How Broad And Varied Is The Second Life Bot Experience?
Most bots in Second Life exist simply to artificially inflate Traffic numbers and simulate Resident activity. Other bots provide information and instruction, entertainment, or even act as showroom mannequins. That's all functionally comprehensible, as far as it goes. Then I read a report by SL blogger Cheyenne Palisades, and wonder how much stranger and varied the phenomenon may be:
... I flew up to 4013 meters, and there they were, standing in a plywood box: a kindergarten age girl, a small dragon, a guy with too-short hair, and two women with too-big breasts.
Boggle. Image: Ms. Palisades.
I had this idea a while ago to do a Flickr gallery of campers and bots (the spammy kind of bot, not the functional kind). Never got it together.
Posted by: Mitch Wagner | Sunday, January 04, 2009 at 02:19 PM
Regarding bot experience diversity, you've previously written (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/07/adz-childs-coun.html) about SLNameWatch (http://slnamewatch.com). It uses a bot to pull information from in-world People Search. Usually there's just one bot, but two or three during tough times. :) The first one looks like Bender. Others look like Gir, and other famous robots. The Gir one is small enough only a kid could fit in it...
Posted by: Adz Childs | Sunday, January 04, 2009 at 03:33 PM
Oh I'll give them their due, it's not like attack of the clones with these bots, most of them seem to have had some thought put into their appearance, some even have interesting profiles!
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | Sunday, January 04, 2009 at 03:34 PM
To borrow from that song of the Nineties (or was it the late Eighties?), "How bizarre, how bizarre."
(Of course, after watching a Pop-Up Video treatment of that song, I tend to think in terms of "Cow bizarre, cow bizarre.")
Posted by: Harper Ganesvoort | Monday, January 05, 2009 at 08:21 AM