New World Notes

BURNING LIFE '05

The avatar cannon of Angrybeth Shortbread

Selected glimpses of Burning Life 2005, SL's annual tribute to Burning Man. (Originally published beginning here.)

I think 2005 must mark the 8th year running when more than half a dozen friends say, "I'm going to Burning Man. Are you going to Burning Man?", and I say, "Yeah maybe, if...", and after a few half-hearted attempts at logistical planning, blow it off for the next year, in the run-up to which my fallback reply becomes, "But hasn't it gotten too big and mainstream to be any good anymore, anyway?", the retort always being, "No way, last year was the best ever!", forcing me to then say, "Yeah maybe, if...", and after a few half-hearted attempts at logistical planning...

Anyway. In the third run-up to Burning Life, Linden Lab's annual tribute to the legendary Black Rock event, I'm starting to detect some real cultural parity between the two events. Burning Man has become such a tradition, such a defining part of global bohemian life, that many people will spend the whole year planning for it. I know of folks whose San Francisco garages have been converted into veritable Burning Man labratories, where they'll tinker away at whatever wild project they're set to unveil in the Nevada desert, for the good part of the year. Pretty much planning much of their lives around the Labor Day weekend out there, and this chance to create for no other purpose than the joy of creating, and sharing it with others.

Which may also explain how some Residents can erect intricate and ornate Burning Life installations in a couple days after the site is opened. Like Vudu Suavage's delicately imposing Cthulu-like sculpture:

Or Foolish Frost's mechancial rose with petals that open and close, and at the center of the flower, a control panel that streams old music videos at the touch of a button:

I took these screenshots last Friday, only two days after the land was opened up for construction. (And by then, the Burning Life "man" was already dwarfed by most of the installations.) You'd almost think people were planning much of their second lives around the Labor Day weekend and this chance to create for no other purpose than the joy of creating, and sharing it with others.

More glimpses after the break.

THE LONG TAIL OF CSVEN CONCORD

An acclaimed theory for digital age economic activity gains new form in Second Life...

The theory of the Long Tail, as conceived by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, goes something like this: Before the Internet boom, products were developed and brought to market over a short period of time, where they had a momentary chance to succeed commercially, or fall away into instant obscurity. After the Internet boom, however, products never really die— after all, with a retail and distribution database like Amazon, the shelf life of products is extended indefinitely. Graphed on a 2D chart, this phenomenon looks nothing so much like a long, tapering tail— hence the name.

Second Life Resident Csven Concord's version of the Long Tail doesn't actually look like a tail at all. But that's only because he's taken Anderson's concept in-world and transmuted it into 3D form. Last week, Concord invited me over to his elegant home of white stone and black glass on the shore of Patagonia (19, 70), where he'd set out his re-modeled rendition of the Long Tail. Then proceeded to explain why he considered it an improvement on the original-- and what it suggested about the future.

“This was something that I'd been thinking about before his Wired article,” says Concord, who describes himself as a design consultant with an aerospace background, in his first life. (Some of his real world designs are featured on a wall  near his virtual drafting board.)

“So when I read it, it blew me away. In some ways, it's very related to why I'm in Second Life. The concept of product creation going into the hands of everyone. I'd followed his blog [Anderson's] off and on.  But one problem I didn't see resolved were ‘cult’ products.  Things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Pez dispensers. Things that never really hit it big, but are out there and well-known. Anyway, I was thinking along the lines of thermodynamic curves. The simple Phase Diagram curves like the one on the board.” He gestures to his display, where Anderson’s flat charts have been sculpted into curving, spinning forms. “Rocky Horror has always been ‘cult’.  As have a number of things. So what's happening with them? That was on my mind.”

Another challenge was, he couldn't always make sense of the flat graphs Anderson had sketched out to explain all the permutations in his theory.

“When Anderson posted some curves, it got me energized.”  On the other hand, one of them “really bugged me. It was so poor. Someone even had to ask him what it meant. It's just not a well-designed graph. That got me to thinking it should be 3D. So I took the Long Tail curve and revolved it.” His solution, first created in a 3D graphics renderer, looks less like a tail and more like a wide funnel.

 

“That's the red and green one ... While I was looking at it," he muses, "it occurred to me it looked like an upside down black hole. (Interesting analogy— pass the Event Horizon and get sucked into the corporate hole.) So I did one for that too.”

But other renditions of Anderson’s thought required a different medium. 

“Then I came into Second Life to talk about it with some friends,” Concord continues. "Because the Long Tail is dynamic. Basically, while trying to explain all this to someone, I created the half-torus. I just realized during the conversation that the two images stacked gave me that shape. That's when I started seeing something cyclical. And that started to explain other issues with the Long Tail. Like resurgence. And ‘retro’. It's like Johnny Cash. Extremely popular in the 60's and early 70's, and then seemingly vanishing from the public eye. Only to re-emerge...”

“Singing Nine Inch Nails!”

Concord nods. “Exactly. The Long Tail doesn't really explain that. So I started seeing a cycle and a time-based system. That led to these three (grey, revolving) shapes."

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

I stopped by Rafin Grimm's floating castle last week, to ask him why he'd disassembled his Roman Catholic cathedral. When I got there, however, he already had company. So while Raffin and I talked about the status of spirituality in Second Life, a curvy brunette in a sculpted fetish bikini went on waving her riding crop at a muscular man with nothing on but a pair of crotchless black leather chaps.

"I am Catholic, and very in touch with my relationship with God," says Rafin. He's a tall young man with dark hair, in stylish gray slacks and a black, longsleeve shirt. And while he adds that he's neither a perfect Christian, "I try to be good and do good things. That's what the church was going to be."

Things didn't turn out the way he planned, however.  I discovered this through fellow Second Life blogger Jonathan Akebono, who'd heard about Rafin's church, and recently asked him where it had gone.

"Actually, I took my church down awhile ago," Grimm replied. Akebono told him he was looking for a place in Second Life to pray, but Grimm couldn't help him there. "It was just causing a lot more problems than good. And nobody seemed to use it. I think it is funny... people like having sex clubs and all that here, but you build a church and it is like you are the biggest jerk in the world."

THE IDEAL TRAILER

A new Second Life movie trailer showcases the potential of machinima as a documentary filmmaking tool...

Now that the world of machinima has fully penetrated the white-hot center of mainstream cultural awareness, it may be time for the medium to evolve.  After all, despite so much promise-- and a few notable exceptions aside-- machinima is a vast repository of action montage, music videos, and in-jokes that appeal mostly (only?) to fans of the games that the video is captured in.

In that spirit, I've been following the SL machinima of Pierce Portocarrero for some time now. He began creating it not primarily as a gamer or a fan of the world, but as a seasoned filmmaker who saw it first and foremost as a new medium to hone his talents in.  Since then, he's been using SL machinima to create a documentary. To be exact, a documentary set within Second Life; to be even more precise, a documentary featuring beloved fashion designer and in-world entrepeneur Nephilaine Protagonist, incorporating real life video interviews with the striking person behind the avatar.

The expanded trailer for the upcoming film, "The Ideal World", is now available in Quicktime here. 

Since I have enough background in film to write about it pretentiously, I have to point out a few extraordinarily cool elements going on in there. For one thing, while it's a documentary about an avatar in Second Life, the in-game footage has been given a soft-focus, color-saturated treatment in post-production. (Not raw video capture from the in-game engine, in other words, but an idealized reworking of the footage.) For another, while Pierce illustrates the talking head interviews with Second Life-based complementary footage, he also uses SL elements to re-enact past in-world events, and visual metaphors for internal states. So as Nephilaine remembes what it was like for her avatar to first wear clothes, we see a re-enactment of that. And when Nephilaine describes the heroic self-conception of her avatar, we see Nephilaine painting a self-portrait as a samurai warrior, which then comes to life. Nephiliaine speculates out loud about what she's missing by not having a real life office job to go to-- and we see her avatar stuck in a traffic jam. Nephilaine describes the difficulty of running an in-world fashion design business-- and we see her using Photoshop and logging into SL from within SL itself.   (If I was more pomo, I would go nuts on all that hyperreal-artifice-as-reality-simulacra- and-reality-as-hyperreal-simulacra action, too.)

So while none of these shots are documentary footage of actual events that took place (let alone look that way, if they did) they still work in a documentary context, helping us to better understand the subject and her backstory. Taken together, then, this isn't just a giant advancement in sophistication for machinima-- it suggests a new avenue for the documenatry form itself. (Acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris often integrates old movie clips or dramatic re-enactments into the interview footage of his films, but I don't believe he's ever gone so far as animating the psychic states of his subjects.)

All this, of course, comes after arduous effort, with far more work to come, before completion. Some production notes from Pierece Portocarrero after the break...

SANDBOX GAME

For a short time, giving a second life to the games they love-- tributes to Counterstrike, Mario, and Warhammer come to SL in skewed form.  Originally published here.

Miroslaw Bukowski was cleaning out his voluminous inventory of created objects, when he noticed a lot of them were tributes to the world of Nintendo's Mario Brothers games. "And there it was. All [the] Mario stuff I made awhile back." A column of glittering coins here, some mushrooms there, and so on. Rather than toss them all into his Trash folder, he went to the free-build "sandbox" simulators, where Residents can pretty much build whatever they like-- with the understanding that anything left there overnight will be wiped by a daily server reset. "So I just took it out of the inventory and rezzed it there," he says, grinning.

"And voila, instant Mario level?"

"Yeah," he tells me.

Most times, the sandbox sims represent Second Life in its essential form, a 3D collective modding tool where socialization is centered around instant creativity. For that reason, the sandboxes attract a unique subculture of Residents all their own. The restless noodlers, the surreal event fabulators, the Type A competitive creators, who'll vie to build the biggest and baddest space dreadnought, for starters. While some Residents go there to create objects that'll eventually find a permanent place on their own property, just as many (if not most) sandbox denizens are perfectly happy to see these projects they spent so much time building exist for just awhile-- a kind of temporary tribute to their favorite things.

That would be the case with the near-exact recreation of the famed DE_Dust map from Counterstrike that's currently floating five hundred meters above the Newcomb sandbox. (And I owe Chage McCoy for first reporting on this in his blog.)   

"I used a map editor to look at the [Counterstrike] map and formulas to get the right sizes of the pieces/stretch of the textures," its creator, Lucia Lumiere, explains.

"Also, it is not the entire map," he adds sardonically, "I somehow lost a few pieces of it thanks to this game's awesome inventory system."

The emphasis on his project is temporary, he insists, with no plans to host Counterstrike-type matches in SL. "No it was just an experiment," he says. "[I]f I actually put CS in here I think I would have to never play this game again, because there's already enough annoying cybersex addicted 'adults' in here, and I don't think we need short bus-riding teenage CS players, too."

Alternately, Owl Patel is intent on playing a variation of the beloved Warhammer miniature strategy games in Second Life-- a decidedly warped version that's more Snuggles than stormtrooper.

"So," I say, surveying the sandbox-based 50 meter board that's crowded with phalanxes of fuzzy miniatures, "Warhammer, but with bears?"

"Yup," a steel robot named Aleksandr Martov says proudly.  "Bearhammer!"

Aleksandr and friends are gathered inside the board, building furiously, expanding on Patel's creation.   

"Though why bears?"  I press. 

Grrolin Anansi seems to glance up at me like I've asked the stupidest question in the world.  "Cause they are cute to blow up?"

Well, of course. Patel has already put together a match of Bearhammer, they tell me, fighting it out with Warhammer rules, with a giant ruler to gague troop and armor movement.

"Who doesn't wanna send waves of teddy bears to take each other out?" Sanct Draper reasons nearby. "Crazy people, that's who." 

Again, a hard point to argue.