AFK is the name for a series of novels about a virtual detective in Second Life (yes those exist in SL) who goes by the avatar name Definitely Thursday, whose work exposing avatar-based infidelity unexpectedly uncovers a web of murder, revenge and terrorism. Written by longtime SLer Huckleberry Hax, these five novels are crisply written and immediately engaging, and now, available in a single volume -- details for getting that on Hax's blog.
As a teaser, here's an excerpt Hax just shared with me, creating these pics to illustrate it:
She was lying across her bed with her back to the door, so her laptop screen was facing us and I got a clear view of it when we entered. What I assumed to be her avatar - a female humanoid wearing army boots, camouflage combats, a tank top and a neon green mohican - was standing on a builder’s platform. A line of orange particles connected her outstretched hand to an assortment of pine cubes.She rolled onto her back and looked up at us. “What’s up?”“Joy’s angsting,” Jesse said. “She’d like to clean our kitchen and bathroom for absolutely no money and she’s worried we might take offence.”She laughed. “You bloody house guests… coming over here and doing all our cleaning.”Jesse turned to me. “Satisfied?”I punched him on the arm. “Satisfied.”“Then my work here is done.” He turned and went back upstairs, taking them two at a time in a sudden sprint which I realised I’d already started to recognise as his style.I peered at Jade’s screen. “What are you playing?”“Playing?” she repeated. Then she followed my gaze. “Oh, it’s not a game. It’s Second Life. I’m building.”
“Second Life!” I declared. “I remember that. Is that thing still going? I’d assumed they folded years ago.” I wasn’t playing dumb for the sake of it. My picture would probably be on the front pages within the next few days and in all likelihood the term ‘Second Life’ would be liberally scattered throughout the accompanying text. Thinking about it, I was quite possibly Linden’s greatest ever advertising asset.
“Nope,” she replied. “Still there. Just not in the news so much.”
“What are you doing with those wooden blocks?”
“Believe it or not,” she told me, “this is actually part of my coursework. We have to create a digital sculpture that wouldn’t be possible in real life.”
“What are you going to create?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just playing right now. Something big, though.” She held her arms out wide. “Something... building-sized.”
“Right. You’re getting to know the system.”
“Oh, I’m quite familiar with the system,” she said. “I’ve been doing SL for years. I used to have a shop where I sold 1960s furniture. Most of my cohort at uni intend to use Blender for their projects, but I want to create both the sculpture and the space in which it’s situated.”
“Right.” I nodded, trying to appear to be pretending to have a clue what she was talking about. “You sold furniture.”
“By which I mean, of course, virtual furniture. Yes.”
“Virtual furniture.”
“One day, half of everything that gets sold will be virtual,” she told me. “Maybe more!”
“I’ll take your word for it on that.”
“Maybe,” she mused, gazing momentarily up at the ceiling, “it already is.”
“Hmm? You mean like music?”
“I mean like flat-packed bookshelves made to look like they’re made out of oak,” she said. “I mean like ‘distressing’ paintwork to make something look artificially old. I mean that we buy things according to how they look rather than according to what they actually are.”
“Hmm,” I said again, not really sure how else to comment. “Those blocks look a bit like packing boxes.”
She looked back at the arrangement herself and for a moment fell silent. “You know,” she said, after a while, “you just might be onto something there. Packing boxes. Hmm...”
She sat up, pushed the laptop forward and patted the space beside her. I perched there. “See look,” she said, pointing at the pine cubes. “These things here are ‘prims’. They’re the most basic building block for if you want to create something in Second Life. Watch how easy it is to create: right click on the ground, click on create and there you go: a prim cube is born. Now see that I can select the cube and I can make it big or small, or stretch it this way or that. I can cut slices out of it; I can make it hollow, and so on. So when Second Life was new, just about everything there was in it was made by manipulating these cubes like I’m doing now. And combining them. Are you with me?”
“I think so. Can you make it look like it’s not made from wood?”
“Oh sure. That’s just the texture - a picture, like a jpeg - you can change that to whatever you want.” She demonstrated: the pine cube became a marble cube became a leopard-skin cube. “See?”
“Nice,” I said, pretending to be lying.
“Well it was reasonable back in 2004. But now there’s a whole new system for building stuff in SL called mesh, and you can make much more complex stuff using that. Except mesh is way more difficult to learn than the old system was, plus you have to do it away from SL in a separate application.”
“Ah,” I said. I nodded.
She chuckled. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Sure I do,” I said. “It’s VHS video tapes versus online streaming: old system crude, but easy to learn; new system whizzy, but you have to be, well…”
“A nerd?”
“Young.”
She hit my leg. “Oh please!”
I grinned. “But I do really want to hear about your packing boxes idea.”
“Then look at the cubes. Look at them as they are right here: unmodified, un-joined, simple; the smallest unit of virtual creativity; the starting point of all constructions, once upon a time; the original common denominator. I knew from the start that I wanted to create something out of them rather than mesh. They’re like pixels.”
“Big pixels,” I commented.
“Big pixels,” she repeated. “Big pixels: I like that. Ok - now we have the title of the piece!”
“Seriously? Perhaps I should stop talking.”
“Perhaps you should talk some more! The title should augment the piece, right? What are we saying with ‘Big Pixels’? We’re saying that a pixel more loosely is the smallest division of something we create; something man-made, like a brick is the smallest division of a wall. In nature there is the atom; in human society there is the pixel. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is or what it’s made out of.”
“And the boxes?”
She looked at me. “Imagine I make a whole building, a whole street of buildings, a whole city of buildings made from nothing but cardboard boxes: that would be something that couldn’t exist in real life, right?”
“I guess not.”
“Think about what the box symbolises,” she said. “First of all, It’s a symbol of childhood innocence, of uncorrupted purity. We all used to love playing in boxes once upon a time. When I was a little girl, I’d see those boxes the homeless live in and I’d think to myself that if I ever ended up living in a box, I’d make it an amazing box, a box with a full sized bed and chairs and a small wardrobe, and there would be other rooms including a kitchen and a bathroom.
“And so secondly, the box is a symbol of poverty, the thing the homeless live in; the cheapest material we turn to for some tiny amount of warmth and shelter when we have absolutely nothing else to protect us. And poverty is itself a symbol of fear. We’re scared of it. We’re scared of ending up that way, alone and with nothing. It’s that fear that gets us out of bed and into work in the morning. We tell ourselves that we’re doing it all because we love our job, but fear of unemployment and poverty is the bottom line. The box is a token of that fear.
“And finally, the box is a symbol of wealth, of modern capitalism, of internet shopping. It is the ‘Big Pixel’ of our all-important, global economy; the thing that contains the product; the thing that holds in stasis the object that was bought with someone’s credit card. What’s actually inside it is neither here nor there. It could contain a dog turd for all we know; the only thing that’s important is the exchange of money that took place which led to the transit. The only thing that’s important is that the thing inside is desired. Our economy is based on material desire. The box is a token of desire.”
“A city made from boxes,” I said. “That would be quite a sight.”
“Like one of those optical illusions where you see either one thing or another,” she replied, “only this will work three ways instead of two: it’ll be either a child’s dream or a picture of poverty or a portrait of capitalist utopia.”
“I like it.”
“And I’ll make every box different.”
I blew out air. “That will be some work.”
She looked at me. “Yes it will. Would you help me with it?”
“Yes,” I said.
Images featuring Caitlin Tobias and Elemiah Choche
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