SELLING DYSTOPIA

Have a Coke(tm) and OBEY

When you're shopping for clothes and custom animations, sure you could visit a modern outdoor mall or a gleaming, sunny metropolis-- but who wants to do that, when you could submit your identity to a palm scan, walk dark, forboding streets while being monitored by the tracer beams of roving 'bots, and get inundated on all sides by authoritarian propoganda? 

Submit your soul to shopping

Like the bastard child of Donald Trump and George Orwell, the shopping area of Suffugium (direct portal here) is a themed commercial district with a difference, transforming the Second Life shopping experience into a grim and moody consumer panopticon where our latent fears of an all-seeing hypercapitalist police state have been transformed into, well, a great place to buy stuff and meet friends.

An ink-stained wretch and a gorgeous dame in a town without pity

Though it wasn't yet opened officially when I visited a couple weeks ago, one of Suffugium's main creators was on hand to show me the future hell she helped create.

Police Drone: "Sub-Citizen, please remain still for the duration of the scan...  Scan complete.  Please go about your business as normal, Sub-Citizen Au."

"Basically," Aliasi Stonebender tells me, "the goal is to make this a place, not a build, as it were."  The thematic inspiration is "noirpunk". ("Like, cyberpunk with a 1940s style, very Dark City," Aliasi explains.)  And though they were still adding slums and an industrial area during my visit, word-of-mouth has already been good to store owners like her.  Turns out there's an audience for shoppers who want a mall with a chemical waste-filled repeater station and dodge battered hovercars that occasionally pass by.

Suffugium is a project of the Squidsoft Collective, she tells me, a group in which Aliasi is an officer. "Many of the Squids are old hands at MUSHes and MUCKs and that sort of thing," she tells me. "We've got a backstory, although still developing that too..."  (Besides Aliasi, the main creators are Kaeli Candour, Lex Neva, and Kali Dougall, who owns the island Suffugium's built on.)  Even on a short visit (and this is without exporing the narrative in detail) you get the sense of a city that's been walled off from a horrific catastrophe, and has subsequently made serious sacrifices with individual liberty, to keep the people safe.   (While still making sure they keep shopping.)  So what we have is a 3D commercial space that also functions as social commentary and immersive cyberpunk fiction.

The Suffugium Reeducation Centre-- and custom animations store

Most impressive to me are the stores that are integrated into this narrative.  An imposing "reeducation centre", for example, is actually where you can buy custom-designed poses and animations for your avatar...

Try custom animations before you buy-- and keep vigilant!

... even though the setting makes it look like you're about to be brainwashed or tortured into giving up the names of "anarchists".

From the dumpsters, whimsy

Fitting the theme (and adding a scavenger hunt game mechanic), it's the waste bins in the alleyways where you can find hints of hope, resistance, or memories of a better life left behind.  "There's an assortment of items you can get," Aliasi explains, after I fish out a child's toy from the rusty bin.  "Different dumpsters even have different things. Like, the [DELETED BY CREATOR'S REQUEST]* I'm wearing.  It makes [DELETED BY CREATOR'S REQUEST]."

Beyond adding the remaining areas and more roleplaying game elements, they're planning to stream movies at Suffugium's theater.

"Don't tell me you show Blade Runner or Brazil in there," I groan, because that would be way too meta.

Aliasi shakes her head.  "[G]oing to show old (and public domain) Expressionist films in theme, like Metropolis.  Problem is, archive.org only has the cruddy US cut."

"I would think dudes in a s***hole dystopia would want to watch nature films and stuff," I suggest.

Aliasi Stonebender chuckles.  "Well, since when do you get what you WANT in a dystopia?"

As is often the case, with Suffigium, I follow in the wake of Torley.

Update, 7:02PM: Element from Suffugium's backstory deleted by request of owner.

Comments

[Lex Neva]

Ooh, a story about my home :D Thanks for writing us up, Hamlet.

Just a few things -- we definitely were open when you visited, and we still are. The slums probably weren't quite open when you visited, but they are now. We're still very actively building, but the commercial district and slums are officially open and explorable. We try to make it pretty clear to someone when they've gone to an area in the sim that's not part of the "official" build, by putting up walls and occluding sight-lines and such.

Also, while you're listing out the main creators, I want to make sure that Binne Ming and Stella Trenchmouth get credit too. They're both an important part of the creation team. Lots of other Squids have helped out too, but there are probably too many to list here.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks for teh corrections and expansions, Lex!

[Alexis Fairchild]

The whole Suffigium sim gives me so may ideas for evets to run there (with the owners' permission, of course)

Bye bye for now,
Alexis