New World Notes

Leila Lists The Fashion Of Virtual Desire

This is a thumbnail of an awesomely sexy image by blogging fashionista Leila Carroll, and it's absolutely not safe for work (unless, say, you work at Nerve.com.)  Leila created the couple's acrobatic love tango for her store, "! Meya !", billed as offering "Not your ordinary poses", an understatement to say the least.  Also interesting is how the picture's accompanying blog post lists all the fashion accessories her models are wearing.  She creates numerous images to model her poses, Leila explains to me, and "[I] started listing the fashion info because I was constantly being asked 'Ohhhhh where'd you get the shoes also if you don't mind me asking.'" 

What Lillie Learned About Men From Second Life Sex

It's said that women who work in the sex industry know the most about male desire as it really is, but does that apply to the virtual version of the business?  Lillie Yifu of Second Sex, upscale avatar escort, metaverse analyst, SL's closest analogue to Anaïs Nin, puts that hypothesis to the test with her latest essay, "A Page From Men: The Missing Owner's Manual", practical advice for keeping men happy in the real world, based in part on what she learned as a working girl in Second Life:

One of the big reasons men cheat in marriage, and I know because they come to me, is because of a simple cluster of factors. Now the peevish way to look at it is to try and beat these factors out of them.Train them to do things Together, and they will start to do those things automatically... Or you can bitch about your men logging on and paying me for virtual [mmph mmph] and trying to get my [mmph mmph].

As the redactions suggest, it's not entirely safe for work reading, but then, it's probably best read in private anyway.  From a dude perspective, I don't quite buy it all, but it's spiked with undeniable wisdom.

Update, 4/20:  In Comments below, Ms. Yifu follows up with still more wisdom gleaned from SL sex work: "Men think about getting sex much more than women, but they aren't any better, and my experience says that most of them are worse, at having sex.  I can't count the number of times a man has IMed me saying 'I want sex with you!' And, then, when I ask what he wants to do exactly, he's at a loss for words. It's in the hundreds of times, and probably thousands..."

Casius' Guide To Getting The Ladies (Of SL)

If you're a gent who yearns for the glamorous women who frequent Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge and other classy locales, you're going to need expert advice, and Casius Masala is your man.  On his blog, he lays out the delicate art of virtual seduction, and judging by his battle plan, it's just as demanding a waltz as the analog version.  Starting with dressing your avatar:

Get ready to spend at least $40 US. Buy the best skin you can find, the best shape, the best hair and the best suit. This is a point of pride. An extra effort to find excellent men's shoes will be noticed for women notice shoes.

That's the part of your presentation you can purchase off the rack, but Casius recommends shaping up your Resident profile, too:  "Pay attention to your groups and your picks. Make sure they express what you want people to take away about you." And only then are you even ready to make your way to Phat's bar, waiting (yes, waiting) for a woman to approach.  And when she finally does, the dance really begins.  Read the rest of Casius' advice, so you know where to go from there.  (Hat tip: Lillie Yifu. Image credit:  Casius.)

New World Newsfeed: The BBC's Video on Virtual Infidelity

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

Narrated with a plummy diction usually reserved for nature programs, the BBC recently aired a 40 minute documentary on love in Second Life.  If you're in the UK, you can see it on the official site here; outside Britain, it's available (for the moment at least) on YouTube, and unsurprisingly, it's a beautifully crafted, observant, and sensitive work, well worth watching: Part I is here; Part II is here; Part III is here; Part IV is here.

It juxtaposes two real life couples, one which came together because of Second Life, one which is near falling apart (along with their family), with SL as the catalyst.  I say "catalyst" because it's made fairly clear that the tumult of their relationship existed before Second Life brought it to a painful culmination.  "I definitely was depressed," Caroline, an attractive redhead, tells the BBC interviewer, describing her state before even knowing the metaverse existed.  "I was looking for something but not knowing what I was looking for." If you look long enough, you eventually find it; being online just lubricates the process.

The Mean Girls Guide to Soft Core Machinima

The link in this image and below is totally not safe viewing for work (unless you work at Vivid Entertainment, in which case, it's research), but it provokes a fascinating question that's never been satisfactorily answered: there's a lot of sexual content in Second Life (though considerably less than often assumed); there's definitely a lot of Second Life machinima out there on the Web.  So where's all the machinima porn? 

Like a Natural Woman: Raven Sells Swaying Breasts

Outside her store, Smashing Prims-- since 12/07, up to 1000 chests served

In her first life, Raven Ivanova is a woman who was none too satisfied with the size of her chest.  "I've always been small breasted and disliked being that way most of my life," she tells me.  Motherhood recently changed that, however, giving her what she dubs "half decent breasts". She chuckles, recounting how she took that transformation strutting outside. "I wear more revealing clothes now," says Raven, "and for the first time I wear bikinis and like to populate hot tubs."

In a sense, this is the experience she offers customers in her Second Life store, Smashing Prims-- website here, direct SLURL teleport at this link-- through a unique synthesis of virtual fashion and technology.  Raven's fashion comes from the evening gowns, lingerie, and custom skins she creates.  The technology is derived from two relatively recent innovations to Second Life 3D building: "flexi prims", building blocks which bend to physical forces like wind and gravity, and "sculpties", prims designed to more realistically simulate organic shapes.  Merging art and science, Raven Ivanova has launched a quiet revolution in female avatar fashion-- and for that matter, the very definition of what women avatars should be:

Bouncing breasts.  Breasts that you can snap to your avatar as attachments, or in a dress you wear.  Breasts that sway and gorgeously swell under clothing, when a woman walks; breasts that briefly take flight, when a woman moves with still more vigor, such as dancing, or maybe a bout of kung fu. To see them up close is to see the Uncanny Valley crossed at chest level, but failing a first-hand look, Raven's product demo video should suffice.

"This is interesting," I tell Raven when I meet her at Smashing Prims, "because it's usually assumed only men want big breasted avatars."

The Joy of Rezbian Sex (Updated)

Kit and her SL lover Lanna (portrait by Delilah Karas)

"Rezbian" is Kit Meredith's elegant term for a phenomenon I've meant to write about for quite some time: women who are heterosexual in real life, but partnered with another female avatar in Second Life.  (Or if you care for a cleverer definition:  girls who like boys who like girls who like boys.)  Recently, Kit explored it from her personal vantage, so I should let her have the floor:

I’m straight in RL. I’ve never even had one of those college “experimental periods” or anything. I’m a firm believer in the notion that our sexualities are hard-wired into our brains... But, here I am, romantically involved with a woman in SL.

Kit's totally comfortable enjoying that paradox, but she's also curious why it's so prevalant.  After all, as she notes, lesbian couples in SL are disproportionately common, compared to their real world numbers. Why?  She suggests a few explanations:

Undersexed, Overbuilding: Academic survey of SL user activity belies stereotypes (Updated)

Source: SL Survey

Last April, I linked to a study of SL activity being conducted by Wolkam Winger and Angelyka Klata, two European academics/Residents.  Their results are finally online, and they're fascinating.  Most striking to me is a question which adds another datapoint to the recurring question, "How much activity in Second Life is sexual?"  I've long suspected it was much less than often assumed, even more so after the Lindens claimed that land designated to have Mature-rated activity was less than 18%.  Winger and Klata's survey of 657 Residents is in line with this:

Asked if they engaged in SL cybersex, only 13.6% answered Often/Always.  28.9% answered Sometimes, and 52.2% answered Never.  This fits my anecdotal sense that most SL users try sex a few times for the novelty-- or consider it, and just pass.

Lash Lessons: Ten sex tips from an SL doyenne

I've known Lash Xevious for years, admired her marvelous talent for richly textured, sensual sculptures (below is a glimpse of her site from Burning Life 2004), and her equally sensual blog Tamed Frustration, which combines her SL adventures with emotionally naked insights from both worlds.  One of her latest posts is a hilariously brash, ten step primer on how not to engage in avatar-based seduction.  Sample:

- Nothing ruins a moment faster than teleporting in two of your "gal pals" while snuggling the girl you're supposedly wooing. No, she will not trust you. No, she's not impressed you know someone who makes hair. Let's flip the tables on your ass and see how it feels when two random guys pop in to watch...

- I hate these lines: "I never felt this way before"-"I'm amazed by you"-"I love you now and forever" and UGH I can't continue on cuz the bile is rising up my throat... And any guy that gets really sappy during cyber sex is just weird.

Much more glorious Lash sass follows-- read it all here.  Totally unsafe reading for work, of course, unless you work at a bar in Williamsburg.

THE OPPOSITE OF SEX

"What if they gave an orgy and no one came?"  It's a provocative question, and Lillie Yifu (who's quickly established herself as one of the best bloggers on the topic of SL sexuality) answers it after taking a stroll through what she calls "The warrens of the undercity", i.e. some of the most popular free adult clubs in Second Life.  What she finds there isn't erotic, but fascinating and insightful all the same, a hard look at the real limitations of virtual fantasy.  Read it here at Raise the Red Lantern, the NC-17 spinoff to her main blog.  (Obviously not work safe, unless you work at Nerve.com.) 

THE ISTHMUS OF SEX

Lillie Yifu in a skybox where she plies her trade

Ziggy Figaro recently wrote a full and fairly unflinching look at the state of sexual expression in Second Life, bringing together many disparate elements in a comprehensive way.  His conversation with Philip Linden yielded a fascinating nugget, which returns us to the ongoing controversy, "Just how much sexual commerce in SL?"  I've speculated it's much less than it's often assumed to be, and this passage offers another nugget for us to work with:

The Lindens, Philip tells Ziggy, "require landowners to disclose if there's mature content on their land by checking a box on the contral panel. As of Thursday, about 15% of the land parcels in Second Life had that box checked, or 18% by land area... Moreover, not all that mature content is sexual in nature... Simple use of swear-words can get content flagged as mature." [emph. mine]

WHAT TEQUILA AND SUICIDE TEACH US

Tila Tequila avatar screenshot courtesy of Endemol

As you'll note by the ad banner intermittently flickering across the top of the page for the next ten days, Playboy is officially entering Second Life in June. And while their success would seem assured, that's far from certain.  Just a couple months ago, MySpace superstar and former Playboy Cybergirl Tila Tequila opened a mansion hangout in Second Life.  And though she counts over a million MySpace friends, attendance at her SL crib has been scant; it's consistently empty during peak periods, with Traffic registering in the low hundreds (i.e., a handful of daily visitors, at best.)  Last year, the Suicide Girls launched an SL space of their own, and though the goth-punk babes are extraordinarily (and deservedly) popular on their own site (and again, were featured on Playboy's homepage in 2004), visitors to their Second Life locale quickly dwindled, and within weeks, most of the dozens of Girls who had created an avatar lost interest with being in-world.

All of which leads to the obvious question: in an online world already beset by sexy female avatars, is there a place for actual sexy women?

THE GAMES ADULTS PLAY

At the heart of the age identification controversy, of course, is the intersection of metaverse sexuality and the variety of mores across the real world, regarding sex-- how it's depicted in the media, and perhaps most germane to SL, which erotic fantasies are considered appropriate or at least understandable, and which are considered suspect, or deemed outside the norm.  It's no surprise that the most intimate of human activities generates the most conflicting responses, from culture to culture, and individual to individual.  You might discern a test case in this video which, while not explicit in itself, evokes a Second Life community where exotic sexual roleplay is essential to the subculture-- and therefore, is likely to generate a variety of reactions.  As a work of SL machinima, it's near first-rate: professionally executed and vividly shot by Ariella Furman, who makes excellent use of the documentary form to dramatize a fascinating outgrowth of SL's Gorean subculture.

A SEXUAL CENSUS OF SECOND LIFE (Many Updates)

Exotic dancers at Stacey Sugar's Barbie Club

Now that I'm plunging ahead fully on the book, I've spent more time than usual thinking about metaverse sexuality.  It's often been said (and reported) that 30 percent of commercial activity in Second Life is sexual* [see Update], though it's never been clear how that figure was arrived at.  Then I got to reasoning it out, and it suddenly struck me as just about the strangest claim in the world.

How much commerce in-world is sexual?  If I had to guess wildly, I'd say 5 percent.  Maybe much less.

At the same time, it's not unreasonable to believe it's more, if you go on real world assumptions.  But then, as is often the case, those don't always hold up in there.

OPUS FLAMAND'S SENSE OF WOMEN

(c) Jose Maria de Espona

SL as artist's palette:  To create these breathtaking portraits of women, Opus Flamand first took screenshots of female avatars, then digitally repainted them by hand.  Flamand's aim was to create images of women that were undeniably sexy, but decidedly unlike those more popular on the grid.

"The idea was to do a type of work not related to the 'digital beauties' a la [the] Barbie/Bratz way but something a bit more dirty and complex," Opus explains to me, "a bit in the Otto Dix way." 

More from Flamand after the break-- though a couple images are potentially unsafe for work (unless you work in a lingerie modeling studio.)

THE LONG TAIL OF CHEATING HEARTS

The illicit embrace from "Your Cheating Heart"

The advantage of running a blog for so long is that you can track readers' comments on stories that were written months or even years ago.  Mainly they're just opining on the post, but others treat them as a kind of anonymous confessional.  (The sins of an avatar, in other words, related through a real life pseudonym.) "Your Cheating Heart", my 2005 story of a man whose real life wife caught him in the arms of a gorgeous avatar, and exacted a humiliating revenge, has provoked that kind of response several times-- most recently (and wrenchingly) from someone known only as "A Reformed Adulterer":

WIRED OUTTAKES: THE LOVEMAKERS

Continuing my series of favorite screenshots which didn't make Wired Magazine's Second Life Tour Guide (Samurai Island screenshots here; Burning Life images here), here's a set featuring Phil Murdock and Snow Hare, the real life couple and owners of PM Adult, a retailer specializing in Mature-rated action animations and equipment.  I profiled them last year in "Making Love", a story of virtual sex and romance as a prelude to the corporeal version, so who better to demonstrate the process of coming together in-world?  To my surprise, shooting these also became a first-hand demonstration of just how viscerally engaging the virtual simulation of physical love can be.  More screenshots after the break, one possibly not safe for work, unless you work in a massage parlor.

SEX AND THE SINGULARITY

Meeting Khannea at her office

When Ray Kurzweil began writing about an imminent post-human future when nanotechology and supercomputers would enable us to transcend flesh and mortality, I doubt he ever imagined how his thought would redound on someone who spent most of her time roleplaying a bisexual prostitute in an online world.  But there it is.

Khannea Suntzu contacted me a few months ago.  Her SL sex work as Khannea, a high-priced and highly-desired call girl, has been the subject of several outside media profiles of SL Residents, including one in the 1 Up gamer portal and another, of all places, in the esteemed Le Monde, so I assumed she had something like that in mind for me.  That turned out to be wrong.

"[L]et me get this straight," Khannea told me, "I am not interested in an interview.  I have done that by now, and I have said all there is to say, or what I would want to say. 

"What I do want is not as simple."

And she told me what that was.  And since she happened to be appearing onstage soon after she did, I met her at the club where she danced, and took some screenshots of her, while Rick James' "Superfreak" streamed across the stage.

STILL CHEATING, STILL HEARTS BROKEN

From "Your Cheating Heart" 

Someone I'll call "Kaitlyn" was having trouble posting a response to the Comments of "Your Cheating Heart", my 2005 story of a virtually unfaithful man who woke up to find himself naked and his real marriage in deep jeopardy.  The question that drove that entry was: "Do you consider having avatar sex cheating on your spouse if the flame has gone?"  Many SL residents had different opinions-- and after reading it, Kaitlyn (not a resident, for reasons that'll become obvious) had hers. 

So she e-mailed her answer to me, asking if I'd post it for her:

"Hello from the land of outdated computers and broken hearts...

SEX AND THE SL WOMAN

SL blogger Biscuit Carroll sings the praises of virtual sex and romance in SL-- not just for their titillation, but for removing age imbalance as a factor from erotic competition:

[W]here this becomes a great gift to humanity is that middle-aged women compete on an equal footing with their younger sisters. And the mind of a middle-aged woman is sexually and emotionally evolved. There is a sophistication missing in most younger women.

As a 45 year old male I can't help being attracted to women in their 20s and 30s... [but in] Second Life, almost all women choose to look this age. Women of all ages are equally attractive. Behind the veil of the avatar is the full spectrum of female sexual identity.

Suddenly I'm lusting after middle-aged women.

MAKING LOVE

Building a life together from the animation of desire (originally published here).

Phil Murdock had a hankering for his neighbor Snow Hare; to launch a romance with her, he hit on the most logical solution available to him: he got on his motorcycle and crashed it into Ms. Hare’s living room.

“Break the ice,” Phil shrugs. “Nothing like a motorcycle crash and a ‘sorry’.” He’s a brawny, bare-chested guy with close-cropped hair (not unlike the photograph in his First Life profile), and keeps a nickel-plated .45 crammed in the front of his leather pants. “It’s been love ever since.”

That was last June; their first month together in-world was a whirlwind of clubbing, shopping sprees, and building. Come July, they started creating custom animations to sell. Phil would design them offline in Poser, then upload and attach them to their avatars, so they could try them out. By that time, however, they both knew their feelings for each other were real and deep, and not just confined to their avatars. Trouble was, in real life, they lived several states and 700 miles away from each other.

And so to move things along, they hit on the most logical solution available to them:  they created a kiss.  Not just a friendly embrace, either; those already existed, anyway.  What they had in mind was a kiss worthy of the name-- full-bodied, open-mouthed, devouring.

YOUR CHEATING HEART

A survey on the morality of in-world romance provokes several Second Life lessons-- learned, and unlearned (originally published here).

Beaux Grayson was on the sundeck of his home, curled up on the couch with a slender brunette, when his wife walked in.   

"And went," as Beaux subsequently put it in a message he sent to his Second Life friends, "NUTZ." 

She demanded to know who this woman in thigh-high boots on the screen was, laying there with her husband's avatar. So Beaux told her. "I gave her the facts (married, English, kids, etc.), but not the name and that we have known each other about two weeks." He tried to be as open with her as he could; he begged her to join him in Second Life so she could be with him there, especially on those days when he was traveling on business, and going in-world from his hotel room, when there wasn't much else to do. ("I could go out to bars, but found it 'safer' to have my social interaction on-line.")

Whatever explanations he gave her, they apparently weren't enough.

"So," Beaux continues, "last night after we went to bed, she got up and went into SL. The first thing she saw on the entry screen was the last thing I was doing: Cuddling on the couch." This is because whenever you enter Second Life, you see the final image of whatever you were doing, the last time you were in-world. No matter what has transpired, since then. Considering what they'd just been discussing, the picture of Beaux and the brunette on the couch might not have been the best thing for her see again. And though Beaux Grayson's wife had never been in-world before, she "managed to do some stuff that shocked me." He found that out after waking up, and greeting her in the kitchen.

"I said 'good morning'.  She said it is not good."  She suggested that he log into Second Life.

So Beaux went back in-world, to find that his avatar was now naked and gray and decidedly smaller-- and lying in the private room of a popular Mature-rated nightclub. "I don't know how she figured [out how to do] all that," Grayson says, astounded.

All this came out after I started looking into an online poll posted in the official Second Life discussion forum. Resident-created surveys are a staple of the Forum, sometimes a way to garner instant feedback on particular issues affecting the world; often a way to air personal grievances in the form of an opinion poll. The particular question, "Do you consider having AV Sex Cheating on your Spouse if the Flame has Gone?" was a simple one. The answers that followed, as they often are, were anything but that; they read a little like a society's first attempts to find a universally acceptable concept of infidelity.

And in a society that has grown to the size of a large, tightly-knit town, these questions are liable to be asked more often. Especially when so much of the town seems like a compressed version of South Miami, Amsterdam, and the Burning Man playa at full roar, and temptations are only constrained by the ethics of imagination.  If they are at all. 

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

Got a philandering spouse? Property needs securing? Marked for vendetta? Online gumshoes for hire in Second Life-- rates from L$100/hour, plus expenses.  (Originally published here.)

Laura Skye had an inkling that her lover was unfaithful, and had gone back to tomcatting in the racier nightclubs, where the working girl avatars come with loose clothing and even looser morals. So she hired herself a private investigator, to do some snooping.

"I found out he went with an escort," she tells me at my office, "and we had a big argument. And then he promised no more. But I didn't trust him." So she clicked on the Find button-- Second Life's equivalent of the yellow pages-- and put "detective" in the search slot.

Which is how she wound up at the office and the private cave hideout of Markie Macdonald, P.I.

"We set up a honey trap," says Ms. Macdonald.   "You know, nice female avatar... flirted quite a bit." 

In a honey trap, a gorgeous woman or a handsome man is hired to approach the target of an infidelity investigation, lay down some seductive patter on him or her, and see if the suspected philanderer takes the bait.

MAN AND MAN ON WOMAN ON WOMAN

Originally published here.

So there's this guy who's a guy in real life but a girl in Second Life, even though in real life he's into girls, and then there's this other guy who's also a guy into girls in real life, and he was playing a guy in Second Life for awhile, but then decided to be a girl instead, and then like two months ago, guess what: the first guy met the second guy, and they fell in love, so now they're a couple-- even though they're really two guys into girls.

In other words, you know, just another romance in Second Life.

"We haven't really been too sexual," Jade Lily clarifies for me. "We're like two people who are becoming very close. It's like I have no concept of gender in Second Life... so the only way i can think to qualify my heterosexuality is my attraction to a female figure."

So I stopped awhile to chat with Jade Lily and Torley Torgeson, the female figure in Jade's life. As it happens, I knew Torley when he was a slim young dude in flowing neon clothes who hauled his keyboard around everywhere, and though a relative newcomer, quickly charmed Second Life's citizenry with his quirky, mad creative charm. (His ongoing journal is one of the strongest Second Life blogs out there-- especially if you're a fan of giant watermelons and sleeping in dumpsters.)  Shortly after taking the in-world by storm, however, Torley abandoned his keyboard attachment for the most part, and his gender.  And in deference to his wishes-- and what else can you defer to, when identity is so malleable?-- I'm going to abandon the male pronoun when I mention Torley from now on, too.

"Jade's the type of person who I felt I 'knew' early on," she tells me, "even if I didn't talk that much to her to begin with. It's kinda like... you have your Pokemon cards or pieces of the puzzle and whatever, and you suspect someone else has a bunch of the missing pieces. Well, as time went on, I found this to be true."

"It's just begun," Jade tells me as we sit down in the courtyard of Jade's Second Life library, last November. "But so far, I get along great with Torley." To make things more complex (and what's a Second Life romance without complications?) we're joined at the table by someone who has a real life history with Jade.

"A girl I dated in high school came into Second Life as a guy," Jade explains. "We attempted a relationship, but it didn't really work out. We're just not compatible. That's completely unrelated."

"You see this lil' lady to my right I once dated," says Sage Maracas, a muscular man wearing dark sunglasses, "I created a male avatar better than her's. She gave me a [male avatar] skin and it's been that way ever since. Now every time I go female she gets all pissy... something about spending money on the skin, blah blah blah."

"I thought it would be interesting to have a relationship with a guy in Second Life who was actually a girl in real life," Jade explains, laughing, "and we thought we wanted a relationship at the time."

"You mean in real life?"  I ask.

"Something like that," Maracas grunts.

"... [A]nd I think we wanted to salvage that," Ms. Lily continues.  "It didn't really work out for either of us, I suppose."

Which brings us back to the relationship which does seem to be working out, at least for the moment, involving the two women nearby who are currently locked in a warm embrace.

"Mmm," murmurs Torley,  "it's hard to let go."

I ask them what it feels like, when they see their avatars hug each other.

MISSING MELTS

Late last November, a woman was sitting in her home office, waiting for her broken computer to be repaired, when the disease that had been wracking her heart took its final toll, and killed her. She was 33.

Days later, a ceremony and vigil was held in-world for her, the mourners in black, their heads bowed, gathered in a ring around a shrine that bore her real life photograph. It depicts a young African-American woman with vivacious eyes and a giant grin, and even if most of the residents who came to mourn didn't know her in that incarnation, they still knew her well enough. On November 24th, a capacity crowd was there to remember the woman that most of them had only known as a slender, sexy brunette, the wittily-named ingenue known as Meltsinyourmouth Steed.

Someone there did know her well enough to know the why and how of her passing.

"She died wishing she was in Second Life," Malora Brodsky tells me. "Her computer broke [the previous] Wednesday... She had to wait nine days from Thursday to get hers back. She was on [her] hubby's computer checking e-mail... his computer wouldn't play Second Life." But by then, Malora and her had known each other her well enough to speak by phone, which is what they'd been doing, the previous day.

"We talked on phone around Midnight, Saturday night," Malora says. "She was tired and TV'd out... she hated not being able to play Second Life."

"And she died a few hours later, pretty much."

"Yes. She didn't call me Sunday, like she usually did..." There's silence on her side of the channel. "So depressed." Malora is a voluptuous redhead with ice blue eyes, given to wearing blood red capes or silk stockings and little else. (Based in part on the videogame character BloodRayne, one of her favorites, and a look that Melts embraced, when Malora tried it on.)

Malora's silent for awhile longer, and I ask her if we should talk about this later.

"Pardon me," she finally says. "Old wounds are open again... gawd, I miss her so much. Her spirit was unequalled. She was so full of love."

She learned that Melts had died on the day it happened. "I called her house to tell her about my mother." They spoke every day, around lunchtime, and for a couple hours in the evening. "And her hubby said she passed away... I had a hard time understanding him [at first]."

News of her passing spread quickly through the Second Life community, and Melts' many friends began planning her memorial, for the following week.

"She loved everyone," Malora says. "But she [also] told everyone how she loved me.  We were the happiest couple."

Because as it happens, Malora Brodsky was not just a friend. In Second Life, the two women were married to each other. "Other women propositioned her," says Malora, "and she wasn't interested in women, 'til she met me... We saw each other and stars flew. We knew we were destined for each other."

PERMISSION TO HUG

Francis Chang has found the secret to bringing fully consensual physical expressions of affection into an online world, and it’s contained in a see-through box that’s stuck to her butt.

“There's this big invisible cube on my ass that holds the script,” she tells me, smiling. “So as long as you wear this attachment, you can hug people.”

This script, and another script that works in tandem with it, represents the code motor that powers the choreography for two avatars who want to come together, even across a crowded room, and warmly embrace.

“The main script listens for a voice command,” Francis explains, “and then when you tell it to hug someone, it scans nearby avatars for the person you wanted to hug. Then, when it finds [you], the second script asks [you] for animation rights. If you accept, the script goes into full gear. And moves my avatar into position to hug your avatar, and then we both play the hug animation.” (The animation for the hug was created by Launa Fauna, Francis Chung’s collaborator in the effort to bring more love into the world.)

As an avatar, Francis is a slender Asian girl with full lips, so when it’s time for her to give me a hug demonstration, I slip on my Hunter S. Thompson-esque avatar. I figure that’ll make for cooler screenshots. There’s another reason for doing that, too.

“I don’t want to make a longer explanation to my real life girlfriend why I’m hugging a babe,” I tell Francis, paradoxically embarrassed.

The run-up to the embrace looks like this, in the text window:

“Francis Chung: /hug ham”
“Hug Attachment (super long): Francis would like give you a hug. Say

to accept.” [And here, if you’re inclined, you click Yes in the dialog window that appears, or type Yes in chat. It’s not just a permission request, to have your avatar animated-- it’s a way or insuring mutually consensual embracing.]
“Francis gives Hamlet a big hug.”

The hug that follows is warm and full-bodied, with arms around waist and cheeks pressed into shoulders or mussed hair, as a kicker to seal the deal. No sideways, heterosexual guy half-hug, this; no from-the-shoulders-up, awkward Christmas party affair, either.

In the realm of online worlds, the hug of Francis Chung and Launa Fauna heralds something of a mini-breakthrough. For unless I’ve missed some recent innovation, this embrace of theirs is the first credible display of player-driven physical affection to appear in an online, fully 3D world. (Hand-holding, furtive avatar bumping, or sitting position clutches notwithstanding.) And by bringing real substance, so to speak, to all the flirtatious and affectionate text that players have had to settle for, up to now, it might herald a kind of mini-revolution, too. What happens to all that pent up demand to touch each other, when it’s finally met? What happens to all that sassy eloquence with which people in the online world have charmed and seduced each other, up to now?

“It's brilliant viral marketing, when you think about it,” Francis tells me. “Every person that gets hugged instantly goes, ‘I LOVE THIS! I WANT THIS!’” And as Launa Fauna tells me in instant message, sales of their hug attachment at her store have been brisk, in the week since it hit her shelves. So far, she says, “I'd guess more in the 150 range.”

“I hope it'll add to the general happiness of Second Lifers,” Francis Chung says, beaming. “Launa tells me she always does an ‘Awww’ whenever she sees people hugging. She camps her store sometimes [to watch].”

FALLING FOR EDDIE

The acts of creation that brought them together (originally published here.)

Their romance began, as many romances do, with a floating brain.

When Eddie Escher lived in Clementina, his pod-shaped house had a brain in a vat. And his neighbor Fallingwater Cellardoor would often stop by, to talk with it.

"I used to say random things to Brain," Fall says, "to try to get a rise out of him.  It didn't work." 

That's because Eddie had programmed the brain in the vat to control his house, but he hadn't scripted it to chat. So Fallingwater's conversations with the brain were decidedly one-way.

Fall turns to Eddie.  "I said 'Hi' to you, though, too."

Eddie smiles, and agrees.  "Always me first, then Brain."

This story began, as many New World Notes stories do, with a totally different subject in mind.  I originally stopped by Eddie Escher's new home in the Elf-themed Seacliff, because Eddie's one of the many residents who are also in the game industry, and use the world as a canvas for more personal projects. Eddie's an artist with a very well-known publisher, and he's working on a console game that's set in a crime-infested New York. (Some recent assignments involved modeling, as he puts it, "tramps, junkies, gang members".) On his Seacliff property, it's all Elvish architecture and magnificent trees, and that's where I first spoke with Eddie and Fallingwater together.

"I tend to spend a few hours a night in-world, during the week," Eddie says, "and don't always get a lot done until the weekend, when I'm logged in 'til the sun comes up." This isn't just a means of letting off creative steam for Eddie, because he sees it as integral to his career as a game developer. "Man, I want to work in Second Life one day, making my game graphics [in here]... plus, I intend to put some screenshots of Second Life [projects] of mine in my portfolio."

One of those projects was his original pod-shaped home in Clementina, and this is where he first met Fallingwater Cellardoor-- who as it happens, had noticed his talents a lot earlier before she started talking to his floating brain.

BONFIRE OF BROKEN DREAMS?

Nick Rhodes, Second Life's only known Frenchman, owns an airy art gallery in Tan , where he exhibits elegant photos of glamorous women-- taken by him, and other photographers of the beautiful female form who are of his artistic caliber. (At least, in deference to Michi Lumin , as female beauty is traditionally defined.)

However, I'm not here for the art, right now. I'm standing on the deck of his gallery, trying to figure out the meaning of this bonfire of desire in front of me. A grand piano, an animal skin rug, an objet d'art, gold-trimmed bathroom fixtures and oak furniture, a slideshow of Nick with a series of lovely women, all thrown together into a pile and set ablaze. An anonymous tipster brought me here, but neither Nick or anyone else is nearby, at the moment, to explain the meaning of these burning things. A scandal, a heartbreak, an aggressive artistic/political statement? All of these things, none of them?

Investigation's afoot.  More information as it arrives.

Originally published here.

PRIVATE DANCER

Originally published November 7, 2003 here.

Before Marilyn Murphy begins her dance routine, I beg her to keep the act PG-13, so as not to scandalize the Lindens-- or even worse, my real life girlfriend.

"Now let's be crystal clear here," she says, "we are [only] talking about animated pixels."

"Well yes," I say, "but there are subtleties involved!"

So Marilyn complies. And as the music kicks in, she unleashes a dazzling-but-relatively-demure flurry of athletic dance moves, karate kicks, and assorted bursts of pantomimed sass, all perfectly timed to the swooping, driving beat of a pounding electronica track. It's the first dance routine I've seen that looks like something other than the generic moves available in the default avatar gesture menu-- in other words, to look like actual, professional choreography.

"I hate scripted dancing," she s