Second Life Sketches: The Great Fissure (2)
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.
(Click here to read part one of this column on the creation of a new sim.)
This is what the Great Fissure looks like on Monday.
There’s a kind of user whom I characterise as a Sim Queen. A Sim Queen — usually a guy — wanders around the sim and loudly proclaims that everything is not good enough. This person is using a borrowed texture on that wall, and is therefore Bad. That person is using a purchased texture in that building, and is therefore Inferior. This other person is operating from inside a pre-fabricated building bought from a box, and is therefore Just An Animal. They consider it their job to walk around criticising everything and denouncing the sim owners for allowing it.
Their standards are the kind that can only be achieved by doing as they do, which is to spend many hours a day inside Second Life learning how to do everything to expert level — and then not actually doing anything except the aforementioned wandering around and whining. Even their praise is backhanded. Sunday, I heard one of them say to a resident: “Thank you for using your own texture! What is that building supposed to be again?”
When the sim opened, I put a pre-fab I liked up — I won’t be there a lot, and it did the job nicely. I took it down three days later because I saw someone using exactly the same pre-fab — an occupational hazard — on the other side of the sim. It just made the sim look a bit rubbish, so I took mine down. Within hours, the sim admins contacted me to ask if people had been telling me to get rid of it. The Sim Queens are apparently out in full force on the Great Fissure, shouting at paying residents about their builds when not complaining about the lack of roleplay.
A roleplay system was instituted as an extra for those people who wanted to partake. The three Wastelands sim are not primary roleplay spaces, as they’ve stated again and again. It just doesn’t sink in with some people, and frequently causes unneeded drama.
This illustrates the thing we forget — instantiating the sim is only half the job. It stands or falls on the human element. Managing the virtual matter of the island itself is, in fact, probably easier on the frame than the social eruptions seen on the Fissure this week, when the self-elected purists took to actually conducting protests against builds and people whom they felt didn’t fit in, up to and including using griefing tools.
In general, the Wastelands sims are very pleasant places to be, because, as a themed area, it tends to attract people interested in the same things. And as it is not primarily a roleplaying space, there’s not usually the tension found in other themed sims where people are constantly looking for a way to prove they’re better than the others, or attempting to coerce behaviours out of other visitors. Like any online community, the energy gets scattered when all the residents are engaged in explaining to each other why they are Wrong. I don’t think the dramatics currently being played out on the sim are representative of the usual tenor of the Wastelands islands.
The Great Fissure, in my experience thus far, is a place where people gather and talk. And for those who want a little more, just over the border in the Wastelands is the hideous Potato Farm, the island chain’s own Thunderdome of post-apocalyptic single combat — a great social area and the funniest thing I’ve seen in Second Life in ages.
Sunday, I took GutterBlood up on his offer to construct me a unique building on my parcel. I’m considering asking him to put a harpoon gun on top.
This is my space on The Great Fissure for the foreseeable future: The Overlook. When I first saw the map, I knew I wanted a parcel as close to the Fissure itself as possible. If people are going to build stuff like this, you want a good view, right? The only addition to the build I made was to add a submarine light from Kyoot — buildings here are pretty well spaced out, and so it gets pretty dark on the night cycle.
The Great Fissure Dev team is currently trying to settle the arguments on the sim today, prior to a residents’ meeting at the weekend. I think, to be honest, that they’re just going to have to remove people from the islands outright. Ultimately, it’s a privately-owned space, and there is no universal right of entry.
Even if you’re just renting a house or apartment in your town, there’s no law or condition that gives a stranger the inalienable privilege to walk in and rub a dead badger over the walls, after all. Nor to burn a dead hobo on your lawn while yelling that your house is painted the wrong colour. Second Life it may be, but if you haven’t learned how to behave like a human in your first life, you’re going to find yourself as unwelcome on the grid as you are in your local pub.
