The guardian for this meeting was Storm and the comments are his.
That night I was not able to visit the tea house, even though it was afternoon for me in Japan, because I was still in an astrophysics conference. Instead, Storm took an extra shift, and stayed at the tea house. He sent me the following reflections.
Another quiet morning at the tea house, standing in on this occasion for Pema and sandwiched into my RL schedule before rushing to work. While I waited in the sunshine, I took the time to update myself on Pema’s new blog entries and scan through those of my fellow guardians.
I also scanned the land around me to check traffic figures and noticed that traffic for Dakini’s Zen Retreat land, on which the tea house stands, was more than 1000. Excellent! Traffic very roughly equates to total avatar-minutes spent there during the previous RL day. But people were obviously exploring the surrounding area, not only visiting the tea house or the meditation sessions nearby, because even my own neighbouring Kuan Yin Terraces had a traffic of nearly 500. This, I thought, was good, and very much in the nature of Play as Being.
I took to thinking, “What can I do to further this project?” And of course I have a lot to do anyway, landscaping the group lands. And then there is the sign for the tea house. But something was nagging me to think of something else.
I thought of two things. One was to pass to all PaB guardians a floating group tag. This can be either in addition to or instead of one’s normal group tag. All people acting as guardians can wear this and not have to change group while taking a session at the tea house. It would simply cause the words “Play as Being guardian” (on two lines) to float in the air above them if they wore the tag. That would be easy and I’d do it this evening.
And then I thought we could do with a logo. Something to put on signs and notices. Something to put on blogs. Something to scatter around our new land. Something to catch people’s attention. Something to encourage people to ask, “What is that?” A kind of PaB advertising branding in a way! Designing one would be a really tricky task. How to capture the essence of Play as Being? How to do it simply and memorably? How to do it without putting any one group of people’s connotations on it? (For which read, “No overtones of any one spiritual path.”) How to do it without limiting the whole idea? I decided to pass this task to my fiance, Jobe Nurmi in SL, a professional artist in RL.
And then it was time to go, first back to my gompa, and then whoosh back into what we’ve decided, by convention, to call Real Life.
