by Idoru Wellman, staff writer
The Netflix "Find Your Voice film competition" is a great new game where everyone can participate by forming gangs to vote for the independent film maker that best represents their community and interests. Consider this a more positive version of the gang abuse report used in Second Life to get the Linden Governance team to ban enemy players. However, instead of helping bring the ban hammer down, in the Netflix Find Your Voice game, you can help a few lucky filmmakers receive some financial and in-kind support for filmmaking.
To play the Netflix game, you'll need a working e-mail address - but Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail and others are happy to hand out spare alt account e-mail addresses for a reason -- so you can play games that want e-mail addresses! What are you waiting for? Vote early and vote often.
Here at the Herald we are partial to SARAHN_12 - an entry from Sasie Sealy with a plot that should strike a chord among the Second Life players. The director's statement tells the tale:
They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired. They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to their own bodies. And though I wasn't there that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living room -- right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace -- of a house I came later to think of as my second home.
-Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace”
Julian Dibbell published his article “A Rape in Cyberspace” in 1993, just one year after Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash first described the idea of a “metaverse” and ten years before the founders of Linden Lab would bring that idea to life. It was a fascinating piece that described the repercussions of a “cyber rape” within the virtual community, a story that stayed in my head months after I read it. And what fascinated me most was the reaction of the players – the emotional trauma created by an “imaginary” crime and their pursuit of vengeance in the real world.
Dibbell’s story was considered groundbreaking at the time, but it has also proven to be remarkably prescient in the issues it raised, issues that are still populating the headlines: a MySpace suicide, divorces filed over Second Life affairs, a woman in Korea jailed for virtual murder. I am fascinated by the growing extension of an alternate “cyber world” – whether made up of merely a collection of web pages or more sophisticated online and gaming spaces like Second Life – and its effect on the “real” world. Entire generations are growing up online, creating communities and identities in virtual space, while the rules and morals of this brave new world remain unclear. Issues of privacy, identity, and accountability are still being determined as we struggle to understand and establish rules in spaces like Second Life. When does what we say or do online cross legal boundaries? Or moral boundaries? Do we have the right to stay anonymous in cyberspace? Are our fantasies and curiosities on the web able to condemn us? And if they are, will the establishment of rules and regulations, not to mention commercial interests, end the free expression and exchange that was the ideal behind the birth of the Internet? Driving all of these questions is the very human desire to create a place to live out our fantasies.
SarahN_12 is my attempt to
address some of these questions in a human story. Sarah is a woman
who is trying to find answers after her boyfriend is brutally murdered
in their apartment. And so her search for answers into his unsolved
death only leads to more questions, as she discovers that the man she
thought she knew led an entirely separate existence online, - a
secret life that may hold the key to his murder. For Sarah,
someone who has always had answers, this brush with unruly, messy reality
leaves her reeling, and her journey towards acceptance that there may
be no easy answers provides the heart and spine of the story.
As a director, I am excited by the aesthetic possibilities of the story and the chance to portray a virtual world in unexpected ways. Too often, virtual realities have been depicted as highly stylized cartoon versions of what audiences expect “computer games” to look like – some neo-futurist slick vision that can actually separate the viewer from what is happening emotionally in the story. What I am interested in doing is creating a vision of Alt Life that is visceral and immediate, more real that the real world. Gamers can have an intense, emotional connection to their lives online, and this is what I want to convey. Alt Life scenes will be stylized live action, paying homage to the camera work of the Dardenne brothers, while real world scenes will be much more formal and distant. I have outlined some of my visual ideas in the pages that follow, but primarily I am interesting in creating something in the footsteps of Pi or Primer, a film that melds form and function to create something that people have never seen.
Like both Pi and Primer, my concept of Sarah_N12 falls into the space between science and science fiction, which is fitting considering the origins of virtual worlds. The founders of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, have expressly stated that they were inspired by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash and other cyberpunk works, and leaders of the emerging technology like Ian Hughes of IBM refer to themselves as “metaverse evangelists,” borrowing Stephenson’s term. Yet while science and technology have long chased the dreams of science fiction, the reality of our evolving “cyber worlds” has led us to questions yet to be tackled by the likes of William Gibson. Whether we are talking about MySpace or Facebook, Second Life or Maple Story, we are merely dealing with the first iteration of our science fiction fantasies. The rules are still being written. And the human implications of our imagination have yet to be determined.
Not your personal army.
Posted by: anonymous | July 02, 2009 at 02:33 PM