Second Life Sketches: The Sky Is Falling
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.
A month or two back, I spent a few weeks in Toxian City, a roleplay sim I’ve mentioned a few times in the past. It’s a single sim, an island in the grid, and as such offers possibly the most intense such experience in Second Life. There are roleplay associations and areas that are as popular, but they’re spread over a wider range of regions. Everything in the Toxian City game happens on Toxia, and it’s that, I think, that gives it that peculiar intensity and its peculiar challenges.
My computer is three years old; top of the line when I bought it, and designed to be a meaty games machine. I don’t play a lot of games, but I handle a lot of graphics and a lot of video as part of my job, and I move a lot of material on and off the net, and that’s what the machine was optimised for. My Second Life experience is usually lightning, even with three other browsers, several Word documents, Winamp and a couple of other applications running at the same time. Even entering its middle age, my CPU could beat up your dad. I’ll occasionally have to throttle my bandwidth to get things to rez at a reasonable space on a very populous night in Transylvania, and that’s the worst of it.
Toxia is so intensely populated with avatars so densely loaded with prims, objects and scripts that my computer would cough like an old man even after dumping cache. The island owners recommend that bandwidth be dialed to less than 500, and I’d often take draw distance down to less than 128, and, you know, stand still and try not to twitch or anything, and the lag would still be horrendous. Some nights the load on the island is so bad that the notecards you summon to read the sim rules won’t actually appear, and you’ll be standing there looking at a timed-out block of white space wondering if you’re breaking the rules just by standing there.
And they do love their rules on Toxia. Whenever you visit, there’ll be one person there, not a game administrator, who’s memorised the entire rules package and will be happy to tell you, unbidden, that you’re breaking a rule just by standing there. You can usually spot those people by the way they rarely engage in gameplay, but wander around to tell people they’re Wrong and then sit somewhere hidden and do nothing, so that their XP accretes.
XP are Experience Points. Toxia’s owners designed the DCS2 roleplay system, a chunk of code that overlays on your avatar to allow a combat function. You win XP by fighting and winning, lose it by dying, and slowly gain it just by keeping your DCS2 on and staying on the island. Gaining XP allows you to obtain special powers. So that guy sitting slumped in the room at the back of the bar with his Away tag on? He’s gaining XP without playing the game. And one day he will descend upon you, tell you he’s an evil vampire, and smack your avatar into the road with the magical Wig Of Phil Spector Attack.
As in all roleplay, for some people it’s a way to work their imaginations, and for some people it’s mathematics for self-aggrandisement and the spread of misery. I wandered into a place one night where a women was being roundly castigated by admins for having gamed an update to the DCS2 system, and thereby having apparently become a holy terror who could kill people by looking at them or something.
This stands in contrast to the roleplay system itself, which is very rich and complex, and the owners’ clever moves to turn the island itself into story fabric. The gaming population is made up of several clans, whose individual definitions naturally create internecine conflict and strife between them. The heads of the clans generate crises — stories, really — that are played out through the interaction of the gamers on the streets. The owners add to this by manipulating the environment. They ratchet up general stress and violence through the Non Player Character system I’ve described before, that randomly generates lethal monsters, ambulatory bits of combat-enabled software that identify, follow and attack avatars. It’s the only time you’ll see everyone in Toxia on the same side, as the Toxic Waste Creatures attack without regard to clan affiliation — anyone wearing their DCS2 is fair game.
But the owners enjoy their island in other ways. One day, it began to rain. Now, Second Life doesn’t generate weather (one of its current failings, to my mind). You can buy weather systems for your land — I ran one on Winterstate — but it’s extremely rare to see one acting on a whole island. For an experienced Second Life user, it really is kind of strange and dissociative to hear and see rain falling as far as the eye can focus. And the rain went on. For days. One or two people started to notice puddles forming here and there, which was also odd. And then, one afternoon, I arrived on Toxia to find the place three inches deep in water. This went on for a week, until the water was waist-high all over town. In terms of manipulation of the environment, this was, as far as I know, a groundbreaking idea. You have to understand how homogenous the SL environment usually is to get your arms around it. This was thinking outside the box.
After a week, the rain went away. But the sky was wrong. The sky had taken on the colour and texture of a box of raw meat, as if David Cronenberg had taken over the controls at Linden Labs. And it was moving. What the owners had done was create that sky as a massive sim-covering flat object suspended over the city just below the regular cloud level, and put an animation script on it to make it scroll the wet-meat texture. At the same time, a box of this stuff materialised in the halls of one of the clans, and, after a day or two, they appeared to commence worshipping it. Again, this took a week or so to play out, the sky moving faster and faster every day.
All of which is to say: as hard on the connection as Toxia is, and as unpleasant as many of the regulars are, it’s the most inventive roleplay area on Second Life. And it’s doing things with the world environment that aren’t being replicated anywhere else, for which acts alone it’s worth looking in on from time to time.
If you’re going to visit, get there early in your day to collect the rules and to pick up an Observer tag, which puts a sign above your avatar stating that you’re just there to look (so the gamers know not to interact with you on a roleplay level). Then leave, to return later in the day. Put the tag on before you teleport there — on a heavy-load day, things like tags can take a while to activate. Also, take off MultiGadgets and any other scripts you can do without before you teleport. People operate an insane number of scripts in Toxia, and anything you can do to lighten the load while you walk around is good. When voicechat comes in, Toxia is likely to turn into a bubbling morass of half-rezzed monstrosities. If you do choose to talk to anyone in regular chat — well, you’ll probably be ignored, but always preface any line you type with OOC, which stands for Out Of Character. Be polite and accepting — always remember you’re dealing with people pretending to be something else, possibly on a full-time basis — but don’t take any lip from anyone not wearing an Admin tag.
Now is probably a good time to visit. I don’t know if they’re doing anything special there right now, but, as I say, voicechat is coming. It may well roll out perfectly smoothly. But my computer acted like it had motor neuron disease for the whole time I was visiting Toxia daily, and that’s when people are just typing. No-one knows what voice is going to do to the grid, but, right now, search isn’t working, teleport remains cranky and the system failed to issue stipends this week. So go now, in case things get worse at the end of the month.
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Personal note: my current temporary base of operations on Second Life is at ZeroZero on the island of Parallax.
