New World Notes

THE EARLY CREATORS - AN ORAL HISTORY

Originally published May 21 and June 4th of 2003 here and here.

Part I - bUTTONpUSHER Jones

At this date, Second Life has existed in some form for more than ten months. (Which must be decades, by the game's internal clock.) Many thousands have since joined the world; whole neighborhoods and cities have since been built; much more of both are coming soon. But what was it like in the first few weeks, when Linden Lab launched the game in its very nascent, "Alpha" stage, when it was still known as LindenWorld? To get some handle on that, while also trying to get a sense of how far Second Life has come, since then, this ongoing oral history will let the people who were there back then tell us about it, in their own words.

bUTTONpUSHER Jones, 32, describes himself as a player of first-person shooters like Quake III and Unreal Tournament 2003, while also being "a recovering Diablo II" addict. His story below.

WHAT BROUGHT HIM TO HERE

I had been searching for the Metaverse since I read Snow Crash about 3 years ago. I found Second Life mentioned in a GameSpy.com forum that was discussing the inadequacies of MMORPGs shown at 2002's E3. When I checked the link, I immediately knew I had found my Metaverse.

That was in August, 2002, and after a few excited e-mails to Linden Lab, I was allowed into LindenWorld in early September. LindenWorld was the pre-Second Life world, basically SL without water.

WHO WAS THERE, WHEN HE ARRIVED

I heard that about 50 users had logged into the game before I arrived, but there were only about 5 regulars that I would see each week. If 6 people were in-world at the same time it was a PAR-TAY! A couple months later we moved from LindenWorld to Second Life, and there were peaks of 20 people on at the same time. They mostly hung out in the same area -- around the "newbie corral".

WHAT THE "CULTURE" WAS, WHEN IT BEGAN

In the early months the culture was definitely create-centric. At least I was. I love creating, and socializing is secondary for me. My most memorable event was one weekend (while the Lindens were away), BuhBuhCuh and I decided to build a bunch of Neo-Tokyo structures overshadowing the little downtown city the Lindens had built. Money went a lot farther in those days, and over the course of 2 days we made about 4 or 5 enormous towers with interconnecting walkways. Okay, so that wasn't really an event... The idea of "events" is something that appears to be proactively created by Linden starting in (looking at the event calendar) January '03. I can take or leave events, but I know many people love them, and it's another aspect in which SL shines -- communication.

WHO WERE AMONG THE MOST VALUED MEMBERS, BACK THEN

Nobisan Wu made an amazing house in LindenWorld -- looked like a cover shot for Architectural Digest. I have yet to see its equal. SpaceDave Didgeridoo made a texture farm with about 100 textures free for the taking. I wore one of those textures as my shirt for months. Alpha Omega started LindenWorld the same day I did. He and I made trouble.

WHO ARE STILL AMONG THE MOST VALUED MEMBERS, EVEN NOW

Steller Sunshine embodies the spirit of Second Life. Endlessly cheerful, creative, and helpful. Flyk Escher is up to her eyeballs in style. She is a master of organic shapes and playful outfits. BuhBuhCuh Fairchild is a soft-spoken pioneer. He is a fountain of good ideas.

WHAT KEEPS HIM HERE

The reason I am still in Second Life is because I find it fun, and it's a fantastic creative outlet. My to-do list has grown from about 5 items before I entered SL to around 50 items now. As I learn more about the scripting language and am inspired by other people's creations, the potential keeps expanding. I haven't hit Second Life's "ceiling" yet, and I don't think I'm close.

(Thanks to bUTTONpUSHER Jones, for his comments.)

ONLINE TOOTSIE

Originally published May 28 thru May 30 in 2003, here.

Someone sent me an e-mail last week, because they wanted to talk about "virtual sexual harassment." Alexis was her name, and she said she'd had a few such experiences with that in Second Life, and she thought I should investigate and maybe write a story about it. "Like what kind of incidents are you talking about?" I asked her.

"I have had one male avatar come up to my avatar," answers Alexis, "and tell me to take off my avatar's top (granted, it happened in a Mature sim, but would still qualify), and another one say to my avatar, 'If we had the gesture in here, I'd smack that (meaning my avatar's backside)'." (By "Mature sim", Alexis refers to an area in Second Life where behavior that's roughly equivalent to what you'd see in an R or NC-17 rated movie is allowable.) On numerous occasions, adds Alexis, she "had male avatars call my avatar 'babe', 'a hottie', and other terms that would be considered demeaning to females." At this point, it should be pointed out that incidents of this variety are, in my experience, fairly infrequent -- not just in Second Life, but in massively multiplayer games in general. If anything, as a recent Detroit Free Press article suggests, female avatars tend to get special, even chivalrous treatment, from other players, both male and female. In any case, the folks at Linden have already put up a pretty robust policy against harassing behavior (no surprise there, as a large percentage of Second Life's users are women) and make a concerted effort to enforce it. And as it turns out, just stepping back was enough to defuse one such encounter. "I just said simply, 'No'. It put an end to that situation," says Alexis, "but probably did not dissuade this person from doing it again to someone else... the funny thing is, I had never met the avatar before until that very moment." So Alexis' main objection to the talk about hotties and butt-smacking, it seemed to me, was the *way* it occurred: "If a statement like that came out during a bit of sexually charged role-playing between avatars," she says, "that would be fine... but this incident happened just as I arrived at the location where this happened, and that was the first thing that was said to me... other than maybe 'Hi'." After a bit of back-and-forth on the subject, something made me go back and check the "To:" line of the e-mails Alexis had been sending me. And only then did something strike me as a bit odd: "Alexis" is a man.

In the interests of preserving his anonymity, we'll call him, at his choice, "Dante" -- "a reference to Dante Hicks," says Alexis, "one of my favorite characters from the Kevin Smith series of films." "It wasn't my initial intention to play as a female at first," Dante e-mails me, "[but] when I signed up for the Beta and went to choose my Second Life last name," he couldn't find any that appealed. In the game, a player can pretty much choose any first name they want, but must select from a pre-set list of surnames. He did finally locate one he liked, and for several reasons, "Alexis" seemed to go with it best. "I have no problems playing Second Life as a woman," says Dante, because he's done so in numerous role-playing games. "And, as a pre-emptive answer," he adds, "I am completely heterosexual (many people think that if you are male playing a female character in a role-playing aspect, then you must be homosexual or have those tendencies.)" In any event, he continues, his actual gender is never a secret -- it's mentioned on his in-world calling card, if you just click the right button. "People are sometimes just too lazy to check the First Life tab," says Dante.

HEATHERS

Originally published May 13 and 14th of 2003 here.

In "Heathers", the 1989 black comedy starring Wynona Ryder, a trio of girls, all named Heather, all among the most popular at their high school, form a nuclear-powered clique that manages to both beguile and terrorize their peers. While the humor is totally over the top (quoting lines like "Corn nuts!" is sure to make your cooler friends giggle), the movie is also credited for being dead on in its portrayal of cliques and ostracization, especially among young women. (It was a reference point, for example, in "Girls Just Want to be Mean", last year's fascinating New York Times article on the subject.) The movie's a cult classic (and deservedly so), so when I exchanged cards with Bel Muse, and I noticed that she belonged to a Second Life group called The Heathers, I first assumed it was comprised of folks were fans of the movie, or maybe just Wynona.

Not quite either, as it turns out.

The Heathers of Second Life were formed (and quickly disbanded) a few months ago, says Bel, in response to a controversy "about a phenomena called 'rate mining'. Basically some players felt that people were playing the ratings systems and taking advantage of it." So after kidding about it with some Lifer friends, she says, "We decided to be The Heathers...kinda like a joke about popularity."

All that probably requires some translation, for non-Lifers, so here goes: In the game, players have a menu which allows them to rate other players, for qualities such as Building ability, Appearance, and most key here, Behavior. (I.E., how likeable you are.) For the most part, rating is a fun way for players to reward each other's creativity and friendliness-- though there is also a cash value for a high rating, because those with a top ranking get a bonus amount of Linden Dollars, added to the stipend the game pays out to all players every week. And if you're up there in the top ten of a category, your name is also published on the website’s Leader Board-- so everyone can see, for instance, whether you’re the most popular person in the world...

Back to Bel, and the birth of The Heathers: Eventually, there was a reaction against the leader boards. Some Lifers began to complain that others were 'rate mining': that is, pressuring other players, especially newcomers, to rate them. "According to the myth," she says, "[rate miners] would show up at social gatherings with the intention of rating people in order to get ratings back. Some people will return a rating out of politeness, so there's a certain percentage you might get back, just by rating every person you saw. Other people are so bold as to say, 'I've rated you... now rate me'."

"But how do you know you'll get a good rating from random strangers?", I ask her.

"You don't. But if you are socializing, interacting with people, being nice," she says, you tend to rate people well. "So I felt that the system encouraged socializing and decent behavior, and had a mechanism to chastise outrageous abuse. But that was not good enough for other people."

Arguing that it was an abuse of the game mechanic, some of them began lobbying Linden Lab to change the rating system, to somehow crack down on rate mining.

This struck Bel as absurd. "It wasn't as though you can 'rob' a rating a knife point, or coerce them. But to read the [Second Life website] forums, you'd have thought newbies were being clubbed like baby seals for their ratings. 'Don't do it for me, do it for the poor defenseless newbies!'" And while you might expect these protesters to come from the less popular players, bitter that the ratings system was making them feel left out, that wasn't the case at all, says Bel. "The ones that demanded the rating system be changed to protect the helpless newbies were popular themselves." In other words, the argument broke down between popular players who were fine with the ratings, and a group of equally popular players, who weren't.

"Competition of cliques, seems like," I suggest.

"Yep. All dressed up to look like it protects the little guy."

One of Bel's main objections to this argument was the judgment it made on the way people played the game. "I think people accused of 'rate whoring' were no such thing; they were just social, or popular because they were nice. But because they appeared on leader board, the assumption was that they were [there] through unsavory methods.” Accusations of rate mining got so heated, she says, when people would rate someone, they'd try to distance themselves from the debate by saying something like, "'That was freely given with nothing expected in return'." Trouble was, that just led to accusations of reverse psychology, because, "people even considered *that* rate whoring, because that was taken as a pre-emptive rate." The back and forth accusation sometimes felt like "a witch hunt", she says. And after some midnight grousing, she and two of her friends giggled themselves into hatching up their comical protest against all that.

HOME FOR THE HOMELESS

The first thing you notice about Catherine Omega's house on a cliff top above the ocean: with a sign like that, she wants no doubt the place is hers. Homeowner's pride must have something to do with the sign. She's roofed the place with lattice-work arches lined with greenish glass, which gives the place a warm, airy feel. It's extravagant, but it does still feel like a real place; a real home.

And that might have something to do with where she built part of it: homeless in British Columbia.

"Couch surfing homeless," I ask her, "Or dumpster diving homeless?"

"Dumpster diving homeless," says Cat.

After a few months with a Second Life account, for reasons she doesn't go into (except to say she "found myself in a very annoying situation"), Catherine found herself without a permanent address. "I was only out on the streets for a couple weeks," she says, "But it was a while before I had a real place." She did find shelter of a kind, in the interim: an empty apartment building, which sat above an abandoned store, without running water, or electric current. Despite all that, she still managed to hack back into the world of Second Life.

By this point, as she tells me this, my skepticism meter is maxed out.

How'd she find an Internet connection to get back on, for starters?

"I had my laptop with me," says Cat, "and I was using it as a router, and I cracked WEP on a WLAN with a soup can YAGI antenna to get on the Net. Boosting electricity was easy enough, because I have my multimeter and I know enough to not touch live wires." (Her tech-heavy answer is sufficiently over my head to seem convincing enough.)

So she scrounged through the hollowed-out building she was squatting in, until she could find a live wire to tap as her power source. "If there was a MacOSX or Linux port [of Second Life]," she tells me, "I'd be able to run it directly on my laptop and it'd save me the trouble of having to build this computer -- it's really annoying because it's mostly broken." Wait, you built yourself another computer while you were homeless, too?

"It turns out that a computer capable of running Second Life is difficult to come by when you're homeless. It took me... like a WEEK." She adds an emoticon wink. "I found it in a dumpster behind a computer store...I replaced the fan. It works fine."

Once again, I get a little wary: I don't doubt obsolescent PCs often get tossed out back, but Second Life requires a fairly powerful, up-to-date 3D card to run -- did you just yank that out of the trash, too?

Well, um, exactly. "I figure they needed to RMA it [return merchandise authorization]," she suggests, "or a user just told them to keep it after they upgraded, something like that...but yes, the dumpster part is true." So there she is, with a jury-rigged PC, logged in from a squat, constructing this seaside mansion online. "And how'd that make you feel", I ask her, "Building a virtual home while not having an actual one?" (I apologize to her for sounding all Barbara Walters about it.)

"Oh, journalists." She emoticon winks again, but she takes a while to respond. "Well, Second Life is an effective escape for most people -- I was no different. It's just that while most people use Second Life to unwind, or hang out with friends, I did the same, but I had more to escape." To her, she says, the game "[w]as a means to keep busy and give me a means to working towards improving myself. I mean, obviously not as big a help as food banks and stuff, but it's been very helpful...in terms of [learning programming] skills, but also in terms of just getting OUT. [W]hen you don't have running water, or money, there aren't a lot of places you can go. Contrary to popular belief, homeless people aren't lazy, they just have a lot of spare time."

Over the weeks, friends did help her get social assistance, and a new living arrangement. "Fortunately," she says, "everything worked out QUITE nicely and I'm housed now." So she's thinking about going to college, perhaps, either as a programmer, or an artist, or both.

But as she stands there in her mansion, I can't help picturing her a few months ago, and where she was then, in the winter chill, surely freezing in her unheated squat, surely with drug addicts and other denizens roaming outside beneath her on the meanest streets. She's shivering, but still tapping away on a computer that's duct-taped together with peripherals grabbed out of a dumpster, plugged into an exposed power line, using a makeshift antenna to stowaway onto someone's wireless Internet portal-- all to get here, in this sunlit mansion above the blue-green sea. It's also a little too much to swallow. ("Once you get to know her better," insisted Lyra Muse, a slinky friend of hers who stood nearby, when I first spoke with her, "you'll believe [all] that. Cat's da smartz.") Her story makes her seem like some William Gibson heroine, a tech-savvy waif out there on the street, finding her own uses for things. But what is certain is that she's in here now, still working on her dream home. She's tinkering with its electric tram line, which you can ride from the nearby hill, right into the Omega estate. (She had to power it off, because the programming script she wrote to make it work somehow causes a bug which makes the surrounding world go a bit wacky.) And looking at her place, you wonder how much it matters, whether her travails happened as she said they did, or whether they're just another facet of her online persona.

In the end, does it matter? The home is here, it's hers to call her own, and like her, it's as real as we want it to be.

"UNDERWATER LUCID DREAMING"

Originally published April 28, 2003 here.

... is about the closest I can get, to describing what it feels like, to be in Second Life. The underwater bit is a sensation I get with other multiplayer games, too-something about the lag, and the split-second delay between what you input into the mouse and keyboard, and when the action actually manifests, onscreen. But the lucid dreaming part, that strikes me as fairly unique to this game. Maybe that has to do with the way the world unfolds, in here: you'll be walking by (or better yet, flying over) what looks like a fairly normal if extravagant cluster of homes, and suddenly, you'll turn and come across a giant granite spike, twirling in the sky, end over end. You'll fly over a boardwalk carnival, then pass right over a forest of futuristic skyscrapers, and so on. You'll see user-made posters depicting anime and videogame characters, then you'll see classic works of art from the West and Asia, and so on. The aggregate effect isn't quite incoherent, but it's markedly different from, say, a high fantasy MMOG, where you can be pretty sure that the next thing you see will somehow make sense, in the swords-and-sorcery world that's been laid out in advance.

Here, though, you get something that seems like… dream logic, a sporadic cascade of imagery taken from pop culture, history books, and fine art, stuff that you recognize, and a lot more that seems incomplete or evolving. And you have some control over it-after all, you decide how you want to move through the place-but you still feel overwhelmed by the visuals that are coming at you. Your mouse and keyboard become like a tiller, guiding this little submarine you call your avatar through this subconscious slipstream that you're sharing with a few thousand people.

So: underwater lucid dreaming.

MAN IN THE MIRROR

Originally published on April 23 and 24th of 2003 here.

So what is my best face, and do I really want to put it forward?

That's probably the first question you'll ask yourself, when you fire up Second Life, and it looks like the developers already sense that. There's a sign next to the third signpost in Prelude, the orientation area for the game. This is the place where you learn how create and alter the look of your online persona.

But first, the sign reminds you not to spend so much time playing with your features, since you can always change them at any time.

In other words, Mr. Vanity, don't get all bogged down poking and prodding yourself in the mirror. Look around and explore, already.

So walking away from the mirror is a lot harder than you'd imagine. (But look at my face! What if I can't get it exactly right?) Probably because the options for what you can look like in Second Life are way more than you'd ever imagine. Your choices are broken down into numerous categories and subcategories (head, torso, hair, eyes, and so on-and-on). You adjust them via a slider control, moving each between two extremes: large nose versus small nose, for example, narrow eyes versus saucer-sized anime eyes. (Not to mention my favorite, the flat butt/big butt slider.) The upshot is an endless variety, and very likely, an endless amount of time tinkering away, to get the look just right...

Believe it or not, the original idea was to try and get as close as I could to what I actually look like in the real world. But I don't really look like George Michael from his A-Ha period, so apparently I bunged up quite a few times, along the way. Part of the challenge, if you're trying to match your actual appearance, is forcing yourself to stay honest: I'd rather not give myself any love handles (yes, there's a slider for that!) - but then, I'd better be straight with myself, and include them. (Then again, maybe it just means I should get to the gym more often.) If you go in that direction, trying to make your avatar mirror what you see every day in the mirror, the appearance selection mode sort of becomes a self-image quiz.

So I'll have to toy around with it a bit more, and get more familiar with the interface - and swallow a bit of pride - before it'll look like the real me. (In Second Life, fortunately, impromptu plastic surgery is always reversible.)

Dig my threads - or not. I was trying to dress myself in an all-white three-piece suit, and this was the best I could do. (Sort of meant it as a tribute to the trademark clothes of Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism master interpreter of American subculture.) What I ended up with, based on the default selections, is more like something from Miami Vice. Hopefully some ambitious Second Life user with good enough fashion designer chops has built a way more Wolfe-like wardrobe. (And if you're selling, e-mail me, because I'm buying!)

In any case, all this brings up another question: what do I really mean, when I say I'm trying to get my look right?

Not that easy a question to answer, when you think about it.

NOTES ON A WORLD FOR THE MAKING...

Originally published April 22, 2003 here.

Here's the thing: ordinarily, I cover computer games for magazines like Salon and Wired. But for the next few months, Linden Lab has invited me to set aside my journalist cap, and instead, don the digital beanie of their in-house virtual correspondent. I'll be writing about the creation of Second Life, their upcoming massively multiplayer online game, as it goes from Beta test to official launch, with frequent posts in this space.

Because what is happening now in the Beta test of Second Life is very much a social experiment in the making. Literally, "making": thousands of volunteers are already in there now, buzzing around in Linden Lab's servers, shaping their world out of thin air. From a default canvas of wide oceans and rolling hills, they're cramming the place with coffee tables, exotic swords, sunglasses, ride-able rockets, electric guitars, readable books, soaring Japanese pagodas-- pretty much anything you might imagine, and a lot more you wouldn't dream of-- to create a playspace as vast and varied as creativity and enthusiasm allows.

At the same time, they're figuring out how they'll get along with each other, too. Already, there are social networks and membership guilds springing up, with rules and traditions that are as complex and detailed as the world they're constructing. Some groups want to stick with their own, others want to reach out and befriend everyone they come across; others, it looks like, are too busy building to worry too much about either.

So as the Second Life Beta goes I'll on, I'll be in the field-- Linden Lab's embedded reporter, as it were-- following the progress of this new, unique society that's developing before us right now. So I'll be putting down my thoughts and observations here, on a near-daily basis.

Why me?

Well, this partly has to do with my writing the mother of all articles last year, on the state of massively multiplayer online games (or MMOGs). Like many who've played these games, enjoyed them somewhat, but always seen the potential for so much more, my main question there was: where's the game for everyone else? Can there be an online space for folks who might be interested in something other than endless dungeons to explore, and trolls to tangle with? (Nothing wrong with that, of course, but must that really be the only variation?) I was about to give the MMOG genre up for dead, when the Linden folks brought me in to have a look. I was so impressed, they ended up bringing me on, too. If any game has a decent chance to become the future of massively multiplayer games, in my (not unbiased!) opinion, this could well be it.

And in any case, I want to be on hand, to see what happens on the way. What will they build in there? What kind of societies will they have? How will Lifers from one part of the real world get along (or not) with others?

The kind of questions I'll be asking right here, the kind of answers I'll be looking for, in there. If you're already a resident, or you're just a curious passer-by, I hope you do, too. In any case, come by often, and keep in touch. (And if you're already a member, be sure to drop by this journal's discussion board, too.)