Second Life Sketches: Worlds Within Worlds
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.
It’s too dark. I’ve materialised on a wooden pier, and it’s way too dark. I take half a dozen careful steps, worried that I’m going to fall off the planks into the sea, and a note appears in front of me. I am about to enter Toxian City, and these are the rules.
The Toxia region is just one of many RPG sims in Second Life. RPG stands for Role Playing Game, and the vast majority of people you’ll meet in these places are working in character, like actors in a re-enactment. Each RPG region has its own set of very strict, and often quite complex, rules of engagement. Toxian City is no exception, although its lengthy code of conduct can, for new visitors, be boiled down to “shut up or we’ll kill you.” The denizens of Toxian City are without exception staggeringly miserable people, deeply involved in the region’s peculiar feudal politics and, in my limited experience, spending much of their time threatening each other. The Toxian citizenry is split into some six groups, the RPG equivalent of gang colours — vampires here, Biopunks there, etcetera.
On my first visit, however, I happened upon a crowd surrounding a vampire player trying to call some kind of truce with a female member of another group. Said female member, in grammar one step up from phone txt talk, told him where to put it. And the oddest thing happened next, which illustrates how much thought these people put into their game. He lunged at her, and bit her. In real terms, I knew that he’d somehow put an animation script on her avatar. But what I saw was her character involuntarily sag and convulse under his fangs. At which point he switched his system to Always Run and leapt off at high speed like a goth jackrabbit. The place erupted — not least because all these players have a combat system enabled that leaves them victim to taking damage and “dying” in a manner that takes them out of gameplay for a little bit. There was a moment of shock, and then everyone drew huge weapons and took off after the guy. From my vantage, however, I’d seen him turn a corner at the end of the street and teleport out, the sneaky sod.
RPG has been around as long as the internet, from the old Multi User Dungeons to the more character-immersive Gorean areas you could find in any chatroom in the 90s. John Norman’s GOR books still exercise a bizarre hold over some people. In 2007, the American housewives waiting in an AOL chatroom to be humiliated by A Real Man have become what seems like an endless string of Gor regions in Second Life. Some of them almost appear like zoos to outsiders: notecards will tell you to Stay On The Boat, do not fly, do not do any of that scary science-fiction stuff, do not enter the Gor RPG area unless you are in costume and character. And since I’m not about to spend Real Life or Second Life dressed only in yellow leather thighboots and a length of rope knotted around my junk, you can be damn sure I stay on the boat.
Places like DarkLife, on the island of Navora, use SL to reproduce the experience of other, earlier virtual worlds like Everquest (or, as a million computer widows knew it, Evercrack). I’m there right now as I write this, looking at a guy with a massively outsized steel hand try to fend off a new player whose right arm seems to be uncontrollably windmilling around his own lap:
New guy: can someone give me money please
New guy: its for a backpack
Grotesque steel hand guy: (New guy)… you lose. Most Navorans don’t like beggars… and that “Magic Money” right there won’t win you any friends either.
Second Life is, of course, a natural and ideal setting for RPG, especially for those impassioned gamers who remain just a little too self-conscious for LARP, or live-action role-play. Throwing ping pong balls at a bloke in a monster mask while yelling “Magic missile! Magic missile!” isn’t for everybody. I’m also inevitably reminded of my friend Patton Oswalt’s tv sketch wherein he plays a LARPer in trouble with police, and runs off shrieking “Boots of escaping!” before being shot. None of that in Second Life. You can dress your avatar any way you like and become anything you like, thanks to the system’s rich creative tools — but that’s obviously just the tip of the iceberg. The people who came together to form Toxia and Navora and all the others have collaboratively designed and defined their own culture, from rules of engagement and political fiat to the hierarchies of submission and casual attitudes towards begging. It’s another facet of the unique advantage of Second Life — that it is entirely built by its users.
