Second Life Sketches: Comeback
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.
Apologies for the absence over the last few weeks. I’ve been on the road — San Diego, and then Arizona — and came back to discover that Linden Labs had somehow forgotten how to correctly process credit cards. This is, apparently, not a unique experience, and it led to my account being disabled for over a week. Hard to write a column about Second Life when you can’t get in.
This made life interesting because I was scheduled to do an official promotional inworld appearance on the 9th, in support of my debut prose novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. Thankfully, I had Millions Of Us on my side, the Second Life promotional company, and they went to work on Linden Lab with blunt instruments on my behalf. Very soon, I had the personal attention of one Aki Linden, who fixed things with great good humour over a couple of days.
And so it was that I appeared at the Millions Of Us sim on Thursday afternoon Second Life Time, to find some forty-five avatars waiting for me. Luckily, none of them were waiting in the tall grass to fire giant singing genitals at me. Which is always a concern at these things.
I’d only gotten about an hour inworld before the appearance, due to Second Life suffering another login lockup — I think there were some hardware outages? Didn’t have time to check the SL blog, but I got the strong impression that chunks of the world were still inaccessible by the time I got in. Everything was kind of jerky. I’d installed the new iteration of SL before going in, and this one contained the Voice rollout. I’m told that sims start choking if more than ten people use Voice inside one. The whole grid feels like it’s grinding a bit under the new function — I’m seeing a lot of people walking into things and flying into walls.
The lag was pretty nasty inside Millions Of Us, as users would expect with forty-odd people in-sim. Over the grid as a whole, new load-balancing means that a concurrency of 38,000 people, as on Thursday afternoon, doesn’t send everything to hell. But sims still complain a bit when more than thirty-five people are wandering around. But it held up pretty well.
I did my appearance over audio, but not over Voice — instead, I used the Skype internet telephony system to connect to the excellent organiser Celebrity Millionsofus at the MOU offices, who then bounced the signal to a Shoutcast server, and connected that to the sim’s media output. Therefore, one had only to click on Second Life’s sound player to hear my voice. Which was weak and raspy due to recovery from the SARS-like infection that ran rampant in San Diego during my week there.
(The San Diego Comic-Con is the only place on Earth that looks like Second Life given flesh.)
I spent about a half-hour fielding questions from Celebrity and the audience — questions came over IM, Celebrity read them over to me and I addressed them in audio — and then we tried something clever that Millions had come up with. All the attendees had been given fake copies of my novel, containing the first chapter, that are readable inworld. I stood at a lectern surrounded by a red circle. When people entered the circle, their copy of the book opened up. If I clicked on the signing paraphernalia on the lectern, and then on their copy of the book, a digitised version of my signature would be applied to the frontispiece of their book.
Someone said, “is that actually your signature? Wow! I can commit bank fraud now!” So I was forced to tell the crowd that it was actually Cory Doctorow’s signature, and any fraud would affect his bank account, not mine. Someone else commented that with Cory and I both having done inworld appearances, they now just had to get Charles Stross in. I’ve known both Charlie and Cory for years, but it’s weird that people are thinking of us as some freak triumvirate now….
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I wander Second Life as Integral Danton, looking for things to talk about. If there’s something you want me to see, drop me an IM inworld, or leave me a message on the answering machine at The Overlook on The Great Fissure. Visitors welcome.
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