New World Notes

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.