Second Life Sketches: Please stop doing that to the cat

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 not often you come home to find people having sex in your house.

I bought some land last weekend to practise building on, because building is one of the central behaviors of Second Life and I should write about it at some point. So, during the course of the week, I’d spent a couple of hours constructing a simple underground bunker, associating sounds with flooring, erecting a blockhouse for a Stargate teleport mechanism and other basic things in order to get a feel for construction.

I went in-world on Sunday evening to pick up messages and to look for some music to stream while I worked. Materialising on my new land, I immediately noticed two pings on the “minimap” radar screen that’s placed in the top left of the Second Life viewer. There were two people on my land.

This wasn’t particularly surprising, as I’d put the land up for sale — buying it had wiped out my Linden Dollar account, and I’m not especially attached to it. But they weren’t moving, which was odd. Flying around, I realised the radar paints were in the blockhouse. The exit from the blockhouse isn’t immediately obvious, so I decided to jump in, say hello, and lead them out if necessary.

The first thing I saw in the blockhouse was the avatar of a naked man strapped face-down over a piece of sexual apparatus that presented his backside. I then realised that the blockhouse had been filled with dungeon toys. A couple of dozen of them. And, sitting on a chair I didn’t recognise, was a dominatrix with long dark hair, idly waving a riding crop.

“Please be quiet,” she said. “We are busy.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I typed.

“Go away,” typed the slave.

“I not tell you to talk,” the dominatrix tapped out.

Feeling more than a little stupid, I explained that they and all their objects had invited themselves on to my land.

“We will be done soon. Please be quiet,” typed the domme, whose name was Mastress and who hailed from somewhere in Germany.

I resisted the urge to pull a weapon and blow them off my land like an enraged farmer. Instead, I used the Land tools in the menu. You can select every object on your land that doesn’t belong to you and send it back to the inventories of the owners. Therefore, Slave Bill flopped on to the floor as his wooden sex horse vanished from under him. The Land tools also let you ban individuals from entering your space. If they’re already on your land, it takes a moment; and then they quite satisfyingly fly through the roof and are dumped on the nearest available adjacent parcel.

This triggered a flurry of IMs from Mastress, at first indignant and then apologetic and mollifying, wheedling and needy in ever more broken English. For a second, I considered picking up the conversation, because topping a domme is always fun. But no. Who has the time? And anyway, they were just a pair of wandering perverts (and probably both men) who broke into my house for dominant/submissive shenanigans.

Point being: this was unusual, but not entirely unexpected.

Sex is indivisible from Second Life. It’s an aspect of the broad freedoms allowed its users. Frankly, if it’s on the Internet, you can be certain that sooner or later (and usually sooner) it’ll be used for shagging. Across the sim from my new land, there’s a “nightclub” festooned with people playing at being pole dancers. I struck up a brief friendship with a pole dancer, an Italian girl, last summer, while at a club that featured a particularly good live DJ (said DJ offered to have “a Second Life affair” with me later, an idea so strange that I decided to avoid the place entirely).

In return for allowing her avatar to be animated into bump-and-grind moves around The General, she got paid Linden Dollars. Not a lot, but hers was a free account, which means the system doesn’t give her a stipend in return for paid membership. She could leave her computer running for a couple of hours, making sure her Second Life connection didn’t time out, and earn enough Linden Dollars to get through the week — mostly spent on styling her av and helping with the rent on the land she and her friends called home. Which doesn’t sound a million miles away from the life of a real-world dancer, subtracting the need for food.

That Second Life can replicate that sort of blank existence would seem reason enough to take a good look at what kind of experience the world is really fostering. But that is really the soft edge of sex in Second Life.

There have been attempts, recently, to downplay the role of sex in Second Life. Anyone’s who’s spent more than a day in-world knows those attempts to be disingenuous at best. The mainland is divided into Mature and PG areas, and any tour of the Mature regions will inevitably feature a collision with the sex business. A longer tour will illustrate how little of it is vanilla.

The first land I owned was bordered by what looked like an empty parcel. Six hundred meters above it, however, floated an airborne house designed to facilitate what is called “age play.” Couples would attend the house, invariably one avatar looking like an older man and one avatar designed to resemble a small child. The house was full of toys loaded with scripts that animated avatars, placing them into sexual poses and running them through looped sexual motions. It was, bluntly, a place where people could simulate having sex on children.

Using donated money, I eventually bought the parcel and destroyed the place. Intolerant? I have a young daughter. I have no tolerance for even simulation and roleplay where paedophilia is concerned. I also decided I was doing Linden Lab a favour — sooner or later, the current swell of media attention to Second Life is going to bring the simulation of illegal sexual activity before a court.

(Editor’s note: A Dutch prosecutor said this week that virtual enactments of child pornography may be a crime if it encourages child abuse. In Italy, this is already a crime. In the United States, the Supreme Court struck down a law in 2002 which would have banned computer-generated images that depict minors engaged in sexual conduct.)

I also bought and broke down the — and it remains hard to believe I’m typing these words — erotic underground toilet that later sprang up to the west of my land, where I found two peculiar Italians whispering to each other that they could “probe things here.” To be fair, the female of the pair didn’t look so thrilled at the dubious things the built-in animations were going to make her do.

Eventually, something of a sex playground accreted around my land, catering for every fetish you can conceivably imagine. And the traffic was amazing. There was dozens of people in there at any one time, getting sexual relief from cats and what have you. I ended up selling that land, simply because the region ground to a crawl — that many people in a region at any one time puts a horrendous load on the server and everything happens very, very slowly. And no one needs to see a man getting sexual relief from a cat in slow motion. Trust me.

The sex playground people — two self-described escorts and students from LA, and if you believe that I’ve got winged pigs to sell you, and the pigs are virgins too — bought my land within 24 hours and put something on there that I cannot describe on this website. I think they were going into direct competition with the sex club two sims north, which was helpfully named The Sex Club. They probably also needed the space to enter into a newer market, a role-playing-game innovation that can only be described as capture-and-rape.

I have nothing against BDSM or RP in general, believe me. I’m just saying: anyone who says that sexual activity is a tiny part of the SL experience is either stupid or knowingly lying. Further: anyone who thinks it’s not going to lead to trouble down the line is just an idiot.