Second Life Sketches: The Art Of War

Fri Feb 2, 2007 5:04pm PST

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.

Everyone around you is screaming for help. Fire fills the air. You can barely see a meter in front of you. Explosions make everything rattle. There’s the flat pop of gunfire behind an electronically filtered voice yelling “Get lost!” over and over again.

Just another day at an Infohub, a help area in the world of Second Life.

I don’t want to personalise the experience too much — it’s valuable to remember that that avatar isn’t “you”, and you’re just viewing the whole thing on a computer while drinking coffee and scratching your armpit. After a while in-world, however, you learn that to enter some regions of Second Life, it’s useful to append offensive and defensive programs to your avatar. In other worlds, you’d be a fool if you didn’t go armed.

Weaponry, therefore, is a booming business in Second Life. Some weapons come as in-world objects, visible guns that you can attach to your hands and aim like a first-person-shooter game. Some come as invisible fields of code surrounding you. Defensive mechanisms will light up in a sphere around you like the shields of the starship Enterprise when you’re attacked. And, believe me, sooner or later you’ll be attacked.

The range of weaponry is astonishing. There are lots of very basic free weapons available — you can get boxes full of them for nothing at places like Yadni’s Junkyard, and some of them even coded by Linden Labs employees. The majority of them, however, are designed by other users, and can come at exorbitant prices. High-end designers can charge you LS$3000 for a weapon, some twelve dollars American. These guns can come with eight different kinds of “bullets,” some of which are loaded with tracking scripts that will follow your victim around corners. Cheaper, and more insidious, are the “orbiter” scripts, that let you pick a local victim from a dropdown menu and fire them up into space. The more powerful orbiters will send your avatar into an uncontrollable high-speed ascension to a point a million meters up, at which altitude your avatar starts to fall apart and you have to log out of the world.

You can’t “die” in Second Life, of course. Weapons will either render your avatar unusable until you relog, or will cause you to reappear at a home point, resurrected and confused. Injury and death are really just inconveniences in a world you just view that comes with an off button.

That said: it can be a pain in the backside. And, as in the scenario at the top, it can be baffling and disorienting for the new user. If you’re actually there to look at things for a reason — writing a column for Reuters, for instance — these things get in the way of the smooth experience you need and eat up time you don’t have.

So, some while ago, I decided to look at weapons. The choice, as I said, is vast. There are immense warehouses full of bizarre ordnance. Want to induce an acid trip in your victim? There’s a box right there for that. How about bees? Ordinal Malaprop, steampunk designer in the beautiful Caledon area, has a handcannon that turns you into Nic Cage in “The Wicker Man,” screaming NOT THE BEES! Anything with the term “push” in its arsenal will shoot an unlucky avatar a lateral twenty thousand meters or more. There’s one inworld company selling nerve gas. Yeah. Nerve gas.

“AubreTOX is a lethal nerve agent developed for military use by aubreTEC Labs,” reads the text file that accompanies the object. “A single cannister will contaminate a 45m radius for up to 4 minutes with a slow-killing (or fast-killing, depending on your toxicity preference) greenish gas that goes right through shields.” This is, of course, far ahead of comtemporary nerve agents, which don’t have a dial on them to select the speed at which they turn your central nervous system into pig droppings.

Consider this: “While aubreTOX has a slight green tint and is visible to the naked eye, it disperses quickly and will continue to contaminate areas even after dissipating to the point of invisibility. Side effects may include loss of mobility control. Subject may find themselves unable to move, or moving without their control.” This means that someone actually sat down, looked at the Second Life operating system, and devised a way to replicate both the gross and fine effects of nerve gas. You kind of wonder what that person is like, don’t you?

The notecard concludes with the following wonderful caveat: “We at aubreTEC Labs urge you not to use this product to grief… This gas is intended for serious military purposes, and should be handled with respect. Using this gas is a very bad idea.”

Like any online community, Second Life contains people whose only goal is to screw other people around. On message boards, they’re called trolls. On Second Life, they’re called griefers, as in giving people grief. Obviously, AubreTEC agree that it would be a very bad idea to either grief people with this, or to use it to hideously deliquesce the avatars of griefers.

But let me take you back to the first paragraph. I’m viewing help areas, for one of my earliest pieces on Second Life, and the Infohub I’m in comes under attack. Fire and self-replicating objects designed to slow down and crash the area are all around me, and the two dozen new users in the Infohub are, understandably, freaking out. Cages are starting to appear — constructions that trap avatars. This has happened to me a lot.

I’d clearly be breaking the Terms of Service by, say, switching on my weapons, identifying the three attackers by their ownership of the munitions they’ve brought into play, and doing something terrible to them. The Terms of Service do not allow for self-defense and two wrongs do not make a right. It needs only be said that the three people in question were persuaded through diplomacy to discontinue their attack on the Infohub, and that I spent five minutes afterwards disabling the cages that they’d placed the very confused new users inside. It took about a minute to end the attack. But it’s worth noting that if I hadn’t taken an interest in SL weaponry for that blog entry six months back, I would have been in exactly the same position as all those new users getting information from the Infohub, and that the attack would certainly have ended my session in the world for that day.

There are, obviously, no police inworld. Sometimes, self-defense is all you’ve got. Before now, I’ve had to draw a weapon and blow people off my land to discontinue attacks. Look at that sentence again. It makes me sound like I’m living on frontier land, or, perhaps, like I’ve become a mad farmer with a shotgun. Is there a case to be made for Second Life as the lawless digital Wild West, where sometimes a man has to slap leather to defend his person and his homestead from the badmen and the road agents? It’s more than a little absurd. On the other hand, being ejected out of the world is a little more inconvenient than some freak running his mouth on a messageboard.

Sometimes, the users are Second Life’s own worst enemy.