Second Life Sketches: Digital Shorelines
By Warren Ellis
The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.
I still see Second Life referred to as a “game.” Now games, in my experience, come with goals. You enter a game to achieve something. World Of Warcraft habitually contains some 500,000 concurrent users chasing after very clearly defined goals: kill stuff, get money, improve your player character, kill more stuff.
Second Life has no goals, unless you count the continuing attempt to avoid the erotic depredations of hideously overendowed anthropomorphic rabbits. It’s an experiential environment, not a game environment. For some, it’s also an experimental environment.
In the Terminus area of Second Life, a team of coders are attempting to reproduce the beginnings of life. Eight artificial organisms, pixels and code instead of tissues and fluid, are emerging in the shallow waters and on the shoreline of Terminus, behaving according to the simple commands of scripted genes. Some of them even seem to have fright-and-flight behaviours if touched as you wade through the shallow waters.
Put a little kinetic energy into one of the flat eggs laying on the ocean bed, and you might find yourself jogged by the birth of some hideous spirally thing that actually causes a little creepiness as it tries to follow you around. Occasionally you hear a thumping sound, as a cannon plant flexes to eject a seed. Every now and then, you’ll see them eaten by a gridlouse. Last time I was there, I saw a few cannon plants of different colours. I think that was new. There are weird floaty bag things — that’s the technical term — in the water that appear to evaporate on contact with the air.
In time, if the experiment is maintained, the simple lifeforms of Terminus should begin to evolve. Even if they don’t, Terminus remains an interesting and beautiful digital art installation. (More information can be found at the SL EcoWiki.)
It also suggests possibilities for future applications of Second Life, which become germane this week as elements of the Second Life system are made Open Source by Linden Labs. My daughter is currently fascinated by Nintendogs — I’m not completely convinced it’s a game — which she plays on her DS Lite, wherein she appears to be breeding dogs along with her many DS Lite-equipped friends. They swap things between the wireless handheld units, hold competitions among themselves, all the while tending their electronic animals in a manner not a million miles away from the old Tamogotchi.
I wonder how many years away we are from a Second Lifeform swimming off the grid into a handheld game console like a DS Lite, to be taken out into the world, tended to, transmitted between devices and evolving in the wild. Such a process could even be a companion to Will Wright’s long-gestating “massively-singleplayer” game Spore, where it is intended that the digital lifeforms created in the game be uploaded to a web system for other players to download into their own Spore ecosystem.
* * * * *
Stress points continue to emerge across the Second Life system. Peak days on the web tend to be Thursdays, but the heavy concurrent-user counts on Second Life seem to happen on the weekends. You can’t easily Second Life at work surreptitiously, I guess. I went in a couple of times over the weekend to find teleport functionality popping in and out, inventory troubles, and a few alerts about same on the SL blog. The Carnage Island sim went down several times. Linden Labs must look like an urban free-fire zone at weekends.
But one stress point seems to be sneaking up on them. Land prices have gone through the roof. Mainland parcels seem to have at least doubled in the last four months. Most listed “land sales” are in fact island parcels where the monthly land tax is paid to the private owners of the island spaces, not Linden Labs. Rentals, in other words. Most of these sidestep the Linden economy by insisting you pay your tax/rent to them via Paypal.
In terms of in-world experience, it’s meant that the mainland has in places become a morass of oddly-shaped dead areas festooned with For Sale signs. The basic parcel is 512 square meters. You’ll often find them subdivided into 16 square meter patches sold off as advertising space. Some buy the patch, stick an incredibly ugly ad on it, and put the patch up for sale at an extortionate price — to clear your view or just get rid of the bloody thing, you’re invited to buy the land off the perpetrator at 1000% of the land’s actual value.
This is one of the new business opportunities that Second Life apparently provides.
The expansion of mainland prices seemed to start when the cost of running your own island was hiked by some 33% a couple of months back. There appeared to me to be a sudden rush back to the mainland by people wary of that hike being passed on to them through rent raises. I imagine that demand outstripped supply fairly quickly.
I had a history teacher whose favourite saying was that land is expensive because they don’t make it any more. In Second Life, land is expensive because they make it very slowly. In any case, a 512 parcel (which comes land-tax-free) that cost 4,000 Linden dollars three months ago is now going for 10,000. L$10,000 currently equates to around US$41. I personally suspect that’s around the point where most people decide they don’t need to own land in Second Life. Despite the title, Second Life is a digital experience and design environment, not a place where you shelter from the weather and eat food.
I have a month’s rental to go on my own mainland property, which I mostly use as a place to introduce people to the notion of exploring the mainland and other areas of interest (and stream in music from one of the best nightclubs I’ve ever visited, the DNA Lounge in San Francisco). Since no-one’s about to donate me an island on which to create my own cult compound, I think I’ll probably give it up at the end of the month, and wander around Second Life like Caine in Kung Fu. Only without, you know, the kung fu.
