Alphaville Herald

It Has To Be Said: Stop Calling it a Game

by Jessica Holyoke

Second Life is like the Internet in many respects; its on the computer, no one knows that you are a fairy tale blind mouse and there is a heavy text and graphical basis for our interactions.  And it looks like a video game; you can fly, you can be in space, you can be underwater without SCUBA gear,  and you can have sex with strange creatures that shouldn't be reproducing with humans.  But combine the video game looks with the Internet aspects and suddenly people take it as an excuse for being a dick or bitch. 

"Oh, I stole all your spacebucks?  Too bad its a game!" 

"Oh I said I would be your boyfriend and I'm having fake sex with aliens?  Its in my game rules." 

"I want to spend time with you, sure, right after  I am done spending time in Zindra gambling your spacebucks away." 

These are typical things that are said to me.  Especially by my dick ex-boyfriend Steve*. Jerk.

Now granted, there are aspects of SL that are games, role playing sims and actual video games like Dark Life.  And on role playing sims, you are expected to play a character.  But on those sims, if you 'role play a dick or bitch,' then you are treated like a dick or bitch AND they understand that you are playing a character.  People present know the difference between In-Character or Out Of Character. 

Saving Time in a Virtual Bottle

How is your time in Second Life best spent?

by FoxM Ember

What is time?  “Time,” measured in minutes and hours, days and weeks – even here in SL.  Is it simply an awareness of events and occurrences sorted in our minds in such a way, as to allow us to perceive them in an ordered, rationale way?  Without it, the flood of simultaneous information would be unmanageable and overwhelming for the construct of consciousness – ours anyway.  Where did time come from, and why is it here?

If time an infinite reality, always having been, always still to be, then it disqualifies the theory of the Big Bang; which necessitates a beginning to our universe, and to our reality; the start of time.  Who wound the clock?  

Conversely, if the universe always was, and always will be – infinite in existence as well as breadth – then why is everything winding down, decaying…burning out?  When did the “dying” begin?  A star burns itself out; and from its “burn rate” we can trace back its existence to its beginning.  We can see water poured out of a pitcher, and by observing the volume and speed of the water as it falls away, we can discern the time at which the water began to pour – we can measure back to its beginning.  So if the universe - and by extension time - always was, who started the countdown clock, and why?

How The Simulacrum Killed Carmen Hermosillo

The first to warn are the first affected

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

In H+ magazine's  A Virtual Life. An Actual Death Mark Stephen Meadows and Peter Ludlow make a compelling case that Carmen Hermosillo’s real life death last year was most likely the sort of suicide Carmen had warned against when she wrote in Confessions of a Gorean Slave:

"Several people in SL have commented to me that they expect, at some point, to hear that someone has committed suicide over events/relationships in SL, and they say that because it is their feelings that the Lindens appear oblivious to human cost of entry/experience in SL. Think about it.".

While online worlds can be a source of diversion and delight, the weight players invest into the symbols and relationships they form are such that what starts as an escape may become something far stronger - and stranger.

A Virtual Life. An Actual Death is a must read cautionary tale for those who would immerse themselves in the virtual realm. A few excerpts:

It might be clear what had happened, but the more urgent question is why it happened, and as it turns out, understanding this requires a journey into a deep rabbit hole involving over a decade of online life, virtual relationships, BDSM roleplay, and a virtual island Kingdom...

Eye of the Beholder

by Jessica Holyoke

Perception is reality.  Its a phrase I learned when I held a supervisory position for a large multi-national before I went to law school.  For some readers, this might be a surprise because my work experience would make me older than it would seem by my avatar and my previous statements.   Most people did not know that, it might change people's perceptions of me a little, but nothing fundamental. 

In the past, I was attacked for supposedly supporting the People's Republic of China.  In these attacks, it was suggested that I was the daughter of Chinese communist officials, which would also allege that I was Han Chinese in RL with a blonde European avatar.  A very different change in race, but no one was lining the streets calling for my head because my race didn't match my avatar.

But suggest that I am a man in real life and everything changes. 

And I have been accused on a number of occasions, as have other women on-line as a way of intimidation in one form or another.  People will try to silence you if they intimate that you are a man in real life.  People have had a problem with my writing about Gor on the Herald and have gone to my editor and myself banging on the table if I am a man in real life, simply because there must not be any women on Gor. 

But Does That Make Me Gay?

by Lapis Philosophorum

Reading "The Wanderer's" Gor series, there is an overarching concept that truly bothers me.  The Wanderer writes that he will not be sexually using or abusing the female slaves of Gor because it is more than likely that there could be some gay guy fapping in the background -- an all too common concern for those considering cybersex. 

Is the person who you are cybersexing the person you think they are?  Are you sure? Really?

You might think s/he's dreamy, but s/he could be really ugly, a different religion, too old, too young, the wrong race, species, or even a Tory. Despite these frightful possibilities, many people are even more concerned with the gender of the typist behind the avatar, worrying that if the person on the other side of the screen is not the same gender as presented it makes you something else - either forced homosexuality if the typist matches your gender or forced heterosexuality if the person behind the avatar does not. Horrors!

Of course, this is one of those issues that being bisexual solves - but perhaps are not bi -- now what?

The Philosophical Parrot Of Socrates Cafe

Authentic dialogue in a synthetic world

by Alessandra Narayan

Tired of contests, free sex, acoustic live music, poor roleplay… one of those days or nights when everything seems to go wrong? Ok, there might be a solution if you’re into philosophy. Check out Socrates Cafe and you might end up in an intense debate that will keep you endlessly pounding your keyboard.

In this interview, Socrates Cafe owner Parrot Ferrer, tells us not only how Socrates Cafe got started but reveals other “alternative” plans for the future. Besides his art gallery, an event area covering Open Space Technology will be rising soon.

Alessandra Narayan (AN) – You have a quite suggestive name. Are you half human half parrot?
Parrot Ferrer (PF) – Yeah! I used to raise and show parrots in RL for a hobby, sold nationally and when I came in-world I saw furries but no birds. So I searched and found Grendal’s children. Got the Parrot AV.

AN – What about Socrates Cafe? A drop in SL's ocean?
PF – One of my first mentors was Verum Vicirca, she and I started Socrates Café two years ago. It was originally centered to be a writers discussion area but folks veered to more current events and reasonings/debate. Verum ended up departing SL due to medical reasons and she gave all the properties for 1$L.

Op/Ed: Finding Real People in Second Life

by Jessica Holyoke

A complaint I have heard from the 'Get A Life' crowd is that the people you meet on Second Life aren't real.  Because you may never have seen a photo or know their name, they don't count.  I once mentioned  to a close friend of mine the snow storm another friend of mine suffered through which prevented her from logging on, and I was asked how we met.  When I said I know her from SL, I was told that my SL friend wasn't real.  

And there is a certain amount of 'puffing' with the people we meet in SL.  No woman is as skinny in Real Life as they are in Second Life.  A man might have 300 pounds/136 kg/15 stone on him, but its not going to be muscle.  Very few people have a human avatar that is less attractive physically than they are. *[see HAMAT rule note] 

Appearance alone does not tell the whole story.  One of the things SL is missing is ID. If you are in a virtual world where you can do anything you want, even those internal psychological controls are missing.  That's why we have so much sex and fetish on display.  That's why we have griefers and drama queens.  There is nothing holding us back. 

Remembering Carmen Hermosillo

The Herald is sorry to report that Carmen Hermosillo (aka humdog, aka Montserrat Tovar, aka Montserrat Snakeankle, aka Sparrowhawk Perhaps) has died irl. Below the fold are my memories of Carmen, starting from when I met her on the WELL back in 1993. Others of you will have very different memories of her because you knew her in very different ways. Please feel free to add some remarks in the comment section.

--Peter Ludlow

Op/Ed: Tortured Thoughts

by Jessica Holyoke, Gorean kajira

Torture has been on my mind lately, not only due to my Gorean excursions, but also in real life as well.

Back in June, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was on the U.S. news magazine show "60 Minutes."  He was asked why is the U.S. government allowed to torture....I mean, use high end interrogation, in light of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." Justice Scalia's response was that torture was not punishment.  He did not go into it much more than that.

Justice Scalia's views usually match a line of thought that says the Executive, in our case the President, can do no illegal act.  But when you look at torture, it is an illegal act.  Not just due to international convention, but rather due to the fact that it has been determined over centuries that a person has a right to bodily integrity and there is a prohibition against battery.  So in looking at torture as a government policy, you also have to look at what gives the government the right to do so.

This of course leads back to the question of the Chinese dissident and the corporate position.  My position on that is the Chinese dissident is one question, one part of the problem.  A policy of torture, or a policy of suppression of speech of any form, is wrong. What a corporation does about it is another question, a different problem.  Did anyone notice that international journalists are not getting unfettered internet access in Beijing and the IOC knows about that?

SL Herald - the literary backbone of virtual worlds?

Mario Gerosa Interviews Urizenus Sklar on the New New Journalism
Does this explain all the damn poems?

by Idoru Wellman, Dept. of Literary Salons and Euro-Trash Intellectuals

Mario Gerosa (Frank Koolhaus in SL) wears many hats (some virtual). He is real life editor of Architectural Digest Italia He has also made headlines here and elsewhere with his virtual world projects that include a virtual tourism agency and a convention for the preservation of virtual architecture. He is also author of several books on virtual worlds including Mondi Virtuali and, most recently, Rinascimento Virtuale (The Virtual Renaissance), published by Meltemi Editore in Italy. Of interest to Herald Readers is the interview with our Founder and Spiritual Advisor Urizenus Sklar, republished in English below the fold by the kind permission of Mr. Gerosa and the publisher. (Yes, I know, it's a bit dated. Uri informs me the interview took place a year ago.)

Drama & Dismemberment

Euripides' The Bacchus and the future of SL theatre

by Night Morrisey

Agave sorts through a box of her butchered son's body parts, cradling his severed head

I must admit... I approached the MUSOFYR Productions recent staging of Euripides' The Baccus with serious skepticism. I'm a theatre major - a degree that left me spectacularly equipped for my original career as a waitress. All the same, I have devoted many of the best years of my life toiling devotedly in this most personal of art forms. Endless classes and workshops, readings and rehearsals, all in pursuit of that glorious moment where lights, music, and lines disappear, and it's just real.

But theatre in Second Life? As much as I love the art form, I just wasn't sure. Of course, through voice, actors could bring the lines to life. But in my mind, so much would be lost to the awkward bumblings and vacant stares of the avatars themselves, because the best AO's in the metaverse still can't come close to capturing the deep emotion and meaning held within a single human glance.

But the performance was surprising. Quite frankly, it worked. Not in the way I was used to, not in the way I had thought, but it worked nonetheless. And honestly…I can't even completely say why. There was a power and profound resonance that caught me completely off guard. So in an attempt to get my head around this remarkable emerging art form, I met for a conversation with Director Phorkyad Acropolis. I hit him with the same tough questions I had before seeing the production, in the hopes that his answers would shed some light on why and how SL theatre works, and its potential for the future.

Does Autism Speak in SL?

Metaverse is a battleground for Autism Speaks and Autism Speaks Doesn’t Speak For Me groups

by Violet McGinnis

There are two sides to every coin. Granted, you won’t often find the tails side of a coin loudly denouncing the actions of the head side; that’s where the analogy rings untrue, especially in the case of the heated battle between one national organization and it’s greatest detractor in Second Life.

Autism Speaks is an organization that supports research into the causes and treatments of autism, as well as finding a cure for autism. They’ve merged several autism organizations from all over the country and are heading up several projects. Some such projects are the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, a DNA repository and family registry of genetic information, as well as the Autism Tissue Program, a network of researchers that studies brain tissue donated for autistic research.

Autism Speaks Doesn’t Speak For Me is an organization that believes that autism is not negative and not necessarily a disability. They state:

We know that autism is not a disease, and we oppose any attempts to "cure" someone of an autism spectrum condition, or any attempts to make them 'normal' against their will.

The autism spectrum they refer to ranges from high-functioning autistics (such as those with Asperger’s) to the lowest-functioning types at the other end.

Why Griefing = Drama: Broken Immersion

A virtual “world” creates an environment where griefers can do the most damage

by Mudkips Acronym

[I recently invited the founder and retired leader of the notorious PN invasion/griefing group to write an expanded version of his recent thesis on the serious business of griefing. Here is his response - the Editrix]

“Griefing” takes many forms in Second Life, but the results are the same. There are dozens if not hundreds of “anti-griefing” groups, all devoted to filing abuse reports, I guess. Why does griefing and trolling ignite so much drama and controversy in online communities? And why do griefing actions get an amused or positive response from people not in those communites? The answer is simple: griefing exacts the toll that it does on Second Life for example, because it breaks the immersive experience users have - or attempt to have - in “virtual worlds”.

There are a few different types of immersion we should differentiate before proceeding. First off, a movie, game, or other “alternate-reality” has a set maximum immersion. For example, an action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger may be expected to have less immersion than a drama or romance film. We expect Arnold to be able to fly over tractor-trailers on a motorcycle, and we do not question this when it happens, even though the scene violates all we know about physics - and common sense! We can't get too caught up in this concept: of course, we can be “immersed” in this movie while still maintaining a suspension of disbelief. However, it takes much more work to immerse yourself in a medium where often events are surreal: I call this phenomenon absurdity. A film that is in a normally “serious” genre often has high maximum immersion, so if it does not deliver on its implicit claims to reject absurdity, the viewer will find the film laughably horrible. This is one of the reasons parody series, like Austin Powers and Scary Movie, tend to do well in theaters alongside the very movies they mock.

---

Second Life has unwittingly set itself up for disruption

---

How does this relate to Second Life? As a self-proclaimed and marketed “metaverse”, Second Life raises the bar on its claim to immersion. Expectations are high of an experience that parallels real life. With banks, land ownership, and many other institutions that exist in “meatspace”, Second Life succeeds in delivering on many of its goals. However, by attempting to parallel real-life and create a immersive experience, Second Life has unwittingly set itself up for disruption. As immersion increases, toleration of absurdity or surrealism proportionally decreases. Even more damning is that in games, users are much more disillusioned when confronted with the absurd, because they have put their own time and energy into constructing the medium. In movies, one is not an active participant, and therefore has much less to lose from the surreal.

Mony Mayfly: A Story of Addiction

by Sigmund Leominster

This night I learned a bitter-sweet lesson. I learned that five hugs equal one kiss. And one kiss equals goodbye. But this is not a story about me. It’s a story about an addict and, to some extent, about every one of you reading. You’ll recognize aspects of yourself in this narrative and if you’re lucky, you’ll avoid some pain and suffering.

I didn’t use the word addict. My friend did. Mony Markova. Say the name over and over and it sounds like a murmuring mantra. Like all of us in Second Life she is distractingly beautiful. The trick, as always, is to peel away the skin and find the attraction beneath. It’s a shallow way to experience Second Life if all you want to do is read the glossy covers. And despite what people try to tell you, it isn’t a Game. It’s far more serious than that.

Mony wanted to tell her story to someone before she left. And she decided to leave because she had come to realize that she had lost control of her ability to stride effortlessly between the two worlds – Real Life and Second Life. She is not the only person to face this real and frightening problem.

On her last night, she came to me and I told her the first three lines of this article. I had suspected for a few weeks that something like this was about to happen and had already scribbled down those words.

“Noooo!” she said, “it is not that! U want me to cry?”

What Scares Me In SL?

Players who treat others as toys

by Aurel Miles

dancing in fear

When I came to SL I assumed I was not afraid of anything here. After all, it never gets cold, you can't starve to death. You can look as you please, go where you want and nobody can injure you. Play lemming as many times as you want - not a scratch. The worst thing that can happen to you here is that you might have someone push you or get hit-up by some noobie jerk begging for money. Even if you die, you just get sent home. And you can fly. 


So what's scary in flatland? There’s the "I am Legend" sim where you can run around gnashing your teeth as an infected zombie/vampire or run around trying to avoid getting killed by packs of roaming zombie/vampires. There are the capture sims, where consenting adults do things to each other that I cannot bear to think about but that apparently give them pleasure. There are the diaper sims that scare me out of my wits and the kid themed sims that raise my hackles and turn me into a would-be Joan of Arc.

There are mazes and shooter games and possibly overspending. As a person who has a rule about bringing money into SL I wouldn't know about that but I have heard a few stories. And then there's sex.

I have been writing about SL sex long enough now that he thought of two people describing whatever they can imagine to each other over instant message no longer holds any mystery for me. Ditto the idea of cartoon avatars shagging in every position physically possible (and a few that surely aren't.) The act itself no longer raises an eyebrow with me.

I took a long walk around SL late one Friday night. I went alone and I went to the scariest places I could find.

So I'll tell you what scares me in SL. It's You.

Second Life as Prison Life

Podgorecki and the original Second Life

by Urizenus Sklar, post-Prokofy FIC watch bureau

You may have thought that Philip pulled the name “Second Life” out of the aether, and maybe he did, but he wasn't the first. Today I was reading about a Polish sociologist named Adam Podgorecki, and the Prok bells in my head went off. Here is why. Podgorecki, banished to Canada (can it get any worse!) by the Polish communists, did a study of Polish prison life, and he referred to the emerging prison culture as “Second Life.” So you see, Second Life was really prison life. But surely that Second Life was different from *our* second life! Well...

SL Relationship Ethics - Anonymity, Timezones, & Spybots

Ethics Roundtable Topic One

by Victorria Paine

Following the Op/Ed I wrote last week about appropriate ethics in our virtual environment, this is the first of an occasional series of articles focusing on one specific ethical issue at a time – something that I hope will allow for more in-depth discussion of each topic.

I've decided to start with the issue of virtual relationships, simply because they attract so much attention, both inside SL and in the various hot button debates here and in other blogs and forums. But before I start, I'd like to define what I mean by "virtual relationship". What I mean by that term is a relationship that began in the virtual world, and plays itself out in the virtual world.

So when I speak of "virtual world relationship ethics", what I mean to discuss are ethical questions relating to those virtual relationships themselves, and not the interface between these virtual relationships and any relationships that the avatar's typist may have in the material world. Those kinds of issues – such as spillover impact of virtual relationships on material world ones – are important, but are different from what I want to address here. Here I want to focus on ethical considerations intrinsic to the virtual relationship in itself, without regard to material world spillover concerns – a significant and important topic best left for another discussion.

I also think that many of the aspects of a virtual relationship – communication, honesty, trust, reliability, loyalty and the like – are essentially similar to what one might expect in a material world context, so I won't really be addressing them. Instead, I'd like to talk about a few areas that are particular to virtual world relationships to open up the table for a discussion about some of the issues presented by them.

Second Life as Temporary Autonomous Zone

By Urizenus Sklar

Coming on the heels of the Linden's recent excessively broad and vague definition of the "broadly offensive", the hand wringing about the Leather and Lace Ball at the Second Life Community Convention got me thinking about Hakim Bey's fringe culture classic, Temporary Autonomous Zones. Bey’s headline idea was how Temporary Autonomous Zones are liberated places where people can carry on festal activities so long as they occupy hidden cracks in the net. If they become too visible they are squashed out of existence by the State. To survive, the residents must, like nomads, fold up their tents and move on. The question is, has the Second Life Subculture become too visible? Will it be squashed out of existence? Will Second Lifers, like 21st century nomads, soon have to fold up their tents and move on to hidden corners of the metaverse?

The Bare Facts: Nudism in Second Life

by Lisae Boucher

[After the Herald's recent story on closer scrutiny by Linden Lab of images that might be considered "broadly offensive," we were contracted by Lisae Boucher (mentioned in the article), who asked to weigh in on a related issue: the practice of non-sexual nudism in Second Life. Here, she looks at how the virtual practice relates to the real thing, and bring up some cultural differences that prevail between Europe and America. Enjoy. Although not at work.
--Walker Spaight]

Let's start with one important quote: "Nudity is a taboo in America because we primarily equate nudity or nakedness with sexuality and we have taboos about sexuality," said Matthew Westra, a psychology professor at Longview Community College in Missouri. (All quotes in this article reference this National Geographic story. -- Ed.) "A lot of it has to do, I think, with the Puritan and Victorian heritage that we have, which says that any kind of temptation will lead you into hell." According to the same article, a recent national poll found that 80 percent of the U.S. public feels it's okay to have a nude beach, as long as it is marked by a sign, while 25 percent of adults polled said they'd gone skinny-dipping in mixed company at least once in their life.

What do these statements mean? And what do they have to do with Second Life? It seems that Americans value the freedoms to live your personal lifestyle but also the right to not be offended by other people's lifestyles. In addition, that's about about 75 million people in the U.S. who have had some nudism experience in mixed company. Which is quite a lot of people.

Considering these numbers, it is no surprise that you would find similar numbers in the Second Life environment. Actually, since Second Life seems to focus on a mature audience, the proportion of nudity and even sex is probably a lot larger than in real life. In the virtual world, of course, mature areas are clearly marked. But how could Second Life implement a safe area for people who simply enjoy the virtual nudist lifestyle? Would it be appropriate to have nudist areas in PG-rated sims, for instance? After all, in real life, there are many family nudist resorts where you would have many families including young children having the basic clothes-less fun. There are even a few teens-only nudist resorts which are limited for teens only. These are just like regular summer camps but without the clothes.

Philosophy of Second Life, Part 1: On the Origins of FIC Ideology

(FIC propaganda poster stolen from Flipper's FIC propaganda repository.)
Being Uri, there are moments when I look in the mirror and skeet. You would too! Imagine being a supreme visionary AND an alpha male (although ‘uberstud’ is the politically correct terminology I prefer). But then there are those days when I read my favorite philosopher, P. Luddie, and I think “I’m not worthy.” This is about one of those days.

There I was in Amsterdam chillin’ with the peeps at Submarine – those cross media Dutch masheruppers (them that brought us “My Second Life” and – even better – Lou Paradis) and the topic of virtual worlds and utopias came up. A vaguely familiar notion, I thought. When I got back to my crib in Toronto I dug through my endless pile of P. Luddie publications and found that yes! He had pontificated on this! Back when Philip and Cory were still in short pants, and due diligence requires that I say this: Luddie, you are such a freaking visionary!

What really smacked me upside the head though, was how Second Life’s central social conflict was predicted back then– the struggle against an H.G. Wells style “modern utopia” with its elite class -- its Feted Inner Core (FIC) -- with their technophile Jetsonian gadgetry and their total Lack. Of. Moral. Compass… its modern roots in the California techno-hippie liberatarian ideology, etc. (Luddie even used the word ‘fete’.) Well… how could I not share? I offer the following for your consideration. Please keep in mind that it was written in the Last Millennium if published in 2001. --Uri

Touching the Sky

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Worlds, Planets, Universe, Multiverses, Metaverses (Yes, There's More Than One) and Deep Negative Hyperspace

OK, so I'm clearing away prims in Neumoegen and suddenly I see Michael and Nigel Linden have a new train, a dark-red, old-fashioned beat-up one that I guess fits in with the hobo build in Calletta at the start of the line. I fly after it eagerly and select SIT and get RIDE...and away I go down the Linden tracks, clackety-clack.

So I settle in for what I imagine will be one of those bumpy but fun rides on the old SLRR. I realize it is hopelessly analog of me, and I know I'm supposed to teleport and p2p and skin off my hair, or strut around with AOs, but I still like riding the rails of Second Life. Maybe it's the old beta-era hobos I meet along the way, their hands stretched out over barrels on fire, fingers protruding from hole-filled gloves. Their hollow eyes tell the story. They've Been There. I spot an Asian build coming up and the train bumps and halts and starts to give me messages. Then it starts up again.

I ride without event out of Achemon -- or nearly so, when whoops, the land falls away to make a gulch. OK, pas de probleme, this is de rigeur. I zoom around looking ahead...and notice the land is dropping beneath me. OK, it will recover. It often does. If you ever watch it from the sidelines, it often jumps over sim seams.

Suddenly, I look out and realize we are aloft. No, we are not in Soho and no, this is not a project of Forseti's. We are in the sky. And suddenly, I realize I am in a living, breathing, metaphor for the game of Second Life.

Fiction or Documentary? Real or Virtual?

Over a year ago I met art/documentary filmmakers Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita (Dellakino Arizona and Dellakino Omlet in SL). Kaori is from Japan (Tokyo) and Alain is from France (Paris). At the time they were working on a documentary-fiction about people who played the Sims and TSO, but the project has morphed into a Second Life project (details here: http://avatars.blogs.liberation.fr). I don’t know how the project has evolved in the interim, but at the time they were doing things that blew my mind, in particular, interviewing people about their online lives, but stripping out all reference to games and the virtual. The effect was, fascinating, surreal, and compelling all at once. My thought was that their project was exploding the artificial distinction between the real and the fictional. A great example of this is the following interview.

They also showed some of the interviews in game, and the effect of avatars watching those interviews seemed to magnify the already mind-bending properties of the project by an order of magnitude. I’ve pasted an example below the fold.

Lindens Name New Sim after African Goddess of Lag

"she slows down the day and night, and everything around here happens in a time outside of time"

Special to the Herald by Economic Mip

As I was cruising the new continent, I had the misfortune of running across a sim named "Mbokomu" which certainly brought back memories. According to several African tribes, Mbokomu was the daughter of Ngombe. According to the Ngombe tribe in of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) she was sent to earth with her mother, due to the perpetual annoyance of the father. Also according to the Ngombe tribe, she was discontent with earth, and disliked all things green. (Some go so far as to blame her for all droughts, but that seems a bit harsh. Also, she found humans and the mortal creatures of the earth amusing, but was dismayed to find out they had such a short life cycle. She had a very unique way of correcting this problem...

Virtual Worlds 2007, Report #5: Venture Capital and The New School of Athens

by Urizenus Sklar

As I reported Wednesday, much of the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference reeked of the anxiety of marketing guys and gals trying to catch up with the next wave. The fear was palpable. Why else would those people be sitting in that auditorium taking notes like they were Gorean slaves pressed into service as scribes? And all they seem to want to know – at least all they wanted to ask - is this: What is the return on investment? How many eyeballs do we get? How long do we keep them? Are they the kind of eyeballs that spend money?

Thursday I lasted for about 30 seconds of that. I walked into the auditorium – steaming hot and stacked to the rafters with suits -- and the first thing I heard was the interesting factoid that when you create NPC salespeople you want them to mimic the animations of the customer. Psychological studies show that mimicking gestures is more likely to make the customer trust and like the salesperson whether an NPC or a human. And it only takes a simple script to do this! Joy. What a brave new virtual world we live in. Would someone please penis this event?

Usefulness Is Dangerous

Blingsider, Tard*Star, New World Goats Notes are completely safe

by Bayesian TextBot

be very very afraid of games - and the Second Life Herald

Roderick Jones recently posted an article to Counterterrorism Blog entitled "MetaTerror: The Potential Use of MMORPGs by Terrorists". The article is primarily about Second Life, and on the whole compliments Linden Lab on creating a versatile and useful space. Of course, usefulness might not be a good thing:

"While the makers of Second Life (Linden Labs) pursue an admirable utopian ideal these metaverse systems can potentially also be used by those seeking to pursue a radical agenda."

Note: this presupposes that "radical" is a bad thing, but let's set that aside and really get to the heart of what Jones is trying to say:

"Streaming video can be uploaded into Second Life and a scenario can easily be constructed whereby an experienced terrorist bomb-maker could demonstrate how to assemble bombs using his avatar to answer questions as he plays the video. Using the decentralized organization effect, already successfully used by SL companies, the bomb-maker and his pupils can be spread around the globe and using instant language translation tools (available in the world) could be speaking a variety of languages. "

Ludlow Joins Shirkeyjerk

Hotspur, Glendower, Mortimer and Worcester arguing over the future division of the kingdom at Bangor, in 'Henry IV'. Painting by Henry Fuseli.

Let's see if we can reconstruct what happened. First, there was all the fluff and hyperventilation about Second life having 100k then 1 million then 2 million "residents", followed by much ridicule in the SL Blogosphere. This was followed by Clay Shirkey coming along a year later saying there aren't really that many "residents." To which we said "no shit Sherlock" but of course Clay was then feted as the ubergenius of the new millenium by Dan Hunter and other Eggheads on Terra Nova. This was followed by cries of indignation from the SL Blogosphere and cries of hyper-indignation from Clay Shirkey, and then the heavy guns got involved -- as when Henry Jenkins, Beth Coleman and Clay got into a three-way convo about it. Apparently the debate is about played out, because Ludlow is involved now, in part two of an interview on Jenkin's Blog. A few excerpts are below the fold.

Bearded Eggheads Talk about Virtual Journalism and Stuff

Henry Jenkins just posted part one of a two-part interview with our own Nutty Professor -- Peter Ludlow. In it Ludlow has some not very nice things to say about the Avastar, and some marginally interesting things to say about civic responsibility and virtual journalism, and also where the Herald fits in the magic circle ("on the circumference" it turns out), but what might be discussion-worthy is this:

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating "“only a game"” so much. If you google "“only a game”" and “Second Life” together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay – and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying “it’'s only a game” they are really saying “the rest of my world isn’'t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent.” Saying “it’'s only a game” is like saying “this isn’'t how things really are, this is just a bad dream.” People need to pinch themselves, because this ain’'t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

more quotes below the fold:

Ageplay in Second Life: Interview with Jailbait Manager Emily Semaphore

In real life, Emily Semaphore is 35 and works as a librarian. In Second Life, she roleplays as a 13 year old girl. Together, with Ian Manray (her real life husband, who she met in SL!) she manages Jailbait, a Second Life club dedicated to age-play – often involving cybersex between the participants. In this interview, we ask her about ageplay, her job as manager at Jailbait, what she considers the psychologically healing aspect of sexual ageplay, and what she sees as the troubling aspects of ageplay and society’s reaction to it.

Valley-Meme and the Crashed Drawing-Room

A pointy-eared polemic by Prokofy Neva

Robbie Dingo's Whisper Box Near Magellan's Crash

While it seems like a credible concept, the good professor's "new media" concept reveals too much Chomsky-reading, and not enough McLuhan. Far from having a new streaming interactive pushme/pullyou immersivia to replace the old one-way pulp-and-electron media, we have something far more broken and dangerous nowadays: an unaccountable archipelago of amateur egos scattered across the budding Metaverse who are all playing a grand game of Gossip. They flash memes picked up from games forums and group IMs and speculative blogs and amateurish podcasts and mash them into approximations of news stories as fast as you can push Blackberry buttons. In the name of this indy corrective to another evil -- concentrated media corporations -- they scorn the basic methods of investigative journalism and editorial accountability. This isn't just Wikiality; this is Wikiality 3-D, streaming, and with the power to fill your world with red ban lines and self-replicating prims as well as reiterating reputation-damaging falsehoods.

The little salons of 40 intelligent and sage conversants lovingly imagined by Urizenus would be a wonderful thing if they really existed in SL -- but they are more likely to be replaced by griefers crashing the neo-18th century drawing rooms and making coherent discourse impossible. And these illegitimate claims of "trolling" and "spamming" in fact are about an often viciously rigid orthodoxy that brooks no dissent, and takes any kind of principled position as a "troll" and any kind of self-affirmation or consistency as a "spam". Ever wonder why you can't post comments on Valley Wag and can't even find the button to register? They have a creepy Friendster or SLOG-like system of only inviting their special friends to post -- and their special friends who are confirmed. Nice way to get an echo chamber!

The Return of the Salon and the End of Mass Media

Pointyheaditorial by Urizenus Sklar

Denizens of the internet have long noted that many online meeting places have served roles like those of the literary salons and coffee houses of the 18th century. Online conferencing systems like The WELL and Mindvox, MUDS and MOOs like Xerox PARC’s LamdaMOO and MediaMOO, and graphical social spaces like The Sims Online and Second Life have become places where robust and innovative political, social, and artistic ideas have been discussed and debated. In this essay, I will say a bit about why such “cybersalons” are important, raise the question of whether they are endangered, and ask whether there is anything we must do to preserve them.

Spotted in the News: That Other Book on Virtual Worlds

The Economist gets down with Ted Castronova this week, calling his new book an "illuminating guide to these new synthetic worlds." We agreed back in October. If you haven't already bought your copy, now's the time -- you only have three more months to read it before the Doomsday Book appears.

Book Review: Synthetic Worlds

Author Ted Castronova demonstrates approximate size of words used in his new book (photo by Cory Linden)

Run, don't walk, to Amazon.com (is that even possible?) and order your copy of Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games today. For anyone interested in deeper thinking about MMOs than just whether the latest patch nerfed your favorite class in your favorite game, it's a must-read.

While Castronova doesn't write with the same juicy style that we all know Herald readers prefer (he writes for a more sober blog, after all), he does deliver just as many thought-provoking ideas, and has a lot to say about one of our favorite subjects: where these things we call virtual worlds may be headed in the future.

Castronova's view of VWs is deeply influenced by his being an economist. But he is just as deeply an MMO player, and he draws freely on his experiences in EverQuest and World of Warcraft to illustrate his arguments.

His perspective is very much his own, though, and not one everyone will agree with. For instance, use of the word "nigger," in Castronova's view, should always be a bannable offense. While it's reprehensible in most cases, I'm not sure all VWs should be so constrained. Such speech is not always a crime in the real world, after all. But then, we're not talking about the real world, are we?

That's an interesting question. Castronova is one of the staunchest supporters of the preservation of play spaces as removed from the real world (thus he's more or less anti-RMT for most VWs). Yet he also posits a scenario in which MMOs can add to people's real-world income, as already happens in some cases. For that to be possible on any large scale, though, game worlds would have to become work worlds. When it becomes more or less easy for many people to earn a living in the world of swords and spells, won't that world become as drudge-like as the world of staplers and sales meetings? At that point we'll start looking elsewhere for our entertainment.

Synthetic Worlds also has a lot to say about the potential of game worlds to improve the lives of their residents. Castronova even envisions a mass exodus to game worlds, should many people start to prefer them to the real one. That's a pretty dark vision, if you ask me. If the only thing you're getting out of the real world is food and shelter, there's something deeply wrong. Game worlds certainly have huge potential to enhance one's physical existence, but I'd argue that they will never become a substitute in the way that Castronova's book seems to hold.

At one point, Castronova claims that NPCs with exceptional AI could provide emotional experiences that might be harder to get in the real world. But while they could certainly provide simulated experiences of whatever sort, the mere fact of interacting with an NPC changes the experience. No one mistakes an NPC for a real person. If the NPC has been programmed to admire or respect your formidable deeds, you still know it's an NPC; that takes away from the weight of that interaction. That's why fighting another player is a totally different experience from fighting a computer-controlled character. There just isn't another person on the other end, as good as the simulation may be. And it's the other people that make these places special.

There's a lot to debate in this book, but there's also a lot to think about. Significantly, Castronova tacitly challenges Richard Bartle's contention that virtual worlds are all about identity. To Castronova, they're about economics and the joy of acquisition; fun equals getting something you desire. But what if the thing you desire is a gripping narrative that unfolds over months or even years? I'm not sure the economic explanation of virtual worlds can contain that motive. The economic explanation of the real world has enough trouble with it.

The great thing about Synthetic Worlds is that it attempts, for pretty much the first time, to take a comprehensive look at these things we call virtual worlds. Hopefully it will be read by more than just the people who already know and love these places. So buy it now and start reading--especially since you'll have to finish it by the spring so you can start reading Only A Game.

CmdrTaco takes on Blizzard.

There is an interesting story in slashdot, by one CmdrTaco, who was forced to change his WoW name by the game owner Blizzard Entertainment. Why? Because 'Cmdr' is a title he hasn't earned. Never mind that "Commander" isn't even a title you can earn in the game and never mind that CmdrTaco is this guys screen name from the dawn of time. CmdrTaco has lots of interesting things to say, but my favorite passage is this:

I don't think I'll quit WoW over this, but I will take away some lessons. The GM I talked to had a nickname of something like Lathanian. I found this disconcerting. If you were arrested by Officer Snuggles or found guilty by the honorable Judge Lawtron, it's hard to take that seriously. In this case 'Punishment' is being dealt. A real human is wearing a shroud of anonymity and handing out the bitchslap to a total stranger. That really makes the whole experience even more dehumanizing. In a massive virtual world, we're still people.

You don't see names and faces, which is why you'll see a 60 corpse camp a 30. When you don't see the real person on the other side, the tendency is just to forget. You expect it from opposing factions- but it feels different when it's the GM.

Herald Pundits Give Rise to Intellectual Hand Wringing

You may recall that some weeks back we reported the EVE Online heist in which a guild was infiltrated and $16K US in assets were ripped off. All legal in the game. Heartless Herald Editor Walker Spaight was overjoyed: "it doesn't get much better than this." But former Herald reporter Neal "Love Beast" Stewart wasn't so sure: in the comments to the Herald article he worried that some real life betrayal had to take place to make this happen, not unlike the old SSG infiltration jobs.

Now the eggheads at Terra Nova have taken up the question, framing it via the two positions staked out by Heartless Walker on the one hand and Neal the Love Beast on the other. Which side shall prevail?

Illuminating SL's Spiritual Side

story and photograph by Buttery Shortbread

Avatars of all denominations and spiritual beliefs have a new place to worship in Second Life, at the Interfaith Temple, built only about a month ago by Athel Richelieu, who is not yet out of his teens in his first life (though old enough for SL proper, to be sure).

The beautiful, pure white marble monument he built rises from the sim of Ambulyx. Inside this simple yet very functional worship center is the Ray of Golden Light, which, to myself at least, symbolizes universal spiritual illumination.

I observed out loud that it seemed a bit unusual for someone so young to be so involved with religious pursuits. "I feel more and more in my age bracket are becoming open to spirituality and bringing it into their lives," Athel said, "though yes, perhaps it is unusual in the United States."

When asked whether his temple was geared toward the New Age movement, Athel said, "Ahh no, not New Age. I would consider it to be for all faiths, though I would say there is an emphasis on mysticism and inner peace. Mysticism, finding God or Spirit within, is a part of most all major religions and cultures. Hence the meditation pillows, and such."

"My personal spirituality is very open," Athel continued, "though right now I feel my personal spiritual teacher and Guru I am following is Mata Amritanandamayi or Amma, a worldwide recognized Saint in the Hindu religion though embracing all. She has spoken at the United Nations, and has followers such as a former US Senator and Yolanda King, Dr. Martin Luther King's daughter. I would say my life centers quite a bit around spirituality. In my first life I have an altar in my room."

Athel estimates that the temple receives perhaps several visitors a day, but he is currently not often at the sim. "I am surprised by the interest it has received in such a short time. I will come here randomly and it seems like people visit often. There are some who like to stay and just feel the presence." One avatar who was visiting during our interview, FarindaFlyingdove Talamasca, mentioned that she likes to visit the sim several times a day.

Athel says would like to be able to hold daily services, though realistically his goal is set for three or four per week. He does not preside over the gatherings except to lead prayer and moderate to keep discussion topics on track. He considers himself as much a visitor to the temple as any other member of SL.

Given those ambitions, I asked whether he hoped to expand to building other churches in other sims. "I do hope to possibly build shrines in the future in other sims," he said, "but these will most likely be focused on more my personal spirituality and things I feel need focus, rather than Interfaith."

The temple is also available for weddings, committment ceremonies, memorials or candlelight vigils for peace, you name it. Those who wish to book the site can bring their own items for and someone to conduct the event, or request Athel's services. There is no cost for that or for use of the sim.

And with the holidays just ahead, Athel hopes that Interfaith Temple will serve to host a number of celebrations of all manner of spirituality. Be sure to get your reservation in soon!

Big Brother Linden is Watching You!

Big Brother -- more demonic and horrifying than even Orwell could have imagnied. (pic stolen from Pirate Cotton's site)

There’s been some buzz on the forums lately about the extent to which the Lindens monitor convos in SL. I’ve always just assumed that in-game communications are unsafe, but perhaps that is a bit of paranoia I picked up on TSO. Meanwhile, former Herald prodigy Neal Stewart has blogged the issue, and as usual we have ripped off his story and reposted it here. Read on for your latest dose of Neal.

"He's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!"
-- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

During a casual conversation in Second Life recently, a friend told me something which strikes me as, well, a pretty big deal.

I consider this person to be a source you can rely on. Their claim is something that I have never actually heard another resident suggest. If they're right, the implications seem to change the face of what law, privacy and government mean in Second Life. Will privacy advocates wring their hands in mass hysteria and reach for their tinfoil? Will griefers and criminals across the grids tremble in fear?

The claim is this:

Every word you speak in Second Life via chat or instant messages, is logged by Linden Lab. Not 30-minute logs. Not day logs. Logs that go back at least as far as last year. Possibly further.

Now, it may or may not be true. Although it's incredible, it does seem logistically possible.

So I posted a Hotline to Linden question (note: the resident I mentioned in the question is not the friend who made the logging claim). Robin Linden replied: 'Logs for chat and IM aren't permanent, although I can't say how long we keep them'.

You can't be certain whether Robin physically doesn't know how long they keep them or whether their policy prevents her from revealing it. I think it's safe to assume the latter. Policy-wise, there's obvious reasons why they won't be specific.

Less firmly, my friend also suggests that Linden Lab may log even more detailed information than just chat. Possibly everything from object rezzes to gesture triggers. The works.

To my mind, the first claim seems plausible but the second beggars belief. In any case, it presents an interesting opportunity to think about what these could mean for our second lives and the future of the metaverse itself.

Privacy
=======

Section 8.2 of the Second Life Terms of Service:

"You acknowledge and agree that Linden , in its sole discretion, may track, record, observe or follow any and all of your interactions within the Service."

Whether we're pottering along at Tringo, slinging arguments at a Thinker's discussion or trying to find a pair of sunglasses that will go well with our dick, we're always vaguely aware of that privacy clause. We know that if we were somehow to stray into CS/TOS-violation territory, that a Linden might materialize behind us with their x-ray vision or that an employee at their desk in San Francisco might receive an IM and invisibly bring up our account details.

In the privacy debate, the naysayers argue, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about". But I wonder if other residents would be at least vaguely disconcerted at the thought that every single utterance they have made in the past 8 months for example, is nestled away on a storage medium somewhere, in an office, like a fly frozen in amber? All trivial fond records, an indelicate joke about nuns, a whispered aside about how god-awful your best friend's new dress is. But the serious stuff too: Personal confessions, double-lives, revelations at an in-world alcoholics anonymous meeting, a RL affair, a tearful dislosure of childhood sexual abuse, embarassing medical problems, intimate exchanges, shared Real Life phone numbers, work and financial details. All frozen in time.

Is SL any different than the rest of cyberspace in this regard? How so?

Whatever the answer, as a hypothetical it's interesting to ask yourself if you would be willing to sacrifice your privacy if it meant that every act of harassment, every Terms of Service violation, every act of fraud and real-world crime could be traced and examined with almost God-like precision. Griefers, copyright-thiefs, con-artists, paedophiles - the whole spectrum under complete scrutiny. Would you make this sacrifice in Second Life? Are you already making it?

Crimes and Evidence-Gathering
=============================

Suppose that my friend's second claim is true - that everything from object rezzes to gesture triggers are logged. Imagine that Linden Lab were to investigate the virtual-world equivalent of the Kennedy Assassination. In their God-mode recreation of the event, they can determine the timings, they can tell you what the cloud coverage was like on that day, they can tell you where the sun was, the wind velocity and direction, the ground height and slope. They can tell you the exact color of the bullet, and can give you a complete account of the physics that took place - velocity, mass, gravity, energy, the list goes on. And that's just a tiny sample of all the relevant information. They could close the case on the chat-logs alone.

That's just a hypothetical example. There's a slew of real ones available. The really virtual and the really real. Everything from allegations of in-world Nazi death-camp re-creations, to TSO's virtual child prostitutes and RL physical abuse, virtual child porn in SL, the recent client-side hack and 2 alleged land-ownership group-dispute/scams (1 and 2).

With its limited knowledge, the public (myself included) has never shied away from making its own rulings on these controversies. But would it change things if we were to learn that Linden Lab was infinitely better-informed about abuse and TOS violations than we had previously thought? That perhaps they have ruled on a hundred decisions already, the ones above for example, with 20/20 hindsight, never once revealing the extent of their evidence? Would residents actually welcome our new elephant-memory overlords?

But what about the blindspots? Private emails and forums, IRC and instant messenger sessions. Are these significant enough to be worried about? To what extent is griefing possible outside of the Second Life client itself? And if so, is it even a legitimate area for LL concern? It seems apparent that if extensive in-world logs do exist, the Lindens would not trawl through them to investigate every single abuse-report. The limited time available, and the sheer volume of information, would make this prohibitive. But will the knowledge that it is technically possible, strike fear into the hearts of griefers and criminals in Second Life? If so, will they shift their tongue-forkery off the grid and into the spaces where LL has no jurisdiction - instant-messenger programs and IRC? And will they meet there the paranoid, refugee champions of privacy and free speech? Or just all the residents taking advantage of SL-denied communication features like temporary-group chats and stealth settings (offline status)?

Government Law and Order
========================

One of the most hotly-debated topics among Second Life residents has been in-world government. Residents ask whether Linden Lab can accurately be described as 'the government' within Second Life. They discuss whether residents might play a role in a global, in-world government or whether they should they look to ways of forming their own. And they wonder whether these resident-based governments could actually have any clout.

A few of them also wonder about 'resident review panels'.

'Resident review panels' are an aspect of the Second Life legal system that have been announced publicly but are shrouded in secrecy. You can read a bit about them here. In brief, LL chooses 25 active residents at random and sends them the anonymous case-history of an alleged serial offender. The review panel lets each resident vote yes or no on whether the offender should be banned, and provides them with a blank line in which to write a comment. LL reserves the right to overrule the majority decision and panel participants are asked not to share the details of the case with others.

One of the concerns I have often heard from the few people who actually know about these resident review panels, is that the alleged offender has no chance to present a defense. LL's response seems to be that the facts of the violations themselves are not open to question. All they're interested in finding out is whether the residents think that the violations warrant a permanent ban. But some residents clearly see in these review panels the seed of a complete Second Life in-world legal framework - one that involves greater resident participation.

But this new claim regarding Linden Labs' evidence-gathering powers, casts all these law and order questions in a new light. Is a complete legal framework with judges and juries, prosecutors and defense attorneys, any longer necessary (if it was before)? On the other hand, isn't it true that court trials are not always about disputing the facts but disputing the interpretations of those facts, and the relevant laws? If so, how often might these trickier ones actually occur in Second Life?

And in any case, is a global, resident-involved legal-system an example of 'taking the whole metaverse thing too far' or will they be a commonplace feature of the virtual-worlds of 2015?

Robin Linden recently posted:

We believe that police are not the preferred solution to the elimination of bad behavior and intolerance in Second Life. The mechanisms are in place for dealing with people who are infringing on others' rights. Be sure that we are continually refining them and looking to find ways to make them even better, but adding police isn't the means we are considering. First, it isn't scalable, and second, we think that top-down solutions from Linden Lab are not in the best interest of Second Life.

Give us suggestions for ways to improve the abuse management system, or to improve land control tools which will ensure griefing is either unprofitable or no fun.

OK, you have my vote but...

/me edges towards Yahoo Messenger.

Commodify Me! Chapter 2

Thanks again to Clickable Culture for reporting on this little gem -- A breakdown of the way Massive Incorporated's in-game advertising works. Seems that not only are the ads placed in the game, but the marketers collect information about the amount of time the ad is viewed by individual players, the size at which they view it, as well as the angle it is viewed from.

Now I'm sure there will be a chorus of "screw me harder" gamers saying if we don't like it we don't have to play, but this "love it or leave it meme" limps as badly in MMOs as it does when we talk about nation states. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is precisely what Lawrence Lessig has been warning us about for years, especially in his book Code as Law. In virtual worlds we are effectively engineering certain values into the world. The question is, are we going to engineer in values and principles of freedom, privacy, and liberty, or are we going to surrender all of that as our lives continually move online? It seems we are on a trajectory in which we are gladly surrendering our liberties to despots with benign sounding titles like "Game Maker." But strip away the friendly title and we don't find a kindly toymaker like Gepetto, or even the Wizard of Oz, but something much closer to Big Brother.

Uri Chills with the Salonistas!

A Future Salonista shows us what we will all look like in 2020.

Last night’s Future Salon had its usual share of technical snags, but it was interesting – more interesting for me perhaps, because I had an opportunity to be on the other side of the discussion. It certainly gave me lots to think about in terms of using SL or any other 3D graphical environment for holding meetings. Obviously there is a lot of potential here – one can imagine far flung business execs holding meetings in these spaces, not to mention classes and, well, discussions of emerging technologies. But from where I sit we are a loooooong way from this being a viable format for exchanging complex ideas in a rich and meaningful way.

update: Zero Grace/Tony Walsh has his take on the event here.

Apart from the audio issues – I was on a cell phone and had no sense at all if anyone could hear a word I was saying -- there was the issue of the 1-2 minute lag between when I said something and when the audience heard it. This meant that any typed feedback I received from the peanut gallery was very late, and also out of context when I received it which put a heavy processing load on me while I was talking. It amounted to a kind of weird double tasking in which I had to keep up my own thread of conversation, while remembering what I said 1.5 minutes ago and then reading and processing the comments relative to time t-1.5. It was like joining a conference call from the moon.

Zero Grace (aka Tony Walsh from Clickable Culture) makes a statement.

This magnified another problem that I found with the format, which is that there is no way to read the audience. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I’ve logged in classrooms and in talks in places ranging from Bulgaria to Princeton, and I’ve always been able to read the body language of the audience pretty well. Oh sure, in Bulgaria a nod of the head means no, and a smile in Princeton means “I hate you”, but you can at least tell if the audience is paying attention, tired, distracted etc. Here there is really nothing.

Pathfinder Linen targets Prokofy Neva with his deathray eyes.

This problem requires reflection. I know that several friends of mine in psycholinguistics are currently doing eye tracking experiments and they are finding that being able to track the gaze of your discourse partner is extremely important in many forms of communication. I don’t know what the remedy is, but that is a problem that haunted this meeting for sure.

Robin Linen in a reflective moment, in which she asks herself: "Why oh why did I take this job???"

At a certain point I gave up on the voice altogether and dropped into chat, and from my perspective this was much much better. I don’t know how it was from the audience side, but I at least *felt* like I was engaged in a conversation rather than barking into my phone (“Is anybody out there?”). I know people are tired of Prok, but I felt that even the chat convo didn’t get rolling until I goaded Prok into peppering me with some questions. It was more fun for me anyway, and it got some other people to press questions as well.

Maybe an idea to try would be to have two or three designated interrogators – a meet the press format – and let other people chime in if they want to. We have discussed doing this before in the game, but like all things of the pixel the idea perished of bit rot.

The depressing news of the evening was that Amanda is all hooked up already. :(

I thought the other two presentations were great, by the way, and I enjoyed listening to them, but I’m not sure that anything was added to them by placing them in SL, except perhaps that we got to witness them as a community, and that ain’t nothing I suppose.

Indeed there was a fun sense of community about the whole event – having the Herald Editors, Zero Grace, Prok, several FICs, as well as Pathfinder, Robin, and Jessie Linden in the room was fun. But then as you all know, I am so easily amused…

Games, Learning, and Second Life

Terra Nova has a preliminary report from The Games Learning and Society conference, with notes from the talks by Henry Jenkins and James Gee. Almost on cue, there is an interesting related post by Zero Grace on Clickable Culture. It does seem like games are promising environments for learning, but Second Life seems disappointing in this regard. I'm not sure why, but it is worth reflecting on the issue.

Prok/FIC Wars Lead to New Forum Policies

The repercussions of the board war between virtual agitator Prokofy Neva and the Feted Inner Core (the SL denizens who have allegedly found favor with Linden Lab and constitute an in game Aristocracy according to Prok) has led to the announcement of a new policy governing behavior online and in game. Of special note is the fact that behavior on the boards can get you banned from the game – in effect, you are not just gagged, but toaded – and vice versa. The rationale for this policy remains unstated. Of further concern is the announcement that abuse will be “quantified” – good luck with that one – and a system will be introduced for abuse reporting. As our friend Zero Grace observes, this will result in “a system that can be easily gamed to achieve political goals.” Just think of it as the Second Patriot Act. By the way, Zero's emoticon was winking at me in an insincere way clearly "intended to insite anger". Can I bust a cap in his ass?

One Life is Not Enough

by Budka Groshomme

The brains behind Linden Lab? See below.

Three months ago somebody whispered “Ever tried Second Life?” When I hesitated he added, with a knowing smirk, “Come on, the first week’s free.”

Since then I’ve become a regular, but I’m not particularly worried about it. I’ll make certain that it doesn’t start controlling my life, consuming my every waking second, pushing every other concern to the sidelines as it consumes ever greater segments of my first life.

At least, that’s what I said after that first week or two. But that first rush, that first heady plunge into a universe of color and light and wonderful sights made me aware of how much potential it had to offer. Night after night I logged on, seeking to recapture that first jolt of intellectural, emotional, almost physical, rush of discovery.

And I was never disappointed.

But I still wasn’t really addicted. I found that I could go eight, sometimes even nine whole hours, without yearning for a bit of the Sweet Life. Just a little visit, I’d say. Perhaps a small peek would suffice.

Only a month into Second Life, I found myself carving time from my other activities to build my SL skills and hone my talents. Views of life “outside” no longer seemed quite so intriguing--although the resolution was much higher, I'll admit. As I spent more and more time in SL, I began to think of it not as a game, but as an actual, physical and mental location. And in many ways it is.

At the two-month mark, the thirst for new discoveries continued to grow. At this point I was no longer interested in merely being a casual tourist, but started reading the forums, hitting the fan sites, viewing the pictures, downloading software, and otherwise exploring all the ephemera surrounding the growing artificial world, environment, culture and glorious experiment that is Second Life.

The revelation that made me wonder if I could handle it all without my brain exploding was when I found myself in the wee hours of a morning (PST) stroking the keyboard lovingly and saying over and over, “My precious. My precious.”

I fantasized over the creative geniuses at Linden Labs, and pictured them in their pristine white coats and bulging brain cases (see above), musing on which wonders I, a mere mortal, could bear were they to further enhance my experience. I found myself posting pictures I’d taken, just as if I’d actually been somewhere besides locked to a desk, staring at images on a glass screen. I even, on one occasion, found myself pointing at the real ground and murmuring “Create, damn it! Create!”

That’s when I realized I had switched lives.

I began to wonder if Linden Lab had a twelve step program for avatars/people like me? Otherwise, how could I ever hope to untangle myself from the alliances, friendships, casual relationships, imaginary property, and other aspects of the life I’d been leading in SL? How could I possibly contemplate extricating my psyche from the investment of time, experiences, skills, and knowledge that gathered around me as barnacles on a wooden ship?

The deeper question I now face is the validity of everything I’d seen and done. Has it been “real?” Aren’t the emotions I've engendered in others in SL as valid as those in real life? Aren’t the dialogues with other avatars, in which neither typist knows the real person behind the avatar, as honest and forthright as a conversation would be in real life?

Or have I been like a driver during rush hour, behaving rudely as I never would in person without a couple tons of metal wrapped around me?

What I realize is that accepting the fiction is all that matters. Second Life is as real as one makes it, just as in the day-to-day lives we lead. Yes, came the epiphany, every experience was as true as in any other human interaction. It certainly justified the time and effort I had put into it.

So it hasn’t become an addiction at all. What I had been experiencing since that first rush of discovery and exploration was another way of making something from the world I’d entered.

More importantly, and far from being an imaginary world, it lets me reach out and make the real human connections to others that we all need in our lives.

Back to the Future Salon

The line-up for the next SL Future Salon has been announced, and it features media empire builder Urizenus Sklar (semi-retired publisher of the Second Life Herald) and up and coming cyberlebrities Amanda Congdon, vlog anchor of Rocketboom, video blogger, and actress, and Keith Halper, CEO, Kuma Reality Games, makers of KumaWar. Date is June 30, but location is undetermined while security issues are being resolved. Regular readers will recall that His crankiness Mr. Sklar had some crabby words about the last Salon. Is it payback time?

Rumors of a romantic attachment between Ms. Congdon and Mr. Sklar, although entirely plausible, have been denied by spokespersons for both parties. But we have paparazzi following both of them anyway. Enquiring minds have the right to know!

Interview with the Anthropologist

Tom Bukowski (no relation to Charles)

We know they are here. Philosophers, journalists, sociologists, anthropologists, proctologists… And worse! But what are they up to as they skulk around the grid? In this interview our intrepid reporter Montserrat Snakeankle talks to Tom Bukowski, who by day is an anthropologist at UC Irvine and an avid shopper at Fashion Island (ok, I made that last part up) and some of the rest of the time a resident of SL. Tom talks about research methods (both on and offline), and his new book on gay subcultures in Indonesia, and other things too!

montserrat Snakeankle: ok let's start this way: what would you like 2nd life readers to know about you?

Tom Bukowski: oh gosh - I'm a Taurus?

montserrat Snakeankle: for example: some researchers here say that their projects are shall we say, influenced or to some extent approved or disapproved by linden labs. what's been your experience with LL

Tom Bukowski: Personally I've had no problem with LL. I went through the regular human subjects review at my university, which is all they ask. And anyway as far as I'm concerned my greatest ethical obligation is to my friends and acquaintances here

montserrat Snakeankle: so you have not had the experience of LL saying that they want oversight of your project, you have not been censored or had any discussion of that sort with them?

Tom Bukowski: Nope - nothing like that at all. That might be because my research project is so open-ended, or because I'm a more experienced researcher, I don't know. but as I understand it (and my knowledge is limited)...most of the problems that have happened with researchers have involved undergraduates who weren't properly trained or supervised

montserrat Snakeankle: have you discussed your projects on the SL forums? because at least in one case, a researcher got noticed by LL that way.

Tom Bukowski: Not yet, because I still don't have much to say. That will happen. I'm just about to celebrate my first SL birthday but I haven't really got going with my research yet. If you notice the book "The Gay Archipelago" behind you...

montserrat Snakeankle: yes

Tom Bukowski: you'll see that it's coming out in November...

montserrat Snakeankle: congratulations 8-)

Tom Bukowski: ty … Finishing that book and my teaching load at Irvine has been taking up all my time. But I'm really excited about having more time in sl

montserrat Snakeankle: yes it seems like it would! what kind of research to you plan here?

Tom Bukowski: Good question! My idea is that I want to approach sl just like I approach Indonesia, with the same methods and same respect towards my fellow travelers and study the cultures of sl

montserrat Snakeankle: do you expect to have resistance from residents? You know the old "we are not lab rats" thing

Tom Bukowski: so far I have not had one problem

montserrat Snakeankle: what were those approaches, in Indonesia, i mean

Tom Bukowski: lol Okay now there are like 3 questions lemme see -- With my Indonesia research, there are important ethical issues -- I am studying gay men and lesbian women there, in a predominantly Muslim country. I must be very careful to protect their confidentiality. It could have serious real world repercussions. So I am very, very careful about that. The people I work with there respect me. Not once in 13 years have I had someone say "I don't want to be your lab rat" etc.. But I spent a long time there before starting research. getting to know people -- that is very important. Now on to sl.

There may well be people who won't want me to interview them or talk about them in my research, which is fine. Because as an anthropologist I'm trying to study the culture, not the individuals per se. And even the people I do interview or talk to, I will never use their real names or their real screen names, or even identifying info like "runs a great club in the Clunn sim" or whatever. Most of the problems that arise with research happen when people don't protect confidentiality. If you respect people, I find that most of the time they want to be interviewed, they want to share their stories. So my experience is that 99% of what's needed is just common sense and respect. That goes a long way

montserrat Snakeankle: i see. what about the problem of self-selection - for example at your meeting the other day, it seemed to me that people there were kind of stuck in a rut, asking questions that seemed very dated, kind of circular. how will you make your investigations relevant to present day thinking about tech?

Tom Bukowski: Ah, another good question!

montserrat Snakeankle: you flatter me, dr.

Tom Bukowski: For anthropologists doing ethnographic research, self-selection isn't the problem, it's part of the method

montserrat Snakeankle: how so?

Tom Bukowski: Our view is that while random sampling can do useful things, it has important limitations. every method has limitations.

montserrat Snakeankle: what limitations does your field enjoy?

Tom Bukowski: In the case of random sampling, the problem is that the statistical aggregate is taken to stand in for the society or culture -- wait a sec -- let me give you an example: let's say I go to Japan and I want to study Japanese. I do a random survey of 10,000 or 100,000 people. from that data set I could learn a lot about the Japanese language, but I could never learn to speak Japanese. Now, I could also go to Japan and spend an intensive amount of time with 10 or even 5 people, live with them for a year -- and from that data set of just 10 or 5 I could learn Japanese, and with that speak to millions of Japanese speakers. I would not learn every dialect, or every vocabulary item. so there are limitations but i would learn something broadly shared. so that's how anthropologists study things. It's always known to be a limited knowledge. but still useful and can say things that you can't get from surveys. So I don't expect that I will discover the "truth" of sl. But I can learn some of the broad patterns that are emerging. So you don't want to talk only to the same circle of people of course -- but "snowball sampling" is actually good because you want to learn how people interact with each other -- and with surveys you atomize people and their responses. (That Japan language example is in my Gay Archipelago book by the way lol)

montserrat Snakeankle: it sounds like a very interesting book!

Tom Bukowski: lol ty let's hope it sells more than 10 copies lol

montserrat Snakeankle: in a society as diverse as SL, how will you find the "motive" force, if any.

Tom Bukowski: I won't in that sense, just like in my Indonesia research. Anthropologists are always finding what Donna Haraway calls "situated knowledge’s"

montserrat Snakeankle: but it seems like there might be fewer cultural patterns in Indonesia than in SL

Tom Bukowski: Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world! It's big, so it's not that I think, lol. What I mean is in Indonesia for instance, I claim to have found a widespread set of cultural beliefs and practices that gay men and lesbians engage in... but I'm not claiming all Indonesians or even all gay men and lesbians in Indonesia think that way and in the same way...there can be interesting and widespread cultural things going on in sl worth discussing...but it's not necessary to claim that everyone shares them or that they are motivating forces. All cultures involve debate and they are almost never homogenous, which is fine and interesting!

montserrat Snakeankle: let's talk about haraway for a minute -- if you don't mind, because i think some of her ideas are relevant to my question

Tom Bukowski: Sure - Haraway isn't an anthropologist but she is very influential in anthropology. I know her and she's been at Irvine recently

montserrat Snakeankle: in haraway's book "simians, cyborgs, and women" she talks about salvation history and the garden -- yeah she used to be at ucsc, my native land

Tom Bukowski: I remember that, faintly (been a while since I read the book lol)

montserrat Snakeankle: now haraway suggests that mainstream meatbody culture for the most part clings to the idea of the garden and a culture like 2nd life, which a cyborg culture (although it builds gardens) on some level does not share those origin stories. what do you think about that relative to anthro research here

Tom Bukowski: hmm I’ll have to think about that! ... not only the garden question, but is sl a cyborg culture - because I think cyborg culture and virtual culture might be different things, but then again might not. That’s a very interesting question. that's sorta the kind of question I'm interested in more generally, very basic questions...like what does identity mean in sl when people can have alts or more than one person can control an avie? Or what does embodiment mean here in sl? That's a great question I've been thinking about and I should re-read Haraway to help me think about it

montserrat Snakeankle: the thing here is that identity construction is easy. there's no defined center

Tom Bukowski: I'm interested in a lot of those kind of big questions - language, for instance, is another one -- yes it's definitely different here...trying to figure out what exactly differs here from rl, and what does not, is a really interest gin question to me too. In my gay archipelago book...I actually talk about how I don't use the term "Identity" anywhere in the book, really, what I walk about are subjectivities and subject positions, because in the West the language of identity is really tied up with notions of agency and choice

montserrat Snakeankle: i think that's an interesting position. why did you choose it?

Tom Bukowski: so I think about the ways people can occupy subject positions in different ways the analogy I use is that we have a biological capacity to speak language...but no one speaks "language," we speak English or Chinese or whatever... and there will never be a gene found for those...and in the same way, our subjectivities don't just exist out of thin air...we occupy subject positions that form in culture and history... but how does that work differently here in sl? I don't know yet . that is a very interesting question because there is great flexibility here great choice, but still within horizons of intelligibility so to speak

montserrat Snakeankle: don't you think also that identity construction is involved with whatever fetish objects a community decides is important to it?

Tom Bukowski: Oh yes, definitely, and you really see that with the consumerism in sl, probably (still thinking about that)...but community is another big question....that's actually a very complex term that isn't found in many languages, Indonesian for instance...it tends to presuppose physical proximity, shared institutions, a lot of stuff. so here how do communities work? there are groups neighbors in a sim. all kinds of social groupings. that's another interesting question I plan on learning more about.

montserrat Snakeankle: i wonder how you define community in a world where one person can belong to 12 groups, say. do you define it by nodes around the prson?

Tom Bukowski: yes, that's a great question, and I really don't know yet!

montserrat Snakeankle: patterns of belonging?

Tom Bukowski: Something like that perhaps. I'm at this stage of my life...where I’ve just finished that gay archipelago book (and I have a contract for a second book on gay Indonesians that will be finished in a couple months)...and now I'm starting this new research project...and it's really fun to be in this place of having lots of questions but few answers...and what I find is that most people in sl are also asking lots of questions, and like the chance to talk about those questions

montserrat Snakeankle: well. is there anything else you'd like to tell the 2nd life community?

Tom Bukowski: Uhh...How about this... I'm typing off the top of my head here so hope this sounds good...

montserrat Snakeankle: it sounds great 8-)

Tom Bukowski: Because anthropologists do "participant observation" - that is, participating in the cultures they are researching...

montserrat Snakeankle: i really want to tell you how much i appreciate your time and good humor with this interview

Tom Bukowski: I think that good ethnographic research requires empathy, caring for the worlds you are studying. and I just thing sl is fantastic, and amazing new world my "research" doesn't require a build a house like this lol obviously, I love sl personally as well as intellectually...and I'm just really honored and happy to be part of this new experiment in human sociality I can't wait to see where we go! And I want to say that while there are controversies and grievers and all that...and you can learn about that easily on the forums lol my experience thus far is that...most people here are incredibly generous and patient...in fact, that's one thing I want to research, people who don't know anything about each other in rl share so much and there's so much trust and I find that inspiring in this day and age that people from across the world come together here and what you find, overwhelmingly, is trust and respect. let people know they can come here anytime just to hang to or learn more about me

montserrat Snakeankle: thanks, i will do that...

Tom Bukowski: kewl

Another Meeting. Another Post-Literate Future.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of the SL Future Salon, organized by Jeffrey Paffendorf (SNOOPYbrown Zamboni ) of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. The idea of the SL Future Salon is to bring clever futurists (and presentists?) together in SL to discuss the shape of things to come. This round the speakers were Betsy Book (Skyllar Skidoo) of Terra Nova and Virtual World Review fame, Clark Aldrich (author of Learning by Doing), and Julian Lombardi of the Croquet Project. SL seems a natural setting for such a discussion, but as we soon learned, the technical limits of SL become painfully salient – so much so that they distracted from the content of the discussion, which is perhaps just as well, given the content of the talks and hopeless chatter from the peanut gallery (self included).

Clark Aldrich (Clark Waves), Jeffrey Paffendorf (SNOOPYbrown Zamboni) and Betsy Book (Skyllar Skidoo)

As with the last meeting of this group of bleeding edge technological leaders, the meeting was plagued with technological problems. It took about an hour just to get the audio feed, and then there was a one minute delay between in-world events and the audio. It *was* interesting to see how the introduction of audio halfway into the meeting changed the complexion of the event. I’m sure the first speaker (Aldrich) was frustrated with trying to communicate anything by typing to a crowd of attention ho’s like yours truly. I had to do that once to an SL group know as The Thinkers and I found it pretty much impossible to communicate anything of value. Oddly, though, when the audio came on it didn’t seem to help that much – it just changed everything to a different kind of bad.

The peanut gallery

The Aldrich part of the presentation is worth reflecting on at length, since the content seemed to mirror the situation we were in – trying to harness technology for more effective modes of communication and learning. The basic project is reasonable enough and to some level of granularity almost certainly true, but could we please have a moratorium on these brain dead slogans about how books are so passé and we are in a post-literate phase of learning?

Aldrich has written a couple books, but you would think from the talk that those are the only books that he’s read. In any case his idea of what books are and what they do was utterly foreign to me. Somehow he has it in his head that books are devices for the communication of lines of information. Read the sentence, comprehend the sentence, store the sentence.

Now if that was your idea of books, then of course you would have trouble seeing how books could be of any use whatsoever in the acquisition of problem-solving skills, conveyance of emotions, yadda yadda yadda. But how on God’s green earth could anyone ever come to such a bizarre view of what books are and what they do?

Books -- and written and verbal communication generally -- are notorious for inflaming passions, indoctrinating people into lifestyles, behavior patterns, attitudes and mores. If the only book you were familiar with was Perl for Dummies, then indeed you might think Aldrich had a point, but I do think there are some minor oversights here – you know, things like THE BIBLE and THE KORAN.

The issue is that books do not directly convey information, for the most part, but use fragments of natural languages as kinds of hints and clues, in conjunction with our ever day experiences and abilities, to convey ideas, feelings, and yes even abilities. What is conveyed is not IN the book per se, but is rather the product of the book plus the agent plus the environment. Books provide hints and suggestions that in the hands of intelligent agents with lots of real world knowledge and practical reasoning skills and abilities can result in understanding or acquiring deep truths and abilities. Nor is it an accident that written communications are able to do this with some effectiveness – the technology has several thousand years of beta testing behind it.

I thought about this a lot during the discussion, and what exercised me was not the thesis being advanced by Aldrich (which was a howler) but rather trying to figure out the source of such a monumental tragicomic error. The theory I came up with was this: You sit in silicon valley, playing with computers, and pretty soon you start extending the computer metaphor into your everyday life. You see books, and you think: ah, these are just like lines of code that we feed into our CPUs. You begin to mistake written forms of natural language communication for lines of code. Once you accede to this confusion you have begun sliding down a path of ever more profound confusion. You think: gosh, all this cool stuff I do cannot have been taught in lines of code, so I didn’t get it from books or verbal instructions. Books are crap! They can’t teach me! Books are just so…so… pre-9/11.

The audio came on for the discussion with Julian Lombardi, which had the odd effect of leading me to turn up the volume and leave the computer entirely, coming back every five minutes or so to read the comments from the peanut gallery (and maybe add some). Not that the comments were taken seriously.

I had been looking forward to the Lombardi presentation because I’ve been a big booster of the Croquet Project for some time now. I even hyped it in my presentation at the State of Play last November. Sadly, I didn’t learn anything new about Croquet here, and more sadly Lombardi didn’t have clue one about Second Life so any kind of comparative analysis was completely off the burner.

Croquet, of course, is a project that provides an open source 3-D graphical environment for collaborative projects that allows building objects, scripting them, skinning them, etc, plus running lots of applications (e.g. web browsers) in the environment. So it is natural to ask, as one person did, “What is the difference between this and SL.” A good question that was never answered. We did get a nice gee we should work together some day sort of answer, but I don’t count that. Also on my mind was the question I asked last November: if you have Croquet who needs SL? That was asked and ignored twice. Oh well…

Bettsy Book’s talk was sort of interesting to me for a while, because I hadn’t exactly thought about it, but now that I have I think I might be done thinking about it. She discussed branding of virtual merchandise in SL, with particular attention to FIC allstars Amiee Weber and Cubey Terra. The general impression I got was that branding strategies are going overlap in a major way with real world branding strategies – possibly to the point where there is no meaningful difference apart from the available color palette. Or if there was a difference it wasn’t made salient to me.

Well that’s about it, except for some comments by the “instant access” peanut gallery. It is really just impossible to sit there and not heckle, I’ve discovered, which is sort of cool. Everything depends then on the moderators and speakers to properly filter the stream of wisecracks and occasional good points. That might be an impossible job, it also makes it very easy to ignore the questions you don’t want to answer by selecting the softballs from the bit stream.

But I rant.

Uri checks out the scarey new skin of Clickable Culture's Zero Grace.

Even naked guys and anarchists are futurists!

Is Beauty Only Pixel Deep?

by Budka Groshomme

Kim Charlton fuels a few philosophical ponderings

Can one fall in love at first sight? Could the sunset ever be as lovely as the time you first glimpsed the girl of your dreams walking along the seashore, coming toward you, a vision with flowing blonde locks and tight bodice?

The sight of her immediately makes your heart pound and breath grow short. All your systems go on high alert as your little mammalian brain is thrown into high gear.

You suddenly come down with a severe case of fumble fingers. There’s a loss of focus as all you want to do is throw yourself at the feet of this magnificent being, begging to do whatever she may request just for the sheer pleasure of watching her every move, reading her every word, and gaining, perhaps, a crumb from her basket of affection.

But isn’t this, after all, Second Life? As everything else, her appearance becomes immediately suspect. You know that the “solid” ground you walk upon is nothing more than a pixel-thin skein of images and that the builds surrounding you are really just numbers. Everything you see is, in fact, just images on a flat colored screen.

That girl of your dreams, the one who has your pulse racing, is merely an idealized vision of whoever lies behind those beguiling eyes and lovely breasts. The person who captured your psyche with a glance is whoever scripted the moves of those inviting arms and legs, created her artful poses, and scripted every casual wave. You know on an intellectual level that she’s some young girl in Germany, an older woman in Florida, or, perhaps she isn’t a woman at all. Maybe she’s some hairy guy sweating over a keyboard in Cleveland as he watches his creation perform.

Or maybe it’s your own wife, girlfriend, neighbor, or coworker in disguise.

Appearances are deceptive. All we “know” is that someone indeterminate has created this SL image before us and is manipulating it for unknown purposes. Nevertheless the vision fools us, draws us in, and befuddles our visual sense on a visceral level.

Second Life is an artifice, a dose of unreality that tricks the very sensory organs that took us a couple of million years to evolve and which cause our glands to secrete their magic elixirs when we see something that keys the reproductive urge. We are, after all, visual creatures. We depend upon what we see to give us a sense of the people around us. In Second Life we can smell nothing but ourselves. We can’t use our sense of touch, and, sitting in our chairs before a hot game machine, we cannot use our kinesthetic senses at all. All we have to gather information is our own two eyes.

For paralytics, Second Life might be a blessing. Here they can simulate walking, flying and doing the things denied them in real life. Being deaf in Second Life might not be too great a hardship: Instead of being cursed with other peoples’ poor taste in music, they might find that a benefit. But being blind – there’s a real issue, for, without the visual, this world cannot exist.

Which means that, by relying only upon the visual sense, we cannot “know” the people around us. In fact, the very sense that lets us enjoy SL misleads us. In real life we gain perhaps 75 percent of our knowledge of people through our eyes. That percentage should fall to, perhaps, 40 or 50 percent in SL, at least where avatars are concerned.

Of course, our first impressions are often wrong. Over time and through interaction, a person’s true nature appears. We discover that they are kindly, polite, rude, dominating, argumentative, confused, naïve, or othewise. They are, in other words, human.

The same obtains in SL. That first sight draws you in, every exchange that follows clues you to the mind behind the vision and subsequent actions allows you to learn exactly “who” is wearing that wonderful, lovely, appealing avatar. Eventually you find yourself relating to her because of what she is, says, and does, not the way she might appear at first glance. This is as it should be.

As it should be in real life.

Footnote-In-Mouth Disease

Neal's brain hurts.

My virtual-world name is now footnoted in a real life essay by a real life Law Professor writing about the virtual-world tabloid journalist who is also a real life Philosophy Professor.

Welcome to the metaverse!

I've also just discovered that Josh Knowles at Auscillate.com posted a partial transcript - back in March - of the SXSW 2005 Panel: 'Blogging about Online Worlds' featuring Wagner James Au (Hamlet Linden), Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar), Tony Walsh (Zero Grace), and Jane Pinckard.

Highlights include:

Ludlow: Why does it [conflict/hate-speech] have to mean anything? These other guys tend to over-intellectualize everything.

Walsh: From a philosophy prof...

And transcriber Josh's take on our Uri: "Ludlow's kind of crotchety in comparison to the others, like a guy not totally buying into the hype and not worried about saying that. Which I like about him. The other panelists seem to have more of a direct interest in SL -- working for the company. L doesn't."

Josh might have some of his facts wrong but he's right about Uri...

He is crotchety.

Forget the Turing Test, How about the Paula Abdul Test?

In an extremely interesting post on Terra Nova, Nathan Combs talks about scripting dance animations on second life. I'm never really sure what Nathan is saying, but his post contains speculation that the animations have an odd kind of community-forming function. He then speculates on the possibility more unpredictable dancers and wonders if one might have a turing-like test to see if an observer (fellow-dancer?) could deduce that another dancer was an AI. I think that was one of the points. It's a cool idea and possibly more illuminating that the traditional Turing Test.

Here is one quote:

My scripts, as executed by my avatar, served to connect me to the other dancers and to the pulse of streamed music and hot hot hot pixels from those clubs. In the end it did not seem that the value of the dance was the dance per se, but was instead the textured community they helped to create.

and another:

what if the scripts were not so predictable? What if in their execution there a randomizing serendipity? Would this make them seem more alive? Perhaps variable timings, dynamic insertion of new moves, substitution of old moves... What if instead, the world required you to adopt the cloak of someone else's creation. In this way there would be a freshness and novelty. Life-like? Say scripts had to be traded blindly before use? Would this make them more real?

The W-Hat Birthday: Cake, Ice Cream and Murdered-Hooker Bloodbath (2/2)

By Neal Stewart

It's the quick and the dead in Second Life. The murdered hooker I found at Baku today is not the murdered hooker she was yesterday. Yesterday's corpse had character. A furry, she lay there with eyes closed and brows wrenched, as though her eternal sleep was wrought by nightmares. And who could blame her? But in today's new face there is nobody home. The eyes stare wide open with the good-natured 2-dimensional expression of a vacant, non-furry, latex sex-doll.

I guess that's celebrity make-overs for you.

In a crowded room, the situation was a bit different 48 hours ago...

Continued from Part 1.

*****

"Oh yeah, take it, take it hard" yells Loksr Mysterio, a W-Hat, pumping away at the bloody, avatar-less, furry hermaphrodite corpse. "Unf unf unf."

"The hand twitches!!!", one observer comments. Then, remembering it's a furry, "Paw?". "I KNEW I saw the foot move" says W-Hat Operating Thetan. Dave Eisenberg explains, "Yeah I made her twitch."

"THERE IT GOES AGAIN"

"I saw the eyes open and close once..." another W-Hat says, "Never saw it again."

"Wait, if her eyes are closed how can I stick my penis in them?" Operating asks.

"Stick it in da mouth," suggests Eisenberg.

Some of the other W-Hats have a go at the corpse. Several at once.

"They kinda look like a rowing team" one onlooker declares.

She's right. They do.

The Australian journalist Hugh Lunn says that one of the hallmarks of bad writers is that they start an article by just asking lots of questions in a row.

Because generally it ensures that they're not actually going to provide any answers.

So here goes:

- Should artists have the right to decide what context their work is used in, once it's been sold? In this case, does a builder have a leg to stand on if their avatar-creation is begenitalled, disembowled and covered in blood?

- To what extent can a group be blamed or held responsible for the conduct of it's members? And under what circumstances?

- Do these pants make me look fat?

- At what point does a private build become public? How many walls must surround it and how thick must they be? If it has windows, what is an appropriate gap to have between blinds?

- Is it valid to be offended by an artwork if the artist claims that it was not their intention? To what extent does an unidentifiable red liquid become real blood, red paint, or Hollywood blood, when the artist designates it as such?

One W-Hat criticized the blood splatter in Dave Eisenberg's murder-scene and characterized it as unrealistic-looking.

Another W-Hat asks, "How the hell is a dead furry transvestite hooker with two dicks unrealistic?"

This is the edited transcript. The unrealism has been preserved but some bits are removed for brev. There were also some parts where I explete and say out loud how much I like the build. These have been removed to make me look less like an embedded U.S. war-correspondent who garrottes one of Saddam's Republican Guards with his camera-strap and then storms the palace.

*****

Dave Eisenberg: Just to clear things up - It's not anti-furry [the murder-scene]. It's the only all-prim av [avatar] that I could find. The only all-prims avs are furries.
Neal Stewart: I've seen human ones before. Starax does some I think. And Stormy Roentgen.

Neal Stewart: How long did it take to make, Dave?
Dave Eisenberg: Couple of days.

Neal Stewart: Why did you make it?
Dave Eisenberg: It was a simple idea. We created an e-Detective agency next door and figured it would be funny to create a crime scene right next door and a dead hooker in bed is the classic crime scene and then we just kept on adding to it.
The whole point is to be morbid and ridiculous at the same time.

Neal Stewart: Who made the original furry?
Dave Eisenberg: She wasn't too happy about it. Lucah. That's why we're going to replace the hooker with someone else.

Neal Stewart: What are you going to replace it with?
Dave Eisenberg: Another hooker. Probably furry too. Someone else is actually going to make me one specifically for this scene.

Neal Stewart: How will it be different?
Dave Eisenberg: It'll have all the blood textures on it already. And it'll actually look like an over-exaggerated hooker with bright red lipstick and lots of make up.

Neal Stewart: Where'd you get the animations?
Dave Eisenberg: Made them myself.
There's also 2 jerk off balls. For more people.

Neal Stewart: Do you think Furrys will be annoyed or upset by this?
Dave Eisenberg: Some probably. But it's not anti-furry so they shouldn't be. A lot of people in W-Hat are furries and they like it.

Neal Stewart: Do you see how it can appear anti-furry?
Dave Eisenberg: The fact that I've used a furry av, yeah.

Neal Stewart: Why use a furry av and not a human one?
Dave Eisenberg: Because I can't find any all prim human avatars and I suck at making my own.

Neal Stewart: Would you use an all prim human avatar if you could find one?
Dave Eisenberg: Definitely, then people wouldn't mistake that it's a dead hooker.

Neal Stewart: Is this the avatar you always wear?
Dave Eisenberg: No, I just got it recently. I modified it, and like how it looks like.

Neal Stewart: What av did you have before?
Dave Eisenberg: Uh, lets see...
9 year old kid

Neal Stewart: :) Why 9?
Dave Eisenberg: Because it's funny.

Neal Stewart: Are you going to keep your new avatar from now on?
Dave Eisenberg: For now yeah. I like it. I change them when I get bored of them or find something new.

Neal Stewart: So you're basically a furry yourself at the moment? :)
Dave Eisenberg: I guess.

Neal Stewart: What do you think about Furries?
Dave Eisenberg: They're furries. I don't know am I supposed to think something about them?

Neal Stewart: Do you dislike them, like them, indifferent, what?
Dave Eisenberg: As indifferent as I would be to anyone else. It depends on the personality.

Neal Stewart: Who else helped you with this build?
Dave Eisenberg: A couple of people from W-Hat and another furry from the forest.

Neal Stewart: Are they a W-hat [the furry]?
Dave Eisenberg: Yeah.

Neal Stewart: Is all the red stuff paint?
Dave Eisenberg: I put the bucket of paint as an inside joke because Feem didn't like how unrealistic this scene looks with blood splatter and wouldn't shut up about it, so I just put a bucket of paint here and told him that it's all paint.

Neal Stewart: I see. So it is all meant to be blood on the walls etc?
Dave Eisenberg: Yeah.

Neal Stewart: There's some conflict between you and some of the other W-hats because of this is there?
Dave Eisenberg: Not really. They all like it.

Neal Stewart: All of them?
Dave Eisenberg: Some are indifferent. Some are worried that it'll get me in trouble with the TOS.
But considering how much stuff I see around SL...
The fact that it's in a mature sim and covered, I don't think there should be any problems. After all, it's just art.

Neal Stewart: What have you seen worse than this?
Dave Eisenberg: Disgusting porn. All of these depraved sexballs, this scene is an over-exaggerated parody of it all.

Neal Stewart: Do you think that porn is worse than gore?
Dave Eisenberg: Not really.
I'm pushing some buttons here.
However this is entirely fake

Neal Stewart: How do you mean it's fake?
Dave Eisenberg: Well like gore you see in movies. Gore in movies is more acceptable than porn.

Neal Stewart: So this blood on the walls is not real furry blood, it's fake - movie blood?
Dave Eisenberg: Well obviously.

Neal Stewart: So, what is the point of the build? To stir up some controversy?
Dave Eisenberg: It wasn't intended like that. And so far there isn't much havok going on. It started as a crime scene next door to an e-Detective agency, as a joke and ended up as this.

Neal Stewart: You mentioned before about 'pushing buttons'. Whose buttons is it intended to push?
Dave Eisenberg: This build is generally pushing the concept of what's allowed and isn't in this game.

Neal Stewart: I see, so it's a joke that evolved into a statement about art and censorship in SL?
Dave Eisenberg: No, it's still pretty much a joke. Some might take it offending, and that's fine but if it's covered, not many people will be seeking this stuff out.

Neal Stewart: Are you confident you won't be banned? Because of this build?
Dave Eisenberg: I probably will, but if Lindens give me a reason on how it breaks the TOS I'll tone it down, or take it off.

Neal Stewart: So how long has it been here for?
Dave Eisenberg: I think a week so far.

Neal Stewart: How is the detective agency going?
Dave Eisenberg: Well, we're still hard at work trying to figure out who did this!
Other than that the e-Detective agency is a joke just as well.

Neal Stewart: Heh heh. So, you don't have clients or anything?
Dave Eisenberg: Nope. It started when someone showed up claiming to be a Detective researching W-Hat. So we decided to make our own e-Detective agency.

*****

I stand there in the W-Hat Super Happy Fun Time Land and look towards the detective agency and crime-scene apartments. I try to see the blood through the blinds in the distance. Next to me, hovering in mid-air without reason or context is a photo of Al from Home Improvement. In a building nearby is a picture of Adebisi the rapist in Oz, the television show about a maximum security prison facility. There's a DragonballZ-style picture of Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald, who are about to do battle. There's a beautifully-drawn picture of a female Furry with huge breasts and a solemn expression, saluting with one hand and holding the American flag in the other. The cartoon is superimposed over a photo of the two-towers New York city skyline.

The audio-stream for the land is playing a song that talks about children watching inhumanity, bloodshed and violence on television.

"T.V. is not reality", the song says.

"Neal, for what it's worth," Feem Lomax told me at the party, "We spend an awful lot of time making fun of how people view us as terrorists/griefers".

He then paused to sing the chorus to the Facts of Life theme song. To win L$500.

You take the good, you take the bad,
you take them both and there you have
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.

"In Star Wars Galaxies, the Goon Squad used to run around making people sing the Charles in Charge theme when they wanted to join."

"Please step away from the vehicle" says the red and yellow W-Hat TERROR Truck parked near-by.

"Neal: We make fun of people who think we're griefers and terrorists. That's what all the 'cyber-terrorists' propaganda is about."

One W-Hat shouts over the din at the party, "Oh shit who is this 'Neal' fellow? I heard he likes boys confirm/deny?"

"In fact, we make fun of just about everyone," Feem continues.

"Do you make fun of W-Hat though?" I ask.

"Actually yeah, we do."

There's more W-Hat banter. One of them shouts, "FEEM LOVES BUTTSEX. HE TOLD ME TO KEEP IT A SECRET".

The W-Hat Birthday: Cake, Ice Cream and Murdered-Hooker Bloodbath (1/2)

By Neal Stewart

24 hours ago, the W-Hats celebrated their 1-Year Birthday in Second Life at their "W-Hat Super Happy Fun Time Land". "Cake and ice cream for every girl and boy!", read the event listing. In classic W-Hat fashion, a host of neon pigs, robots, smoking chimpanzees and wheelchair-bound Mad-Hatters laughed and danced away to Super Nintendo tracks and hilarious Japanese Pop songs ("shitsukoku matte masu... anata to nara Happiness"). 100 metres from the party is a recent build by one of the W-Hat members. It is a small room with vast quantities of blood splattered across the ceiling, wooden floor-boards and brick-walls. At the centre of the gore is a wooden 4 poster bed containing bloodied sheets and the disembowled corpse of a furry, post-coital, hermaphrodite hooker. The bed has 5 animation-balls; One where you strangle the dead hooker, two where you have sex with it and another two where you sit in the corners of the mattress and masturbate.

"It's my birthday and I'll cry if I want, cry if I want to..."

Call me an asshat but I have a soft-spot for the W-Hats. As their website describes them, "W-Hat is the non-griefing Something Awful goon group on Second Life." I've been a sporadic SomethingAwful reader for several years but not a forum goon. Believe it or not, the forum goons number in at 57,000 members - more than twice the number of Second Life residents. There is a lot at SA that I don't like or doesn't interest me. One story in particular that I recall is too messed-up to even link to. It would make angels vomit and then weep in their vomit. Having said that, I'm a big fan of Photoshop Phriday, JeffK, and feature articles like 'An Introduction to Moféism', 'Breakup With Girlfriend' and 'Getting Awesome With My Dad'.

So, I attended the W-Hat birthday party as myself - a normal but dangerously sexy SL resident. Admittedly however a small part of me wondered if Neal Stewart the Herald writer would also chance upon the next controversy to follow the furry-mimes, the WTC-build and the recent Pope build.

And he did... uh I did.

We did.

For the party, W-Hat member Feem Lomax built a special replica of the original W-Hat building: 3 tiled floors, green, red and blue, linked by elevator shafts. "For a group that is rumored on the forums to get banned a lot, there sure are a lot of folks here =)", Wintermute Mechanique commented. There's smoke and chaos, floating eyeballs, fart-noises, people doing hand-stand dances in a Satanic pentagram with a wooden toilet in the centre.

"I tekki wiki'd your Mom last night", one reveller insists. "She told me it was a tiny tekki wikki though", the other replies. Hovering over the dance-floor is a giant pink birthday cake with a single candle. Beneath this is an 'IRC link' object coded by the 'W-Hat Mother', Masakuzu Kojima. It's impressive. People outside of SL can enter a special IRC chatroom and the object will publicly relay messages back and forth to Second Life. This creates a delightful kind of anarchic tear in the SL 'Matrix' - almost a key-hole sized TAZ. As the party-goers dance, they're chatting with IRC goons like Taliban Bijoux. Taliban is currently banned from SL for a TOS violation ('intolerance') but 'Talibanta's' avatar-less IRC presence is here in SL. So she's here but she's not. Her messages scroll down the screen in green text: "I heard taliban bijoux is the only awesome member they had [the W-Hats] and she should be an officer or something I heard".

The atmosphere at the party is something awful. While the land-stream plays hilarious, syrupy, manic-cutesy teenage-girl Japanese pop songs, the party-goers joke and bait each other. A female dancer is naked except for a toilet plunger on each breast and a third sticking out her butt. The guests talk about a banned W-Hat, 'Jew Filth', whose avatars - including 'Jewish Filth' and 'Negro Filth' - apparently led to Linden Labs dropping the 'Filth' surname altogether [Note: This avatar was pre-W-Hat]. Apparently another player named 'Bukkake' had his name forcibly changed to 'Butterfly'.

"They may take our names, but they'll never take our freeeedom" one of the guests yells.

Despite the TOS-violation tomfoolery there's also some genuine sense of community at the party. Welcomes and friendships. Some of the party-goers have had a falling out and a few of the others are trying to calm them down. Or maybe they're just trying to avoid the potential drahma. About half-way through the party, Feem Lomax delivers an impromptu speech on the subject of W-Hat history:

"In the year 2004, W-Hat grew upon the face of Second Life like a musical chair festering on the side of a republican calendar girl. Immediately after the spaceship landed, THIS VERY HQ was created! It went through several incarnations! What you see here is a conflagration of some of the most important! Anyway so back then there was a lot of cool stuff happening and SL was kind of cool and we liked it! So we stayed here, and decided to make the place a lot more colorful! This sim didn't exist then! We lived somewhere else."

As the speech proceeds, Talibanta is second-guessing Feem via the IRC link, "Feem you're not telling it right". They conduct an amusing "STFU YOU WEREN'T EVEN HERE OMG LIES" debate. Feem continues, "Most people hate us. We can't really do anything about that. I mean, it's true. Half of us are complete assholes who offer nothing to the community. So anyway."

At this point Feem is apparently distracted by the land audiostream (an mp3 of someone screaming a famous anti-SA rant) and fails to finish his speech.

But I like to think that what he was going to say was, "And as for the other half - well, they're complete assholes too".

As the party winds down, I hear snippets about an alleged 'dead hooker crime scene' that has been built in the past few days. "It's gross", Mother Masakuzu tells me.

The official W-Hat position on the build is that the W-Hats do not have official positions.

The build's creator, Dave Eisenberg, is currently a red and black furry - apparently a modified version of the all-prim avatar that the corpse is based on. He leads me to the crime-scene in a huge brick apartment. The murder is next door to a mock W-Hat detective agency that has a Scooby Doo poster on its wall. The first thing you see is the yellow, plastic barrier tape, "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" strung up in a criss-cross pattern over the doorway. Inside, there is blood everywhere - on the floor and two opposite walls, and splattered on the ceiling. A bloody, severed, furry tale is pinned to the brick wall with a knife. Not far from this, the word 'LOVE' has been finger-painted in blood. There's also what looks like a tin of red paint on the floor. Blood-stained hand-prints mark the bed's head-board. The naked furry corpse looks like some sort of rabbit, white, with purple hair and green paws. Apparently it has not only female genitals but two penises, for good measure. There is a gaping wound in the side of the corpse, emitting an animated geyser of blood into the air. The knife is still embedded in the wound and the intestines are hanging out.

The kidneys are in a jar in the fridge.

Word spreads fast in Second Life. People are already IMing me claiming that the builder is deliberately trying to get into the Herald. But how can I ignore what some would describe as a 'griefer build' by a W-Hat member on the W-Hat's 1-Year Birthday? Particularly a build as original as this one. We've seen Nazis, virtual child porn, upskirt photos, sim-nukes, 911 and pope-assassination mockery (the last two from the W-Hats). But gore is new. It presents an exciting opportunity to debate media-violence, gore-censorship and the relationship between sex and horror.

It also presents a great opportunity to call each other fucktards.

Neal Stewart the Herald reporter just wants to be neutral and get the facts about the story but Neal Stewart the Second Life resident finds the scene aesthetically-appealing in some fucked-up way. Like the horror-gore in a Quentin Tarantino film or a Cradle of Filth clip. So the voice in my head says, "Stay out of this, just write the story" but the voice in my keyboard says to Dave, "You should make copies and back them up with other people".

While I'm trying to reddress this internal conflict during the interview, different W-Hats are IMing me conflicting reports. At the same time, I'm also asking them about how I'm supposed to get into the W-Hat group (apparently it's an invisible group - to thwart Abuse Report griefers). They're messing with me, telling me elaborate, fake, super-secret initiation rituals involving staircases and marmosets. It's probably for the best. I'm not sure I want to belong to a club that would have people like me as a member :)

Hillary Clinton recently slammed Grand Theft Auto, claiming that "Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them".

But at this Second Life W-Hat build, the murder is first. And you don't collect $50.

At my SL home, talking with close friends, the sense of identification with my avatar is quite strong. But at the W-Hat sim, after hours of talking to strange strangers amidst bizarre visual hallucinations, auditory insanity and general mind-fuckery, the link is tenuous. So before I know it I'm testing the crime-scene gestures and throttling and humping away at the murdered, furry, hermaphrodite hooker.

Now I feel dirty and am going to have to go into the lounge and watch my Little House On the Prairie DVD's.

But not the episode where Mary Ingalls goes blind.

So, without further ado, here is the interview with Dave Eisenberg. Is he a virtual satirist, griefer, graphical shock-jock, post-modern artist or just an attention-seeker?

Continued in Part 2...

New Scientist: The Walls are Crumbling!

New Scientist has a short article on how Sony's new Station Exchange (reported earlier in the Herald) is yet more evidence of the crumbling walls between the real world and virtual worlds. Of course we've heard this from the French before, but this time they quote a real live American Philosopher from a land grant university and he didn't use the word 'simulacrum' once! Woot!