Second Life Sketches: A Day On The Grid
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.
EVA Unit-01 is looming over me. Someone randomly sent me a landmark, and I seem to have appeared in an anime Tokyo. Unit-01 is a giant robot from the groundbreaking 90s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, a leering, horned thing sixty meters high and straddling the tramline that circumnavigates the region of Tonari Ku, Nakama. Jump on the tram and sit down — if you don’t sit, the peculiar inworld physics that allow complex objects to move will throw you off the vehicle — to be taken on a slightly rickety tour of the area. Some of it is still under development, so it may be a good place to watch how a sim-wide installation is constructed.
Much of my inworld time this week has been spent at The Wastelands, where the majority of constructions seem to be finished and stable for the moment. Find a high point — I’ve got a floating platform about thirty meters off the ground in the middle of the sim, you can use that — and you can watch the salvagers loping around the area, looking for the boxes of scrap that materialise over the region. Across from me is the Salvager, where the scavenger crews attempt to recombine their found scrap into useful devices.
Occasionally you’ll see two scavengers converge on the same box, and that’s when the weapons come out. Some robot guy will clash with a blue fox dressed as Mad Max, and they’ll pull wooden pistols held together with twine and crowbills made from plastic pipes and duct tape.
I also mention the Wastelands because it’s added a region to its west, The Junkyard. It continues the post-apocalyptic theme of the Wastelands, and some of the builds are even more beautiful and insane than the original region’s. One of them has a gorgeously designed buried hydroponic garden.
Penny Patton, who designs retropunk avatar outfits that remind me of graphic novels like THE RED STAR, has opened a larger version of her Happy Bivouac store in The Junkyard, and Anna Young, co-founder of the FasFerox multimedia project (), is involved in building a FasFerox temple there as a Second Life extension of the property.
The building fascinates me. I play around with building when I can, but I just don’t have the time — or, I suspect, the mind — for the kind of complex building I often see around me. I was never much cop with Lego, either, and, while that might not have stopped me as a kid, I’m now thirty-nine years old, and my Second Life concerns tend to reduce to wanting a better teleporter, more stuff to look at, and improved ways of hiding the fact that I can’t customise my avatar properly either.
None of which is helped by this week’s grid failures. I keep losing stuff. I pull an object out of my inventory to use inworld, and I wait… And wait… And wait… until I get the Little Blue PopUp Of Death that tells me I failed to materialise the object. And it’s gone, swallowed up by some memory hole. Which is even more annoying when it’s a device I’d just spent L$250 on. There’s been a lot of that this week. I haven’t seen the concurrent-user count go below 25,000. A year ago, that would have been a peak. Some functions on the Wastelands are failing whenever the count goes over 28,000, and I didn’t see the count go under 33,000 people yesterday.
Fine news for owner and operator Linden Lab, of course. The boom in interest is still running. What’s interesting to me is that it’s not the Second Life puff pieces that are doing it — they dried up a while back. The recent news pieces on SL have revolved around the weirdness of the world. Discussions about sex in Second Life. News stories about the Second Life Liberation Army staging “attacks” on the inworld base for US Presidential no-hoper John Edwards (the disclaimer at the top of the column means that I can mock anyone I like, so save your aggrieved email). The latter of which, amusingly, seems to have led to speculation that the SLLA is in fact covertly run by Linden Labs themselves in another effort to seed news stories.
I find this idea so delicious that I kind of want it to be true — the owners of Second Life funding their own art-terrorist group to harass high-profile targets in the pursuit of overall publicity. Of course, now that I’ve said that, they’ll probably target the Reuters Atrium next.
What all this means is that people are continuing to enter the world because of, not despite, what might ordinarily be considered dubious experiences. There is, in fact, no such thing as bad publicity. Does this speak to the longterm viability of Second Life, though? It seems clear now that within a year Second Life will have serious competition on its own terms: not from gameplay-driven virtual worlds like Warcraft or Eve, which are not operating in Second Life’s space, but from things like Sony Home, which are absolutely in SL’s wheelhouse. In fact, the few things SL offers that Sony Home won’t are in fact those stranger elements.
A day on the grid, with 35,000 people wearing their psyches on the outside and all the attendant unfettered freakishness that brings, may prove to be the one thing that can’t be emulated.
