Zoned out

March 22, 2011 by Leave a comment

We’ve not had much in the way of Second Life content recently; for one reason or another I’ve not had time to log on to the grid in ages, and I’ve just been glancing at the SL blogosphere in passing.

So what’s been happening? Let’s see… The main action seems to have been the Redzone imbroglio (actually an old story, which came to a head this month for some reason). Playing on the characteristic paranoia and narcissism of SL residents, virtual entrepreneur zFire Xue scared people with stories of how their “security” was under threat from some shadowy villains. In the real world Xue would be a political demagogue, but, this being the free-market utopia of Second Life he instead cashed in by selling an expensive technological “solution” to the “problem”. There was a backlash of course, ironically driven by the same paranoia Xue had exploited in the first place, and the Lindens belatedly lumbered into action to ban Xue and his system from the grid, though apparently without closing the loophole he was using to violate residents’ privacy.

Paranoia, narcissism, management incompetence… good to see that not much has changed in Second Life in my absence.

I’m not sure that this episode tells us anything about the psychology of SL residents that we didn’t know already after the events of “Emeraldgate“, but it does add weight the general impression that Linden Lab are not a serious company. Do they have a corporate risk-management department? Do they employ lawyers? Do they read the newspapers? If so, how did they miss that Xue’s system clearly breached EU data protection law, and that the Lab, as platform hosts, were placing themselves at risk of prosecution for failing to safeguard their customers’ information? They may have calculated that the risk was minimal, but, with practically no upside in letting Xue continue to operate, why take a chance? The situation called for decisive action, not months of dithering followed by a half-baked intervention. If I was a potential investor I wouldn’t be particularly impressed.

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , ,

International Women’s Day

March 8, 2011 by Leave a comment

Today is International Women’s Day. It was first marked one hundred years ago, in Germany, following a proposal by famous German socialist Clara Zetkin, and is now celebrated all over the world. I’m hoping to make it along to a local event later today; check the IWD website for activities in your area.

In the virtual world, the Instituto Espanol in Second Life has an interesting-looking program of IWD-related talks and music which I may try to catch too. I couldn’t see any other events in SL advertised, but I only did a quick search, so I’m sure there are more out there.

As the IWD website says, “International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.”. These days it sometimes seems that our ruling elite are determined to roll back every progressive gain the working class has made in the last century, so it’s important to pause and reflect upon the victories our sisters have won, and look forward to a better, more egalitarian, future.

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Martian Chronical

January 22, 2011 by Leave a comment

I imagine that there has been more than a little schadenfreude circulating in the Linden Lab offices this week, as they digest the news that yet another pretender to the virtual world crown has hit the skids. Blue Mars, with its superior graphics and scalability, was hailed as the future of the 3D web, but, having reportedly never managed to attract more than a few thousand subscribers, now seems set for an uncertain future as an iPhone app.

It’s interesting to note that, despite all the flak they take from Second Life bloggers, the Lindens are still running the only profitable corner of the metaverse in existence. Could it be that they actually know what they are doing?

Maybe it’s just that chilled west-coast vibe…

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

2011: The year in preview

January 11, 2011 by Leave a comment

So, the New Year is here, time to think about the future, and make plans for what we want to do with this blog over the next twelve months.

Looking back over the last year, there are a few things that I planned to do but never got round to; organising some political activity within SL, delineating the psychological profile of a typical Second Life resident, and posting more general cultural commentary, in the form of book, film and music reviews.

I failed to complete, or even seriously start, the first two of these tasks for more or less the same reason; they are big projects, that would demand an investment of time and attention that couldn’t possibly be justified by the results, and thus seem rather self-indulgent. This is particularly true of the political organisation idea; virtual agitation isn’t going to have any practical effect, whereas spending even a fraction of the time on real-world activity would probably have some positive consequences. (Of course I can do the Second Life work from the comfort of my own home, rather than having to go out and stand on cold street corners, but that’s not quite enough to tip the balance.)

One can make more of a case for the SL psychological investigation plan; not because the final result would be particularly earth-shattering, but rather because there would be some likelihood that I would find the process educational in a generalisable way. Again though, utilising the time to study something more immediately applicable to my day-to-day work is likely to be more profitable.

So I’ll probably quietly forget about the political activity thing, though I do have a vague idea about doing a series of posts on the various political groups that already exist on the grid, and I’ll definitely be commenting on real world politics a bit more. As far as psychological comment goes, I suppose I’ll have to keep that going, since it is the ostensible raison d’être of this blog, but I’ll stick to small scale stuff rather then any more ambitious projects. Sherry Turkle has a new book just out – Alone Together, which “describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude”; I expect I’ll have something to say about that once I get round to reading it. I may also try to do more about the psychosexual aspects of virtual interaction; I have written a little about this in the past, but mostly in the form of comments on other blogs.

I am going to start writing some more cultural reviews; the problem hitherto has been my rather obsessive nature, and my consequent inability to keep posts down to a manageable length. What I need to do is pick out a couple of aspects of the work in question and restrict myself to a few succinct comments.

I’ll have to do some basic blog housekeeping too; update the links, tidy up the tags, create a custom graphic for the header. The domain is due for renewal soon, and I’m going to pay WordPress a bit extra so they stop putting adverts on my pages, which should make things look a bit neater.

So there we are; a handy list of my aspirations, which will double up as a reminder of my shortcomings come December.

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

2010: The year in review

December 31, 2010 by 1 Comment

The year’s end draws nigh, and I feel I should produce some sort if review of the twelve months gone by…

First up, the topic that is dearest to our hearts, this blog. Here’s our top ten posts for the year, by traffic:

  1. Second Life demographics – a brief review
  2. Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
  3. On Second Life and addiction
  4. O Superman
  5. What’s up
  6. Zombie Epidemiology
  7. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
  8. Anatomy of a scandal
  9. Running Away
  10. That gum you like is going to come back in style

The demographics post is top by miles, with nearly as many hits as the rest put together, thanks to Google deciding that it should be the #1 result for the query “second life demographics 2010“. It got a lot of traffic in October, presumably due to media studies students researching start-of-term assignments, with another surge this month, probably because other SL bloggers are preparing their end-of-year posts. I think that the fact that this very slight essay, which I knocked out over one lunchtime back in April, should still be able to masquerade as an authoritative source says more about the paucity of serious academic interest in the topic than any brilliance in my writing.

Of the others, the addiction post benefited from my efforts to promote it by dropping a link into the comments of any blog post that mentioned the topic; the Superman post got a boost after it was featured in the Herald; “What’s up” gets traffic from people looking for pictures of 4 Non Blondes (a Google quirk that has at various times also given us hits from searches for Laura Palmer, Mae West and Catherine Deneuve/Susan Sarandon); the Zombie post is still getting referrals from the Undead Report; the rest, I don’t know, probably just random clicks.

Other posts from this year that I thought were OK, but that didn’t make the top ten:

I’m not sure if there was a theme to our posts this year; possibly something about the importance of narrative in the formation of identity, or some such pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

The year in Second Life? Stagnation, layoffs and general management chaos are the things that spring to mind; more detailed round-ups can be found at Daniel Voyager’s blog and Your2ndPlace if you’re interested.

In the real world it’s been a busy year politically; the event with the most direct effect on us was the return of a Conservative government to power in the UK. It’s been a bit of a phoney war since the summer, with only some student-led skirmishes, but the cuts will start to really kick in from now on, and the class struggle should get more intense. 2010 saw the right resurgent over in the US too, without much sign of the left regrouping; hopefully that will change in the months ahead.

In our last New Year review I suggested that we would be posting more general cultural comment during 2010; this remained, alas, an unfulfilled ambition, but I have belatedly managed to think about picks for book, film and album of the year.

Choosing a book was the hardest task; looking back I see that I didn’t read a single new novel all year, though I did buy a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which is glaring at me accusingly from the shelf. Instead I stuck to the classics, of which my favourite was Fielding’s Tom Jones. I hardly saw any new films either; from a restricted field I would have to give the nod to The Social Network. I did buy a lot of new albums; the two I’ve listened to most are Majesty Shredding by Superchunk and The Suburbs by Arcade Fire.

And so to the future… I expect I’ll keep this project going, out of habit if nothing else. Things might be a little quiet in January, while I’m busy with my New Year resolutions – do more serious writing, get more exercise – but once these have been discarded it’ll be back to our usual cavalcade of whimsy.

I’ll finish by sending our best wishes for 2011 to all our readers – may the New Year find you happy, healthy and prosperous.

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

Downhill Racer

December 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

It’s kept on snowing over the last couple of weeks, so I thought I should follow through on my plans to go skiing. I still couldn’t summon the energy to go up to the actual mountains though, so I figured I should see what Second Life had to offer in the way of winter sports. I got myself kitted out at the Zagoskin Ski Shop, for a surprisingly modest sum – skis, boots, poles, ski-suit and goggles for under L$500 – then headed over to the Nakiska Ski Club to hit the piste:

The panorama was certainly impressive, and the run ahead was invitingly steep, so I pushed off and shot away down the slope:

Down at the bottom there was a futuristic mountain train waiting to take me back up the hill:

It was fun for a while, but after a few runs it began to get a little dull. The AO that came with the skis allows one to steer from side to side, but one can’t really do anything more complicated than zig-zaging down the slope. I guess it might be more exciting if there was a slalom course laid out, or if one was racing with someone else. I should probably check out some of the other Second Life ski resorts to see if they are any more thrilling.

The experience reminded me of nothing more than the classic ZX Spectrum game Horace Goes Skiing. I’ve been similarly underwhelmed by other interactive activities on the grid – nice graphics in the service of eight-bit gameplay seems to be the rule for such things.

I was also a little disappointed, though not entirely surprised, to find that I was the only person at the resort, since I always feel that the conviviality of the après-ski is a crucial part of any winter holiday. It’s a shame it was so quiet, because the one big advantage that Second Life has over stand-alone simulations, the thing that makes up for all the limitations, is its social aspect. Maybe next time I go it will be a bit more lively.

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They’re living on nuts and berries

December 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

We haven’t had a good Second Life legal story for a while, so I was glad to see that virtual litigation is alive and well, though this time around the action involves residents suing each other rather than targeting Linden Lab.

The case revolves, as far as I can tell, around an attempt by Ozimals (of virtual bunny fame) to claim sole rights to the whole concept of Second Life pets. Expert opinion, or the SL-blog commentariat at least, seems to believe that the suit has no merit, since the original idea is clearly ripped-off from whoever invented Tamagotchi.

I don’t know about that, but if Ozimals do win their case I’m going to get myself a lawyer and go after them, since I reckon I have a good claim to have invented the Second Life animal-nurturing concept way back in 2007 – here’s the blog post to prove it (and an appropriate soundtrack).

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That’s Not My Name

November 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

My avatar’s third rezday fell last month, which I rather overlooked, since I was focussed more on Premium Account renewal day, which was last week, and whether it was worth $80 or so to keep my patch of virtual land for another year. I eventually decided it was, or rather I didn’t decide that it wasn’t, since I would have had to actively cancel my subscription, so I’m on board for the next 12 months at least, assuming Second Life lasts that long. I effectively got this year for free, since I had a big enough pile of accumulated L$ from my stipend to cover it, though I suppose I could have just cashed them out.

It does make me wonder what the average age of an active SL avatar is. I imagine that the distribution would be bimodal, with a huge peak of very young residents, and another spike of oldies. (I feel that I should know this for sure, since, according to Google, SLS is the top authority on current Second Life demographics.)

Anyway, in light of this anniversary I was moved to do something that I’ve thought about a few times, but never got round to, that is create an alt. I’ve been feeling that it’s about time that I linked this blog with an actual Second Life identity, rather than continuing to lurk behind a double layer of pseudonymity, but I didn’t want to expose my primary account, because it has a history of its own, which I felt should stay undisturbed.

So here’s my new virtual face; pretty much the same as my old one:

apart from the different-coloured hair and a couple of other tweaks.

Thanks to the new “Display Name” feature (which people seem to be down on, but I think is a great idea), I’m able to go by the name of “Johnny Staccato“. I’ll obviously need to get a sharper suit.

Not that that’s the real me of course…

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Brink of the Clouds

November 17, 2010 by Leave a comment

I was briefly excited by the news that a test version of Skylight, the fabled browser-based SL client, was up and running; I hurried to log on, only to find that it didn’t work on my iPhone or my netbook. I’m not sure if this is due to hardware limitations, OS incompatibility (iOS4.1 and Linux) or bandwidth issues, or some combination of the three, but whatever the cause it doesn’t bode well for the promise that the project would bring SL to low-powered mobile devices. I guess I could try it on my desktop, but that would seem to defeat the purpose a bit.

It is just a beta of course, and the final version, if it ever emerges, may sort these problems out. I still think the concept has some potentially fatal flaws though.

The central problem is that it is not at all clear that enabling browser access to SL is a good thing, business-wise. The theory seems to be that lowering the entry barrier will encourage more new users, but even if this works, there is still the problem of extracting enough revenue from these people to cover the substantial hardware, power and bandwidth costs associated with server-side rendering.

Currently residents are monetised via subscriptions, land-sales and tier charges, and participation in the in-world economy. However the particular population that this new service is supposed to attract – people who will look at SL in their browser, but can’t be bothered to download and install the client – seem less likely to be sufficiently invested in the idea of virtual worlds to make a significant contribution to these revenue streams.

What does that leave? Pay-per-minute access charges? Some sort of Farmville-clone that encourages people to spend money? Advertising on the web-page? I guess that the Lindens have worked out a business model, but it’s hard to see how it adds up.

Personally, I think that Skylight’s best chance of success lies in selling it as a way of adding value for their existing customers, rather than attracting new ones. I would certainly spend more time in-world if I could do it on the move, or even from the couch rather than at my desk, and I might even be willing to pay a bit more for my premium account if it included browser access.

So, bring on the clouds…

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with ,

Living in Gangster Time

November 12, 2010 by Leave a comment

A rather curious comment arrived in the SLS inbox the other day, from someone who identifies himself as “gunmaker_guardian”. It opened with this charming salutation:

hey guyz 🙂 its me 🙂 both of u igniter and nicholas”mafia” are full of …

and carried on in the same vein for several hundred words.

Mr Guardian is not averse to blowing his own trumpet; among other exploits he claims to have:

fired my laser in THREE colors 🙂 … broke a hackers world record of 20 million packets per second … used secondlife itself to launch a mail bomb if (sic) impossible proportions … [created] a self replicating nanoscopic black dot …

and so on.

Our intrepid internet warrior’s IP address resolves to Prescott, Arizona. Who knew such mayhem could lurk beneath the surface of this sleepy burg?

I’m guessing that this comment refers to one of those Second Life “Mafia Wars” that the Alphaville Herald is always writing about. I can’t imagine why our friend felt moved to share his thoughts on the matter with us though, unless it has something to do with that JLU piece we did a while back.

Anyway, I’ve deleted the offending epistle, since we try to aim for a slightly classier tone here at SLS, and I have no desire to get caught up in any of that griefer nonsense. Hopefully that’s the last we’ll hear of it.

Still, I dread, dread to think what the future will bring…

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with , ,

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