Second Life Sketches: Happy Talk
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.
There’s the flat crack of cannon fire, and the whump of sails being suddenly filled as creaking timbers turn into the wind. Below me, two small galleons twist around each other, angling for the best shot. Three people on each boat frantically work their banks of cannon, trying for the broadside.
Fire appears on the golden galleon tacking west, followed by a billowing pillar of smoke. They lose line of sight on the attacking ship, which comes parallel and fires again. Another pillar of smoke belches from the golden ship, which shudders on the water. And then the stern goes down. Within thirty seconds, the golden galleon is sunk, taking its crew down to Davy Jones’ pixelated locker. A moment later, they all burst up out of the sea.
Pirates Of Second Life regularly organise sea battles here, off the coast of Sanchon. These people are plainly not well, and they appear to take winning very seriously. Last time I stopped by there, a woman was building a meteor.
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People are talking about talking on Second Life. On my message board, The Engine, people are wondering about the plan to roll out voice communication on the mainland. The consensus is that the grid can barely handle the load it’s got. People are still irritated by recent upgrades and rollbacks that have broken a lot of in-world scripted actions, software objects that do programmed work like animating things or accessing Second Life tools.
Recent breakages have included some teleportation devices, systems that materialise objects, and the avatar animators that allow groups to dance. Carnage Island, the combat region, is barely operating (I’m looking now at Armory Xtreme, which is less sophisticated but also far cheaper to enter, and its basic XCS combat system seems to have survived whatever’s going on with the grid), and the masters of The Wastelands are tearing their hair out over what the changes have wrought on the salvaging system there.
So, with all that: is this a good time to enable voice communication for everybody? Voice traffic is bandwidth-greedy, and when, as happened the other day, 37,000 came in-world and packet loss red-lined at some 20%… Well, people are wondering if voice comms will just bury the grid.
My own take is that voice comms will be adopted by the newer users rather than the old heads, and that, for people like me who tend to head in at 2am with the sound turned down, it’s probably going to damage communications as a whole. However, I’m well aware that not everyone is at as ease with typing fast as I am, and voice communication is probably going to make it much easier for some people, possibly a lot of people, to interact in-world.
People like me will end up in the Second Life equivalent of a medieval monastery, passing each other poisoned books and muttering darkly in subdued text about Microphone-Kiddies and multi-uddered furries yelling obscenities at the compound walls in stuttering packet-loss Portuguese.
It’ll be a terrible thing, to be old in a new world, living on Name Of The Rose Island and being sexually assaulted in the night by monks with Care Bear bodies and Sean Connery’s head.
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It’s only recently reached my notice that the Transylvania/Vampire Empire area has reduced from two sims (a “sim” being the state-like unit of Second Life, a region of some 64,000 square metres) to one. I’ve always known it as two regions stuck together — Transylvania was more open and spacious, social and residential, and Vampire Empire was the commercial area, full of stores. Vampire Empire seems to have vanished a week or two back, and everything’s been jammed into Transylvania, the remaining sim.
These are/were privately held sims, “islands” in the SL parlance that stand free of the mainland. The cost of maintaining islands was recently raised, but it was my understanding that long-held private sims had their old fees grandfathered in. It’s entirely possible, of course, that paying for two sims just got wearing on builder Obscuro Valkyrie and the central group there.
Still, it’s a little worrying. I checked a couple of locations on a recent list of “places to see in Second Life” to discover that the regions had entirely vanished. They had clearly existed before the raise in rates and disappeared after.
Transylvania is home to several large and interconnected group, with a vivid social scene and a tight community; they’re currently involved in a wide-ranging charity drive to help one of their members, who’s recently been diagnosed with cancer. They’re as bonded as any internet community — and having run an internet community for four years that produced at least three marriages and countless other relationships, I know one when I see one — and that kind of community relies on the goalposts not being moved around too much.
If Linden Labs are putting too much pressure on places like this in the process of gouging media-blinded corporations for their own expensive patch of virtual dirt on Second Life… Well, then, it’s going to quickly turn out that it’s their own blood they’re draining.
* * * *
Finally: people have been asking what my in-world name is. I appear to have failed to mention it thus far. Frankly, I was kind of enjoying wandering around anonymously and just mentioning my secret Reuters identity to people as and when necessary. But this is turning into a regular question in email, so, in the interests of reducing my inbox, my in-world name is Integral Danton. Which I kind of wish I’d thought harder about at the time. But, as any user knows, you’re limited in your choice of surname, I’ve always been fond of the play “Danton’s Death,” and, well, it was two in the morning and I didn’t think I’d be staying.
Currently, I can be most often found at FP-1 on The Wastelands, which is right in front of you when you clear the exit shaft from the teleport point. There’s an answering machine there where you can leave messages for me.
