Second Life Sketches: The Lay Of The Land
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 sold my land on Isle Of Phoenix this week.
I’ve been offered some land in the near future, so I sold up at cost while land prices are creeping up again. Land prices creep up because as soon as Linden Lab, the operator of the world, creates new land, people swoop in and buy great tracts of it, divide it into parcels and put it up for sale themselves at inflated prices. The way they divide them is, of course, quite mad: I’ve seen sheer cliff-faces for sale. Therefore, entire regions are rendered entirely useless, becoming abandoned landscapes studded with the ubiquitous red vertical “for sale” signs, spinning slowly with no-one to see…
Anyway. I’m gone from the Winterstate space, on a sim whose processing performance was rarely anything but “BAD!” according to my slightly over-eager performance-scanning software agent (a smooth-running sim throws up the message “AWESOME!”). I believe the local shaggers are moving out, too — a couple who bought a quarter of the sim and put up repelling security fences simply so no-one could see them simulating sex in the rather tragic-looking middle-class 80’s house they put in the far corner. There’s nothing quite like being unable to cross whole regions of Second Life because some pair of idiots are frightened of being caught in stirrups and ballgag.
Speaking of which: it was amusing to see the uses Winterstate was being put to while I wasn’t around. One group was using the main building as Fight Club. A pair of dominatrices were using the warehouse as a training area for their boys — I wandered in one evening to see a female avatar beating a kneeling male avatar with a buggy whip, upon which encouragement the male started to actually lick the female’s boots. Who wrote that animation script? And on more than one occasion I found organised strike teams in the catacombs under the main building, hunting zombies.
I should explain that. I have a few hundred people on my information group in Second Life, who visit wherever I’m living to get inworld information, listen to music or just gather. So, when I decided to experiment with running larger land, I chose to do what many do with more land, which was to add entertainment. In my travels, I found a Zombie Spawning Pool. It’s a disc that you place on the ground. When it’s stood on by an avatar, it generates “zombies” — shambling, moaning fake avatars that lurch after the nearest person and try to bite them. Which is ordinarily no threat at all, and a bit of fun — you shoot them with any free inworld gun and they fly apart in a mess of guts, bones and blood, and it’s very entertaining. I dug a network of tunnels under the land and festooned them with spawning pools. People could go down there and blow away zombies to their heart’s content.
I have to tell you, though - sometimes, Second Life psychosis sets in.
A week before I left, I played a dirty trick. I put a spawning pool under the landing point, the place where people teleported into Winterstate. And I switched off the land’s Safe mode. That means that when a zombie bit someone, it did actual damage to their avatar. Four or five zombie bites “kill” an avatar, which sends them back to their home point, usually very confused. I set the pool down, and then sent out a message to my group, telling them to be careful when they come to Winterstate. And then I sat down and waited.
See, if you show people a button marked Do Not Press Under Any Circumstances, they just press it. Because death and destruction are funny, I guess.
And, sure enough, people started teleporting in. They’d stand and look around. And four zombies would appear and chew them to death. Again and again. After a while, repeat visitors got what was happening, and arrived with guns drawn, firing wildly. But with the land unsafe, the guns did damage to people too. The scene quickly degenerated into utter chaos, with people accidentally blowing other people away while zombies gnawed on their sweet digital flesh.
It was a wonderful way to say goodbye to the land. Of course, the people on the Army Of Filth group will never trust me again. This is why I have no friends.
But now I, through the sale of the land, have many of the space dollars. I’m going to pick up a small patch of new land on The Great Fissure, the next sim in the post-apocalyptic Wastelands/Junkyard chain, because the sketch of the island design I saw is terrific. A column on that will be forthcoming upon the island’s creation. I like being in on the start of new sims that actually have rhyme and reason behind them, a guiding aesthetic, and I’m going to shoot photos of this one from inception onwards.
In other news, I’m noticing a small surge in the number of role-playing areas and related businesses on Second Life, even as the groundbreaking Toxia region becomes choked by users and the popular DCS2 combat system seems to release an update almost daily to cope with bugs and strain. I’m hearing the term “in-game” used more than “in-world,” lately, and I’m wondering if that’s indicative of a shift in focus brought in by new users, or a consolidation in focus from old users.
In the meantime, I leave you with this SLurl to the Temple Of Jawesome, a club whose windows provide one of the best views in Second Life.
