gets booted from the server. But is this really enough? If this is the case, the admins’ jobs require an extra equation: instead of stopping people from doing subversive things, they must also resolve conflicts that are going on. The problem with this is that there is no ‘communication’ between the two parties, and only the admin’s say. If relationships are to be made online, and they undoubtedly will with the setup SecondLife has created, there must be a medium for these conflicts to be resolved.

In addition to this idea of dispute resolution needing to be utilized within the game for users of the game, what about the notion of using SecondLife as a medium for dispute resolution for people in real life? Suppose you have two adults who are having marital problems and they cannot even stand to be in the same room with one another. The obvious and most progressive solution to this would be to talk things out in mediation. But what if things are so bad that mediation is rendered useless? Suppose, next, that we place these people in a simulated mediation-type setting within the confines of SecondLife. The advantage of this is that the people involved will now be able to communicate, but they will have a different buffer zone never used before: their computers. Another advantage would be that the costs induced by the mediators will be greatly reduced: all that will be required is the purchasing of space from SecondLife which is far cheaper than having to own office space. The one disadvantage to this idea, however, is that one of the main purposes of mediation is to humanize the two opposing sides. In mediation all the feelings come out both in words as well as in physical appearance that emotion plays on the body. This will be lacking in SecondLife because the avatars have limited emotion, and afterall, they are merely pixels on the screen.