New World Notes

Coming of Age in Second Life (Or, One Reason Teen SL Hasn't Grown)

Teen Second Life blogger Arwyn Quandry mentioned this post of hers, "Coming of Age in Second Life", as a personal favorite, and she's right to do so. She writes how she discovered SL (with some gratifying props to me), but because she's under 18, found herself in the teen grid, where she developed her creation skills, expanded her perspective for what's possible... and then promptly began pining for "the Main Grid", i.e. Second Life proper:

I read the Main Grid fashion and news blogs constantly, loving them and wanting to be able to access that kind of content. For a little while, I even thought of making a Main Grid account (but never did).

This strikes me as an unintended consequence to having two versions of Second Life divided by age, and a significant reason why TSL has not grown (it only has several thousand active users.) As they mature in talent and ambition, the best and brightest teens in TSL don't necessarily become community leaders there, but instead, start yearning to leave for the Main Grid. (And are forced to do so once they turn 18.) So Teen Second Life remains stagnant, a de facto waiting room for the real thing. In that regard, Arwyn is also anxious about making the transfer: "I worry that I’ll lose my place and just kind of disappear in the crowd, that I won’t have anything to blog about," she writes. But there I disagree; I think someone with her skills will be welcomed into SL by many, and she'll soon find herself overwhelmed by topics to talk about. Image from Ms. Quandry's Flickr stream.

The Secret Treasure of SLsecret

Inspired by Post Secret and published every weekend, the SLsecret series compiled by Iris Seale of Shopping Cart Disco is a well-known guilty pleasure for many, a car crash smorgasbord of interpersonal drama, rancor, accusation, betrayal, and schadenfreude.

The real secret behind SLsecret, however, is why I still keep reading it: every now and again, you'll read a secret like this one -- perhaps from a chemotherapy patient, recently introduced to customized virtual hair? -- and discover, beneath the surface tension, the genuine and the profoundly moving undercurrent of Second Life. Image credit: SCD.

Suffering From SL Drama? Take It Out On a Drama Doll!

Suffering from some form of Second Life drama? Who isn't? Honour McMillan has just thing for you: Second Life Drama Dolls, which you can name after your favorite avatar antagonist. NWN Events writer Chestnut Rau has a full review: "The dolls are scripted to listen to you and then they apologize in really funny ways before setting themselves on fire, waving goodbye to you and disappearing," she tells me. Possible drawback: when they find out about it, the object of your doll derision may feel even more inflamed. So to speak.

Why Was SL6B So Sparsely Attended?

Daniel Voyager documented some interesting visitor stats relayed by Philip Linden during his closing speech at SL6B, Second Life's massive, official birthday celebration: "Over 17,712+ visitors have visited the SL6B regions since the gates opened on 23rd of June 2009. Since opening there have been over 23,662+ hours spent by Residents exploring the SL6B regions." That's quite an impressive number-- except when it's compared with the number of Residents who logged into the world over the last seven days: 580,094. So if my math is right, of all the half million-plus Residents who went in-world, only about 3% attended the official birthday, and those who did only stayed for just over an hour each. I'm genuinely perplexed. Was there an excess of sim downtimes in the regions? Did the hundreds of Resident-made SL6B installations (many very great) overwhelm potential visitors? Or still worse a possibility, is it just the case that vanishingly few active Residents consider themselves part of a broader world worth celebrating? Image via Nika Dreamscape's SL6B reporting.

Update, 6:25pm: Veritas Raymaker has some interesting thoughts from a SL6B participant's perspective, including: "If you think about it properly, the future of virtual worlds [this year's theme] will actually be likely transparently integrated into everyday life, much like the telephone and television are today. How does one then express this self-same transparency, by making it explicit in one's exhibit? There is a very big paradox here."

Open Forum: How Do You Integrate Your Second Life With Your Offline Life?

NWN reader "Adam" has been part of Second Life since 2003, but recently, his real life wife, who hates SL, "accused me of spending to much time in this virtual world," he wrote in an earlier Comment thread. "I'd like to see a discussion on how to integrate one's real life with Second Life and help other family members understand what Second Life is and can do." How do you achieve that balance, and integrate your virtual community with your offline relations, especially among the people you love who may not understand?

Alien Behavior: How Moral Panic Over Second Life Policies Confuse the Unitiated

Here's a fascinating example of user behavior, virtual world management policy, and moral panic all colliding together in an amusing if somewhat irksome way. Back in 2007, after some widely publicized cases of simulated pedophilia (or what's sometimes called "age play") were discovered in Second Life, the Lindens issued a policy forbidding the behavior (even among consenting adults), with a threat to ban violators from SL. While applauded by most of the community, this policy has also caused numerous landowners to employ draconian measures to prevent any perception that age play is tolerated on their property. This often means ejecting from their land not just sexual ageplayers from their property, but avatars who even seem underage, for totally non-erotic reasons -- women in "Gothic Lolita" fashion, for example, or adult Residents seeking to recapture an innocent childhood through roleplay. Or as we saw last weekend, even avatars under 4'9", spotted and then chased off a nude beach -- even if they happen to be squat green aliens without genitals. (See screenshot.)

Normally, long-time SLers would read about this instance of misapplied Community Standards policing with tickled annoyance, or affectionate frustration, or maybe both. But the thing is, last weekend the above screenshot wound up on the front page of Digg.com with 2500+ votes. (Which in my experience, roughly translates into several hundred thousand page views, if not more.) Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming reaction there, from readers who know nothing of this backstory, is confusion and contempt. And in this way, moral panic over a totally reasonable policy has led nearly half a million people to conclude Second Life is rampant with green alien discrimination. (And all the strangeness that seems to suggest.) Image source.

SL Fashion Drama: Over-the-Top, or Just Over-Exposed?

Fashionista blogger Ms. Cajsa Lilliehook has a smart response to my challenge to discuss this topic: "The Second Life fashion scene is infamous for negative interpersonal drama. Do you think it's possible to make it less so, and if so, how?" However, she rejects the premise of my question:

I do not think that the fashion community has more drama than other communities in Second Life... I think the main reason that the fashion community is wrongly judged to be drama-ridden is that more than any other community it has a very public media...

Much more here. She's definitely right that the SL fashion community has an astoundingly huge media footprint. (After all, the top Second Life fashion blog is more influential than the Los Angeles Times' own fashion blog, for God's sake.) She also right that other Second Life sub-communities have their own dramas -- it even breaks out in the Lindens' bug tracking software. ("Have you read the JIRA’s about SL and coding and bugs? The Drama!!!")

That acknowledged (and I say this as someone who tries to write about every aspect of mainstream SL society), I still believe SL fashion is the epicenter of metaverse drama.  Of course there's drama potential inherent in all Second Life, where there's emotional investment in our avatars and the sense of inhabiting a shared space.  But with SL fashion, this feeling is even further heightened by the fact that the industry is also economically lucrative, with the top creators earning in excess of six figures in US$, and then it's still further elevated by the focus on female beauty, on who is fashionable and pretty, and who is not -- a touchy topic in every reality, for reasons to many and complex too discuss here.

In any case, is there a way to dampen the fires of SL fashion drama? Cajsa notes the high level of participation and esprit de corps fashionistas show contributing to and promoting the Hair Expo and other events that benefit real world non-profits. (There's drama even in those, I can assure you, but it is at least muted.) With even more events like that, I have to think we'd see still less drama.

Update: Why Miriel Island Is Going Away

Last Wednesday I noted the imminent departure of Miriel Enfield's beautiful island; many have speculated about the reasons behind this. Ms. Enfield has explained some of her motivations in the post's Comments. "I quit because I was frustrated with a lot of things, especially SL's artistic limitations, my own inability to work around those to my satisfaction, and my belief that LL is not going to ever give me the features I want." Read the rest here. According to her blog, the island's final day of virtual existence will be June 20th.

Second Life Bot Owners Earn USD$400-1200/Month -- By Farming Free Linden Dollar Camping Chairs!

Tateru Nino of Massively recently wrote a great profile of an anonymous bot farmer, someone who deploys artificial avatars in Second Life. Originally, I thought this was yet another individual who's hired by land owners to artificially drive up their Traffic stats with their bots (a practice the Lindens recently banned, but shows no obvious signs of going away, at least not yet.) But no, Ms. Nino wasn't talking to that kind of bot farmer. As it turned it out, it was way more insidious (an deliciously ironic) than that. The bot farmer explains:

"It's strictly business.... A friend slipped me a copy of the bot-running software that he'd bought, and it's much more profitable.... Depending on where I can get camping spots, between $100 and $200 a week. My bro's got better spots, but he won't tell me where. He makes over $300, and only uses 60 bots."

Camping chairs, as longtime Residents know, give out free L$ to people who sit on them; this is also a way landowners artificially drive up Traffic. Generally, Residents will park their avatar on a chair, then go away from their keyboard, and let the Linden Dollars slowly roll in.

That in mind, let the full weight of Tateru's interview sink in: as it turns out, some bot farmers are using their bots to get free Linden Dollars from camping chairs. And quite a lot of money, $400-1200 a month for sitting several dozen bots on them. (The Lindens banned camping chairs last month, but as with bots, that announcement hasn't had a perceivable effect.) The supreme irony of course, is that both camping chairs and traffic bots were both invented to game the Traffic stats... and now they're feeding off each other.

Last Chance to See the Land of Miriel Enfield

Often when someone decides to leave Second Life, or even just opts to scale back their investment in it, they literally take part of the world with them. So it is with Miriel Enfield, who's been a renowned fashion designer in Second Life since 2005 (glimpsed here in 2007). Miriel maintains a store on an island she created to suit her talents: Also called Miriel, it's sumptuously wrought with lovingly sculpted architecture that's seamlessly merged to a lovely, tree-lined coast. For unexpected reasons, however, Ms. Enfield recently announced on her blog that it was going away: "If you want anything -- eyes, jewelry, pictures of the forest -- it's best to do so soon." I've reached out to her, to hopefully learn more, but for now, I echo her advice. If you find the time in the coming days, explore Miriel Enfield's island. Ms. Ivy Norsk, who pointed me to its imminent departure, tells me the place contains a treasure hunt and an unfolding story, for those who'd seek it out. (Direct SLurl teleport at this link -- for now.)