Second Life Sketches: I Am Legend

Fri Oct 19, 2007 9:30am PDT

By Warren Ellis

I’ve been playing “I Am Legend: Survival” for most of my inworld time this week.

I Am Legend is a forthcoming sf/horror film based on the book by the superb writer Richard Matheson, previously filmed as “The Last Man On Earth” with Vincent Price and “The Omega Man” with Charlton Heston. It concerns a man immune to a biological weapon that’s turned everyone else into murderous vampiric beasties.

It’s one of the great themes of the sf/horror cusp (I’m playing with it myself in my novel for next year, “Listener” — its epic form is, of course, Stephen King’s “The Stand”). The new film version, starring Will Smith, is imminent, and, as a promotional tool, an inworld IAL game has been created in collaboration with the minds behind The Wastelands sims.

[Editor's note: "I Am Legend: Survival" was created by The Electric Sheep Company, which has done work for Reuters.]

Their signature is the “salvage” system. The Wastelands has featured an inworld game where scrap and junk magically appear at random across the sim. It’s collected and brought to a machine, into which the salvage is fed three pieces at a time. If you get the combination of items right, the machine combines them into a useful tool — such as a gun for shooting other people before they can pick up salvage. (Which I tried, once, and got blown away by three other people. Swine. I can hold a grudge for years, you know.)

In “I Am Legend: Survival,” body bags litter the streets of New York City. Bumping into a bag allows you to essentially unzip it and raid the corpse within for useful stuff like ammunition clips, bandages, batteries and other items that a combining machine in the safehouses will turn into items vital to your survival. Items like barricades, halogen bulbs (the beasties hate the light) and, possibly, a cure for the New Flu.

The scenery is fantastic. There are three game sims — Central Park, Chinatown and Coney Island — in addition to the non-combat Orientation Island where player kit up and choose their class. All the sims are incredibly well designed, and it’s worth going in early in the morning just to walk around and take the places in.

You can play in IAL as a CDC worker, a police dog, an infected Darkseeker or a hideous infected zombie pitbull that gives me the creeps whenever I see one. (Why animals? This is Second Life, new home of the furry. Of course, I get called out for “fursecution” whenever I make a joke about that. But, frankly, I’m a large human and you’re some kind of midget puce weasel, and you need to just settle for being lower on the food chain than me.)

Humans can go into this ruined New York armed. Darkseekers can’t. Darkseekers, however, don’t need to. The HUD system everyone needs in order to play places movement restrictions on humans, while the beasties can run and leap with great speed and agility.

I get eaten by zombie dogs a lot.

Death, in IAL, requires you to find a resurrection zone, which takes you out of the game for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, the mad vampire cannibals and their bloody dogs are leaping all over the place, switching off the generators that bathe the safezones in light, howling outside the CDC lab, chewing on decent people and laughing at me as I crawl to the nearest resurrection zone. I’ve currently got eight kills to my name, but I’ve died a dozen times, so, you know, I’m not winning.

It’s rare to find something in Second Life that really Just Works. But “I Am Legend” is it. I was in on the latter part of the beta test, and even then it just worked. The two drawbacks are server lag, which happens anywhere you have a lot of people using resources anyway, and machine lag — you’re going to have to have your computer running hot, and play with your client settings, to prevent processing stops. Such as, say, your viewer grinding to a halt for two minutes and resuming only to reveal that you’ve been running into a brick wall for the last two minutes and one of those damned dogs came along and ate your head.

I’m tempted to change classes and become one of the beasties.