Chicken Run: Second Life Home To Estimated 100K+ Artificial Life Chickens That Breed, Hatch, Learn, Die

The Sion Chicken is not an attractive bird, as far as artificial life creatures in Second Life go -- it's a blocky beast with minimal detail, and moves around the world in awkward, stuttering bounces. But what the chicken lacks in beauty, it more than makes up for in vitality. Listen:

The Sion Chicken is bred with eggs that hatch; once hatched, the Sion Chicken can live up to a year; the Sion Chicken can be killed if it's not kept safe, or if it's not fed, and if you do not treat it well, the Sion Chicken will learn to avoid you. The Sion Chicken gets hungry, gets fatigued, and ages over time. The Sion Chicken can breed, and the progeny of a Sion hen and a Sion rooster will take on the attributes of its parents. Want a Sion Chicken that's purple? Get a red hen and a blue rooster together in the same cage, and hope they hook up. And so on.

The Sion Chicken is so popular, since Sion Zaius put them on sale on xStreet and in-world (direct SLurl teleport here), at least several thousand Sion egg starter kits have been sold, Sion Chicken support director, Ms. GreenShamrock McMahon, estimates. (Sion Zaius is a reclusive creator, and declines to answer Instant Messages.) Those thousands of eggs have led to far more chickens in Second Life, chickens in the six figures, quite possibly. So many Sion Chickens, in fact, that some say the world itself is starting to feel the lag of so much artificial life.

How did these chickens breed so fast? Partly from reproduction, and partly through viral popularity, with businesses even starting up to cater to chicken owners:

"[T]he vast majority of eggs are sold by people who raise chickens," Ms. McMahon tells me, as we stand in her own personal coop. "The chickens reproduce and the eggs can be sold or given to friends. There are thousands of people who have chickens, the majority have just one to maybe ten, personal pets, there are several hundred large breeders who have made businesses out of selling eggs and some amazing creations as accessories."

If her guess is right, that's where a hundred thousand chickens come into view. I back-of-envelope the clucking ecosystem for her:

"[I]f several hundred large breeders are in SL, say 300, that's like 30 to 120K among breeders alone?"

Ms. McMahon agrees that may be the case.

And since the Sion Chickens will do what's natural for an artificial bird, the breeding will continue, and the race will expand across the world. However, since Sion Chickens are physics-enabled and can be killed, there are also reports of chicken hunting expeditions, and even chicken killing machines. So the evolution of new life in Second Life continues, with the future unclear.

Sion HUD via the product's xStreetSL listing.

Comments

[Jovin]

Are we really so desperate for something to do in SL? Truly sad...

[Gauge Laville]

More power to the guy. E-poultry is the best hustle since bloodlines. It seems like his lack of maturity, poor scripting skills, and attempt to artificially inflate the value of existing chickens, will be be his undoing. Early adopters are already jumping ship and word of mouth is stunting expansion of this pokemon knockoff. I can't express how distraught this makes me.
*puts on guyliner and cries rivers of black emo tears*

[Marianne McCann]

I think the new EULA that comes with them may be their undoing, too. If anyone actually reads it. Hearing from a few chicken-raising friends today who have given theirs away over it.

[Alicia Chenaux]

I had chickens. I was happy with chickens. I believe I was one of the first to blog about chickens. Then suddenly I was throwing money away left and right on food and healing kits, my island was suffering under the weight of the chicken lag, and it grew terribly dull. I sold off my one favorite chicken, the rest lay dead in a coop, and I have new shoes. I'm happy again. :)

[Robbie Kiama]

This got me as a surprise as well, suddenly Sion chicken merchants and even whole brands started appearing on metaLIFE even encouraging affiliates to resell for them, here is one brand example:
http://meta-life.net/second-life/brand/view/235

wondering what type of new products will Sion come up with, I heard one is coming - with Sion Corn :)

[Meara Deschanel]

Sion himself is not a bad person. But he's not a business person per se. He's a scripter, that made a cool little product that took off and grew faster than he could keep up with. His biggest problems had to do with poor customer service, and poor communication at all levels. Although Shammy has been extremely helpful whenever I've needed to bother her about something, for a good while she was very overwhelmed being the sole CSR for the entire product. Add to that people who exploited previous versions of the chickens in order to increase their personal stock and ended up glutting the market, reactive and emotional decisions by Sion and others, and just general frustration with how LL was handling the whole phenomenon, and things had the potential to go south in a big way.

But they didn't, and Sion and his customers recovered, or are recovering. He has more CSR's, new versions of the product, and a new mini-game with the sionCorn that's come out. People still find chickens fun and profitable. And yes there's other similar products, from different creators, that are coming out in the future. I don't think they'll supplant chickens so much as they'll add to the overall interactive pet trend in SL.

The EULA that everyone is freaking out against is standard EULA verbiage - play nice, don't hack my stuff, if you do I'll bannz0rs you from teh game. Anyone whose ever played any kind of an MMO should recognize it. And bottom line, if you "play the game" right in regards to the chickens, then you have nothing to worry about anyway.

As for lag - sure the chickens can cause lag. A lot of crap in SL causes lag. And there's ways to trouble-shoot around that lag so it doesn't pose a huge problem. I mean I have 70+ chickens on an 8192 parcel in a residential sim. If I can manage that and still run at optimum levels without causing my neighbors any issues, then others can find a way to make do with less.

And Ali, I love you girl, but it drives me nuts when you gripe about the chickens being a money-waster when you know that you get out of the chickens what you put into them. If people get all nuts with them and let them breed, keep hatching them, and don't put out the effort to actually breed good colors or sell what they produce, then yeah the chickens are going to be a money pit and you are just wasting your time. If you put a little effort into them however, they are a nice way to supplement your SL finances.

People who look at them as cutesy pets or a hobby need to treat them as such and limit themselves to a few that they occasionally breed. But don't go letting them breed everywhere, not cooping them up correctly, letting them free-range roam everywhere, wasting money on food and revive kits when they don't have to, etc.

It's like this: sionChickens are a game. If you play the game right, you'll have fun and be successful at it. If you play the game wrong, then obviously it won't be fun and you'll just be wasting your time. And so much of the negativity I read about the whole sionChicken phenomenon comes from people who either played the game wrong, or never played at all. And for someone that plays it "right", all that negativity is extremely frustrating.

[CyFishy Traveler]

So SL has its own little Tamagotchi craze. Why not?