Second Life Sketches: News From Nowhere

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 really wanted to get all screwed up on drugs in Second Life this week, but ran out of time.

Digital drug simulations have been around almost as long as the Internet. They all work in much the same way, and have been adapted for remote sex work by an apparently booming business of “hypnodomme” erotic submission specialists: compound audiovisual systems intended to induce a mild trance in the uninterrupted viewer.

I think it was Ash Scanlan who shot me the landmark to the Seclimine Drug Shack, saying “you really need to see this.” It looks like a well-kept squat. A couple of nasty-looking sofas, a big image of ex-Suicide Girl Apnea dominating one wall. And a rack of pill bottles. Popping the notecard out of the nearest bottle gives you an explanation of the score. The drug Seclimine is designed to get you and your avatar stoned.

While your avatar is staggering and lurching under an animation replicating the outer effects of necking a handful of foul pills that some nerve-damage case mixed up in a bathtub and probably cut with talcum powder and rat poison, motion graphics and audio launch to commence a hypnotic induction. The inductive system is intended to, from what I can gather, get you good and dopey, disoriented, and wondering why the walls are melting and the floor is made of meat.

The whole experience apparently takes half an hour. That, sadly, was half an hour I didn’t have this week. So go down to Seclimine Drug Shack and get good and messed up for me.

(Click here to read about Gideon Television’s Seclimine experience on YesButNoButYes)

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A band called RedZone had an idea I hadn’t seen before. They did a four-sim tour of Second Life. I managed to miss all the gigs, due to such un-Second-Life concerns as earning food money and using the toilet, but apparently they were pretty good. They did a tour of clubs in the cyberpunk sims — Gibson, Suffugium, Saijo City and Sprawler. Which I think is an interesting notion. If they made a mistake, it was in not varying the times they played at. I think all the gigs were at 4pm PST. The first lesson of any online community is that not everyone lives on EST. I’d've done the gigs in the evenings on CET, EST, PST and an Australian timezone, personally.

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Going in at around midnight GMT, I see that concurrency is pushing 30,000 people on a regular basis. There are signs of strain — teleport keeps popping out for me — but not as many as a few months ago. Also, at high strain, walls aren’t doing what they should. I fell into a dominatrix’s skybox the other day. After her initial shock, she began enjoying the idea of a captive a little too much, and I had to teleport out before she fitted something spiky and frightening to my virginal backside.

Land sales, of course, continue to be an issue. New land is being created with some speed right now, to meet demand and depress land prices. The “land barons” are out in force, and, in following reasonably-priced parcels, I’m frequently teleporting into land where the fee has already increased — bought up the second it was made available and repriced for profit. Search isn’t updating quickly enough to cope. That said, land is significantly down from the high of a few weeks ago, thirty percent or so and falling. If they keep rolling land out, things should be back down to 10 Linden Dollars per square metre in a few weeks.

Linden Labs’ next trick will be getting hold of the Linden Dollar itself: it looks to me to be costing more and more US dollars to buy 1000 Linden Dollars. The economic mechanism of the Linden Dollar seems to my untrained eye to be pretty rudimentary, involving crude monetary sinks and the like. The harder it is to buy Linden Dollars, the harder it’s going to be to use the world. It tests the enthusiasm of the new user to spend USD $25 on a small piece of virtual land: spending upwards of $50 on a larger piece that also incurs land tax on top of your membership fee can really separate the interested from the determined.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about teleportation this week. Partly because system strain has caused teleport to pop out every now and then, leaving me stranded in all kinds of odd places. Teleport is achieved by resolving a region name and X, Y and Z coordinates (the science fiction author in me still kind of wishes they’d called it “jaunting”) which constitute a “landmark.” Obtaining devices to teleport inside a “sim”, or region, is easy, and useful if you have wide or tall constructions to be negotiated. Teleporting from region to region, or “inter-sim”, with a device pre-loaded with landmarks is more problematic. Some of the inter-sim teleporters for sale just don’t work. Some, like Baroun’s Gate, work fine, but can’t be copied or passed on to others. There’s also the Stargate system, which is a copiable, free replica of the Stargate from the film and tv series that connects to a network of other Stargates. You can therefore teleport to all the other Stargates on the network, all over Second Life. You can’t, however, add your own landmarks.

Why is this even remotely important? Simple. Curation. Once the web reached a critical size, successful navigation of it required curation. People who took it upon themselves to sort out and collect links to the good stuff and presented them together for consideration. With Second Life rapidly expanding and new users entering the world looking for all the interesting experiences they’ve been promised by reportage and hype, curation will become crucial. It’s now getting too big to just wander around in and hope you bump into the good stuff. Web curation requires working links. Second Life curation requires inter-sim teleport. An easily-operated, easily-modifiable open source teleport system would seem to be required at this point. I mean, sure, you can load landmark links into a notecard, and that acts like a webpage, where clicking on the landmark links teleports you to a destination. But that’s very much a Web 1.0 experience, isn’t it?

With the sort of audiovisual power available that lets some freak induce an illicit narcotic experience in you, you’d think Second Life could do better than a links page…