Second Life Sketches: The Island Of Lost Souls
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.
This week: death and islands.
Memoris is silent. There are candles and incense sticks arranged here and there on the simple wooden structure to the right of the arrival point, here on the island’s coast. All the signs are in Japanese, but there’s no mistaking what Memoris is. The gentle, rolling green hills of Memoris are studded with ethereal grey placeholders. Gravestones awaiting names. The path up to the hills brings me to the first occupied plot, a marker for Mina Cookie.
Memoris is a virtual graveyard. A necropolis for Second Life.
For a relatively small monthly fee, one of these empty plots can be dedicated in the name of a deceased person, a stone raised on the space bearing a message of your choice. Operated by the Japanese firm Metabirds, Memoris is quite unique in Second Life. If you explore the world heavily, you’ll occasionally find inworld tributes to dead friends. But there’s nothing like this — an entire region given over to remembrance.
My friend Ash, in Italy, directed me to Memoris, saying: “It’s the first thing like it I have seen in SL… an entire sim dedicated as a cemetery. It’s a strange virtual spirituality there, I guess… a friend of mine that departed in real life has her grave there. For me, it was nice, because she lived on other side of the world, and this was the only way for me to create something for her.”
Participants in online communities die all the time, of course — during the span of my first online community, a regular in Denmark was murdered, and another, in the Bay Area, had a fatal heart attack — but the nature of message boards makes such losses transient. The community rolls on, and tributes and remembrance get lost in the churn. It is, to say the least, a unusual idea, that in a virtual world a permanent space be erected in memoriam of the people we’ve lost.
I’m constantly resistant to the notion that Second Life be lived as deeply and intensely as real life — logging out of real life is substantially more dramatic and permanent than exiting Second Life. Perhaps I’m more affected than I should be about the idea of a graveyard for the dead users of Second Life. But it does seem to me to straddle both worlds, and speaks more effectively of Second Life as a world of communities than many other, more lauded aspects of the virtual world.
* * * * *
This being Second Life, of course, there is an absurd reaction to every action. So, upon returning to The Wastelands, I found the locals enacting deathmatches.
A mechanical Death Pit has been constructed on the Potato Farm, a parcel on the north road. A square caged floor. The floor is made out of metal panels. The idea is that people don the Wastelands Combat Head-Up-Display — a piece of software that turns your avatar into a videogame character that can deal and receive damage — pull one of the local, horribly primitive weapons, and slash each other to death in the cage. But the metal panels are tricked out. Some flip under your feet and drop you down a hole. Some pop out, I swear, buzzsaws that are coded to do your avatar damage, complete with squirting-blood animation. If the designer wasn’t on Second Life, he’d be working at Abu Ghraib. Or for Dr Evil.
Sadly, I have a bad leg and a cane, and could not participate.
I believe there’ll be a bookie working the deathmatch pit from next week.
Also, it turns out the locals don’t like it when I demand that they eat the brains of their kills to take their strength.
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Islands are regions floating off the mainland areas, inaccessible by anything other than teleportation. They’re owned by private individuals, groups of users or large land-rental companies. They’re purchased directly from Second Life operators Linden Labs, who create them according to the buyer’s specifications. The land companies then divide their islands — and sometimes they’ll buy great chains of them — into parcels for rent. If you’ve got the money, though, and are prepared to look around, you can sometimes rent entire islands at discount prices.
I prefer the mainland. I like to be able to explore, and to encourage others to explore, the weirdness that’s tucked away between the abandoned builds and bad clubs. I rented a parcel on an island last year, and found it both irritating and stultifying. I also developed a pathological hatred of “banlines,” the transparent fences that prevent you from entering or crossing a parcel that the residents erect when they want “privacy.” Which, in Second Life, is an absurd concept — any new user will discover that they can use the zoom-view function to look inside banline-”protected” properties, which almost invariably contain sexual apparatus of some kind.
The last big space I rented, therefore, was on the mainland. However, it sat next to the junction of four sims. Now, here’s the thing about sims. Each of Linden Labs’ servers carries four sims. But they’re not necessarily adjacent sims. Most often, when you cross sims, you’re crossing to another server. This four-sim junction I sat on was clearly the point between four different servers. What does this mean? It meant that travelling in a certain direction across the water west of my land plunged you into a Sargasso of computer deadspace between servers. In experiential terms, you went into an uncontrollable spin while plunging down at high speed through hundreds of meters of rock and, eventually, some kind of bizarre Second Limbo where you could see the blank geometric underside of the world. Which is interesting the first time, as it looks a little bit like Bill Gibson’s first images of cyberspace. The bloom comes off the experience when you’ve been consigned to the electronic underworld for the dozenth time that day.
For the purposes of this column, I think it’s time to obtain an island space, a large one, to see what can be done there. In the meantime, 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.
