Culture | Second Life Shrink

Live from East 3rd Street

April 11, 2009 by olivia Leave a comment

Johnny stopped poring over the blog statistics just long enough to suggest that I do another piece about vampires, or Star Trek, or, ideally, vampires and Star Trek. So we beamed up to the Enterprise sick-bay to recreate this touching scene from “The Man Trap“, the first-ever episode of the original series:

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Johnny is Dr McCoy and I’m his long-lost love – or so he thinks. I’m actually an alien salt-vampire, who lures her victims to their doom by assuming the form of their deepest desire. It ends unhappily for one of us, you can probably guess who.

With that nonsense out of the way I was free to sample some rather higher culture with a visit to “@“, an exhibition curated by the Ars Virtua gallery, that I had read about a month or so ago. The preview on the gallery website promises an examination of “the nature of space, place and the observer, the interplay between the observer and the observed, and the way in which location and “placeness” define or conscribe experience”, which sounded interesting. The show is (or was) presented simultaneously in Second Life and in real life, at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, with visitors at each location able to see into the other gallery in real time:

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Or not as the case may be – by the time I visited the non-virtual part of the show had already closed, and I think the video feed from LA must have been frozen, since there was no sign of life.

I ended up spending about an hour at the show, but I came away a bit disappointed. As I have often found in Second Life, the concept outlined in the preview worked a lot better than the actual realisation. For example, here’s the description of one of the pieces: “Oberon Onmura creates, destroys, and re-creates a megalithic tower or beacon which hints visually at the works of Donald Judd. The work creates a rhythm for the space that is pleasing to watch from afar but possible to participate in from up close”, and here’s how it looks:

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To be fair, this picture doesn’t really give a sense of the impressive scale of the work, and you can’t see how it dynamically constructs and deconstructs itself, but even so I think that comparing it with the work of Donald Judd is a bit hyperbolic.

I didn’t feel my hour was totally wasted though, which isn’t something that I can always say after spending time in Second Life. Even if it didn’t fulfil all my expectations the show did, as it promised to, make me think about the nature of virtual space and its relationship with the real world.

After the exhibition I wandered around the neighbourhood, and right next door to the gallery was the House of Night, a vampire-themed dance club. There’s just no getting away from them.

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with Art, Culture, Second Life, Vampires

Girl from Mars

April 7, 2009 by johnny 1 Comment

After a prolonged gestation period, the virtual world of Blue Mars has started to recruit beta testers, and will, if you believe developers Avatar Reality, go live sometime in the summer.

The visuals, which utilise the CryENGINE2, certainly look pretty, and A-R are promising that users will be able to play without having to buy the latest graphics card, though they are keeping the details of the minimum hardware specifications a secret for now. Windows Vista is required though, so my old linux box definitely won’t work.

It’s claimed that the platform will be able to support thousands of simultaneous users in each region, which would be a massive advance on the paltry number Second Life can manage. It appears though that this will be done by a process of sharding, which I’ll admit I don’t really understand, except that it involves running separate instances of the same location on different servers, with new ones being spawned as necessary. I would have thought that this meant that if you had arranged to meet someone at a popular place then you might miss them because they were on a different shard, but there might be some technical way around this.

There will be a content generation system, but this will be limited to developers who have paid to sign up with A-R, leaving no space for amateur creativity. A central item registration system will protect IP rights, and, presumably, allow A-R to prevent the manufacture of the sort of things that have generated all those lurid stories about the perversity of Second Life. Some sort of virtual currency will exist, but ordinary users won’t be able to cash it out into real money.

So is Blue Mars a Second Life-killer? The graphics are a lot better, the scalability sounds attractive, and there does seem to be plenty to do. I can’t see too many current SL residents being tempted away though, since they would surely miss the freedom to produce their own content, and the potential, however illusory, for making some money.

Hard-core SL fans are unlikely to be the target demographic for Blue Mars though (but then, judging by Linden Labs’ recent actions, hard-core SL fans aren’t even the target demographic for Second Life). Avatar Reality will have their sights set on the corporate and educational markets, as well as new VW consumers who have graduated from places like Habbo and Club Penguin, and are more interested in the metaverse as a place to be fed entertainment rather than an outlet for their creative urges. These of course are exactly the clients who, we are told, represent the future for SL. If A-R are successful in stealing away this potentially lucrative business, they might just end up messing things up for those of us who do stick around in Second Life.

I was originally going to go for the obvious Bowie track as the title for this post, but I like this tune better.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Music, Second Life

Here comes the summer

April 1, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

March saw an increase in our traffic for the sixth straight month; our daily average is well ahead of what it was this time last year. There’s no great mystery about how we’ve done this; new posts are appearing much more frequently (helped by having two of us working on the blog now) and we’re making a conscious effort to include more links to relevant blogs, which does seem to be generating some return traffic. I’ve tried to raise our general profile by registering with Technorati (where our rating is a semi-respectable 2493137) and Blogged (editors’ rating 7.4, “very good”), signing up for a few Second Life blog rings, and leaving comments around the SL blogosphere; this has been less successful.

Even when we go a few days without a post we still get a steady flow of hits. I think that’s because we’ve been around long enough to build up a critical mass of posts, meaning we show up on most Google searches that include the words “Second” and “Life” somewhere, even if it is usually on page 3 or 4 (though we’re back on top for the “Second Life Shrink” query). Our two top posts this quarter have been Olivia’s pieces on Star Trek and Vampires, which I guess tells you something about what’s popular in the SL universe.

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to keep the pace up, now that the days are getting longer and the attractions of summer beckon. We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life, Statistics

History is a random aggregation of opinion

March 24, 2009 by johnny 3 Comments

ArminasX Saiman over at Second Effects has compiled a list of the top 585 Second Life-related blogs, and Second Life Shrink fails to appear anywhere on it. I know that this really shouldn’t annoy me – we’re way too cool to care about being on some lame list, obviously – but it is somewhat irksome to be told that our intellectual endeavour is less significant than a virtual hair blog. At least I’m not the only one who doubts the veracity of the rankings.

More positive feedback has come from the unlikely source of the Thoughts about notes* blog, whose author, the imaginatively-named “Blogga”, ripped off one of my posts in its entirety last week. I was alerted to this by Sheila Bastard, an Australian blogger who had one of her posts plagiarised too, and who is mightily pissed-off about it.

I can see where Sheila’s coming from, but I actually quite like the mash-up effect of Blogga’s creation. He or she is like the blogosphere personified, a mass of contradictory opinions that the author just can’t keep inside, despite the world’s indifference. I’d like to think that my post was carefully selected for inclusion in Blogga’s project, though I suspect it was probably plucked at random from an RSS feed in some automated process. He/she should keep going with this for a couple of months, then print the whole blog as a book; it would make interesting reading, a snapshot of the preoccupations of the blogging population at what might just turn out to be a pivotal moment in history.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Second Life

Bad reputation

March 20, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Reports revealed this week that the UK government is maintaining an island in Second Life, at a cost of £12000 a year, for the purpose of allowing private companies to showcase new technology.

I would show you some pictures of the sim, but of course we mere taxpayers are not permitted to visit; only government officials and the firms taking part can gain access. The story has created a minor scandal, with opposition politicians seizing the opportunity to accuse the ruling party of “living in a fantasy world”, while the scheme’s defenders have claimed that holding meetings and events on the grid will greatly increase government efficiency.

My first reaction to this story was to think that £12000 a year was not a great deal of money, as government expenditure goes – it’s the equivalent of one very junior civil servant. Compared to the amount that, say, defence contractors gouge, it doesn’t seem to be the basis for a particularly lucrative business, even if the project is expanded when the pilot phase ends in 2011.

It also makes me wonder why government departments, or corporations, or educational establishments need to be connected to the main grid at all. Why don’t they run mini-grids on their own servers? That would be sufficient for meetings, presentations and teaching, without the risk of participants wandering out of the building and coming across something scary; it would also maximise control over access and security, and would presumably run faster and be more reliable. Most importantly perhaps, it would create some distance between the client’s business and the potentially toxic Second Life brand.

For the one thing that the man in the street knows, or thinks he knows, about SL is that it is a haven for sexual perversity of the worst kind, and while Linden Labs may insist that they have solved the problem by quarantining questionable content in its own continent, all they are doing is drawing more attention to the fact that the problem exists in the first place.

The potential customers that L-Labs are courting with their new U-rated strategy are probably not particularly worried that they personally will be exposed to anything untoward; they will be more concerned that association with Second Life will be a hostage to fortune. Political opponents, disgruntled shareholders or disaffected employees will be able to search Google images for something suitably salacious to take to the media; the result will probably be transient embarrassment rather than lasting damage, but why take a chance?

Real-life locations can reinvent themselves of course; I remember Times Square being pretty sleazy when I visited New York years ago, but I hear it is now thoroughly Disneyfied. I guess time will tell if Second Life will be able to undergo a similar process of rehabilitation.

I’m sure Joan would agree with me that Times Square was better the old way.

Filed under Culture, Politics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Politics, Second Life

Intelligence Failure

March 18, 2009 by johnny 3 Comments

I can still remember the story on the front page of the only copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that I ever bought – it was a report on the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi, which means I must have purchased the paper on the 22nd of May 1991, when I was travelling up the Pacific coast on my way to the Cascade Mountains.

If if I ever make it back to Seattle (which I hope I do one day, because it is probably the nicest city I have ever visited) I won’t be able to buy the paper again, because, as of today, the S P-I has become an online-only operation, after 146 years in business.

The print newspaper model – where investigative reporting was subsidised by advertising sales – has collapsed, as ad revenue has migrated to the web. What will fill the news-gathering vacuum left behind? The idea that an army of bloggers will ever replace the likes of Woodward and Bernstein is patently ridiculous.

Information may seem to be more freely available then ever, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet (in the developed world at least), but the real knowledge, the stuff the Man doesn’t want us to know, will be buried even deeper in the mass of celebrity trivia and idle speculation that passes for news in the blogosphere. We are doomed to a new age of ignorance. Only musicians can save us now.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Politics Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Politics

Plunging Necklines

March 17, 2009 by olivia Leave a comment

Nosferatu-fever seems to be everywhere these days, what with True Blood, and Twilight, and of course Bloodlines, so I thought I would try to try to secure my very own Interview with the Vampire.

I got myself a nice Mina Harker-style dress, dyed my hair jet-black and headed off in search of some blood-suckers:

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[Dress, boots and accessories from Crimson Shadow, graveyard at Vampire City.]

Typing “vampire” into the in-world search threw up a few leads. The first couple of places I visited turned out to be undead-themed combat sims (as far as I could tell, since the welcome notes I got were in Portuguese), and I also came across several gothic clothing stores, but I eventually got lucky and landed up at the home base of one of the larger Bloodlines clans.

Half a dozen or so tall, dark, caped figures were gathered in the courtyard of a Medieval-style castle. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen, so I went over to take a look. I wasn’t sure about vampire etiquette, so I didn’t say anything at first, but after five minutes of silent inactivity I decided to break the ice.

“Are they going to like, fight, or something?” I asked the man standing next to me, gesturing towards the two heavily-armed figures at the centre of the group, who appeared to be squaring-up to one another. “I don’t know,” he replied, turning to face me. He reminded me of Christopher Lambert in Highlander 3, his trench-coat accessorised with a samauri sword. We got chatting, and he told me he had been in the clan for just a few days, having previously been a Gorean slave-master. “I got bored with all the submissiveness” he said, making me wonder what his expectations of that role had been, “so I decided to get back to my vampire roots.” “You prefer the assertive vampire girls then?” I asked, trying to sound flirtatious, but he wanted to tell me about how far he’d progressed in the vampire fighting ranks, and we ended up talking about our experiences playing D&D, which killed the moment a bit.

I had been led to believe that these Bloodlines fanatics would leap at a girl’s throat at the drop of a hat, so I was a little offended that the crowd seemed more interested in the non-existent fight than me. The awkward silence was broken by the arrival of a junior member of the clan, accompanied by a girl in a decidedly non-gothic spotty dress, who was evidently a new recruit.

One of the combatants, who turned out to be the head of the clan, broke off from the staring contest, or whatever it was, to greet the newcomers. After some small talk it was decided that we should all head off to the Turning Chamber for the Initiation Ceremony. I asked the new girl if she minded me tagging along, and she was cool with that, so I followed the others into the castle.

Now I don’t know what springs to your mind when you hear the words “Vampire Initiation Ceremony”, but I think of vintage Dracula flicks, where louche ghouls overwhelm swooning maidens in scenes of barely repressed sensuality, or, if I’m feeling particularly excitable, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger. At the very least I was expecting some sort of occult ritual, with a soundtrack of sinister Latin chanting.

You may imagine my disappointment then, when I discovered that the Turning Chamber resembled nothing more than a brightly-lit pub basement. The barrels that lined the walls were full of blood rather than beer, but the ambiance was definitely more functional than spooky. The focus of the room was not some unholy altar dripping with virginal blood, but a vending machine dispensing various Bloodlines products. After instructing the convert to buy several items (which cost about L$1000) the clan chief departed, leaving the actual biting to his minions. They didn’t seem to know what they were doing, and it took an age of searching in inventories and unpacking boxes, during which the poor girl had to log out and log in again twice, before her lifeblood finally began to drain away, very slowly. I asked Christopher Lambert how long this was going to take. “I don’t know, this is my first one” he said.

I chatted with the new vampire girl while we waited. What had attracted her to the blood-sucking lifestyle? The fashion sense and the romance it seemed. She was hoping it would get a bit better.

Christopher eventually got round to asking me if I would like to join the clan too, but I politely declined. If I ever give up my virtual soul I want it to be more meaningful than a cold transaction in a characterless cellar. The rich symbolism of the vampire myth deserves more respect.

(I know it’s unfair to dismiss Second Life Vampire culture based on a brief visit to one sim, so I’m open to suggestions of places I should visit for a more satisfying experience. Post them to mail@secondlifeshrink.com, and I’ll review them in a future post, if they’re any good).

Filed under Culture, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Psychology, Second Life, Vampires

Paranoid

March 13, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Shortly after publishing my last post I tried to log on to Second Life, to meet up with Olivia, but I kept getting knocked back, with a message saying there was some unspecified “problem” with my log-in. Then Olivia emailed me to say that she wasn’t able to sign in either.

Suddenly it all became clear to me. The Lindens had been so badly stung by my criticism of their “adult content” proposals (and all my other subversive posts) that they had kicked both of us off the grid in retaliation. They were obviously logging all the traffic on this IP address. They probably had my phone bugged as well, and, come to think of it, the postman who delivered the mail this morning wasn’t the regular guy either – he must be working for them too…

I enjoyed my status as Linden Enemy #1, The Blogger They Could Not Silence, for five minutes, before reluctantly checking out the grid status page, and confirming that it was a universal glitch that was keeping everyone out.

Oh well, I can dream. At least it gives me an excuse to link to some vintage Black Sabb.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Psychology, Second Life

Brave New World

March 13, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

As readers will no doubt be aware by now, in an almost unbelievable development Linden Labs have announced the creation of a new “adult-themed” continent, to which all mainland businesses dealing in such merchandise will be required to relocate in the very near future. As it is worded the proposal seems to indicate that all adult-orientated activity will be confined to the new landmass, though various Lindens, contributing to the debate on the SL forums, have sought to reassure residents that the regulations will be interpreted in a way that will not affect what individuals do in the privacy of their own homes.

To say that reaction to this announcement has been negative would be somewhat of an understatement. I gave up reading the comments on the forum after 15 pages, but the feeling among residents was unmistakable – almost universally this is regarded as a terrible idea. Objections range from opposition in principle to the limitation of free expression, through doubts about the workability of the scheme (particularly the age verification element), to concerns from retailers worried that they will be forced to exchange their established prime locations for undesirable plots on the new continent. Just about everyone expects in-world trade to take a hammering, mainland land prices to collapse and a mass exodus of disaffected residents.

Linden Labs seem to be taking a massive risk with this move. At the moment they have a solid if limited business model – collecting subscriptions from a core of residents for whom the freedom to do what they want in SL is the main attraction. They may or may not actually engage in “adult” activity, but they like the idea that they could if they so desired – it’s a transgressive edge that is missing from their real lives. The Lindens are betting that the income they will lose as a result of alienating part of their current user base will be more than compensated for by new money from corporate and educational customers who are currently, so the theory goes, scared off by the reports of Second Life’s rampant perversity. I guess they have done some sort of research to back this up, but even so it’s a brave enterprise that will forego a proven revenue stream in pursuit of what may turn out to be an non-existent market.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Psychology, Second Life

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