Second Life Sketches: From Hell’s Kitchen to Dune
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 lurched up the steps from the subway on to the main junction at Hell’s Kitchen into complete chaos.
A dozen different people were shouting at each other as bad, tinny hip-hop blared across the street. Guns were being waved. A bored hooker stood in front of the bar next to the subway exit, watching it all kick off. A guy in a cop’s uniform appeared to be trying to hold everything together, as the massed invective got sharper and more threatening. I could hear weapons being loaded and cycled from four different directions. And then the increasing noise of a big, ugly engine.
I ducked back into the subway just as a 4X4 vehicle the size of a small house roared up the hill into the junction and ran over a dozen people. Just bounced all over them, flattening them on to the asphalt or sending them flying into the storefronts. For the next five minutes, no-one was saying anything that I’d be allowed to reprint here. The guy in the car was laughing like he’d gotten eight Christmases at once. A girl who’d already been aggrieved by someone lost it at this point and unloaded her weapon into a woman on the other side of the street. Her friend drew and fired at the first girl, indiscriminately hitting others who were trying to get back up after having a jeep parked on their throats. The cop pulled and started mowing people down. Which I guess is one way to keep the peace.
Welcome to Hell’s Kitchen, a piece of bad 1980 New York City in Second Life.
Themed sims, as they’re generally known, combine art, homage and roleplay. I’ve already spoken here of The Wastelands, a post-apocalyptic space. There are a lot like that, combining any or all of the above elements. The Wastelands isn’t big on roleplay; it’s allowed as an extra element for those who want it. Hell’s Kitchen is strong on the roleplay, and gives visitors an “observer tag”, a bit of code that creates floating text over your head denoting you as an observer who isn’t participating in the roleplay. Which you need, as these places divide their inhabitants sharply into clans, houses and factions, and impose strict rules upon them.
If you’re going to speak to anyone in a themed sim outside the immersion of roleplay, you need to state your speech as OOC, Out Of Character. Most usually, this means enclosing your speech in ((double brackets)). You can also obtain scripts inworld that toggle your speech between roleplay and OOC. This is for general inworld chat, not instant messaging. And, seriously, if you don’t want to be thrown out during your explorations, it’s something you need to know. Of course, most of you aren’t conducting the sort of anthropological explorations that I do in search of my fee. But, still, bear it in mind if you’re going to visit any of these places.
Which you should, because they often feature the most beautiful and inventive builds in Second Life. Wandering the back streets of Hell’s Kitchen, I got a little frisson of memory from my own early visits to Manhattan, back when the clean-up was starting. It’s hard to make Second Life look littered and lived-in, of course, but they got the buildings right.
The themed sims go from recent contemporary sites, to historical reproductions, through, naturally, to fiction. I discovered The Dune Project this week, which seeks to bring a chunk of Frank Herbert’s Arrakis to Second Life. Or, perhaps more correctly, Arrakis via the David Lynch film version. I personally find this a peculiar direction to take. The recent tv versions produced by the Sci-Fi Channel, particularly “Children Of Dune,” were far superior. But the sim designers have gone full-bore for the Lynch version, even creating a Weirding Module for in-sim combat that includes, on firing, a sound clip of Kyle McLachlan going “Chuuuuk-SA!”
(None of this, of course, compares to the mad hammy glory of Steven Berkoff giving it “Send! Men! To summon… WOOOOOORRRRMMS!”)
Nonetheless, the lengths to which the designers have gone are impressive. Upon entering the area, you get a meter to attach to your avatar that simulates environmental effects — specifically the consumption of water. Water loss can be mitigated by wearing a stillsuit, which the meter detects and adjusts for. The meter also knows where in the sim you are — if you’re in open desert, you consume water faster, and electrical devices like shields run down faster. Coming out of the landing area, going left and then left again, should bring you to a bar where you can obtain water in Herbert-authentic litrejons.
Unlike Hell’s Kitchen, The Dune Project is very, very quiet right now. The last time I visited, there were 35000 people in world, but just one person in Dune, a woman sitting reading in the bowels of Sietch Tabr.
It’s a shame the sandworms don’t move. It’d be nice if they could get a physics engine in them, and have them appear in the desert as NPCs — Non Player Characters. The best example of these are the Toxic Waste Things in Toxia, radioactive beasties that randomly appear across the city and attack the nearest avatar. Toxia is a heavy roleplay zone, intensely factional, but the addition of the NPC element creates a constant and unpredictable threat level for everyone. If you’re there — and get an observer tag if you visit — and one of these things emerges, don’t join in with the fighting. Just stand and watch as the inhabitants attempt to pull together and beat it off. Chances are that you’ll see a radioactive beastie envelop, choke and abuse a victim to death.
There are worse ways to spend a slow Friday afternoon.
