New World Notes

Monday Memory: How Second Life Roleplay Wound Up in Hot Tub Time Machine With John Cusack & Clark Duke

Listening to The Office podcast about the 2007 episode where Dwight and Jim play Second Life reminded me of another appearance by the virtual world a few years later -- in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), starring John Cusack along with Craig Robinson and Clark Duke. (Both of whom, funny enough, also starred in The Office.) In Hot Tub, Duke is Cusack's geeky nephew, who apparently is obsessed with playing in one of SL's many dark urban roleplay communities, like the infamous Crack Den (think Grand Theft Auto Online but with hardcore sex), but is stuck in the game's prison, doing hard time.

When the movie came out, I got to talk with Steve Nelson, the SL creator who worked with the filmmakers on the machinima for the SL scenes:

TONIGHT: Inventor Prototypes Battlebot in Second Life -- Then Creates it in Real Life to Fight On Discovery Channel's Battlebots!

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Above: Sharky in SL and in RL (images courtesy Constantine of Nano Station Technologies

Tonight at 8pm on the Discovery Channel (check your local listings!), there's a chance for Second Life users to cheer on a hometown champion: Episode 6, third fight of the night, it's Sharko (woot woot!) versus Slap Box (boo! hiss!) on the popular Battlebots reality TV show. 

Sharko is the creation of Edward Robinson, known in Second Life as Artorius Constantine, owner of the Nano Station Technologies store.  For the last few years, Constantine has not only been making a real life living from his SL inventions (animesh roleplay bots and so on), but taking what he's learned from the battlebots he's made for Second Life fights, and applying what he's learned to design real life battlebots:

The Life & Death of NPR's Science Friday in Second Life Ends on a Mystery

This is a really good new segment of Science Friday on the life and death of Science Friday's own Second Life islands over a decade ago, where the much-loved NPR show hosted an audience of avatar fans during the live broadcast, with host Ira Flatow even occasionally taking questions sent in-world via group message. Produced and hosted by Daniel Peterschmid, it expands from that story to talk about the value of virtual communities and virtual world play, especially now in the COVID age, and ends on a nice rebirth and reunion segment that I won't spoil here.  (Also, a couple nitpicks: Suggesting Second Life's graphics "haven't changed" since 2009 only seems true if you're running it on a low-end PC, and Jim from The Office doesn't actually say Second Life is only for "losers", but that's a whole other post.)

For longtime SLers, it does introduce a mystery: Why exactly did the Science Friday sims disappear, especially when the in-world group had grown to over 2000 members? The segment's answer (around 20:13 in) only raises more questions:

Carmen King Kicks Up Second Life User Concurrency -- YouTube Star's SL Videos Likely Lead to 1st Growth Since COVID Quarantine

Recent SL concurrency stats via Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey

It's been over a month since YouTube gaming celebrity Carmen King started streaming hilariously raunchy Second Life videos on her channel -- September 3, to be exact -- but has that led to growth in Second Life use by her nearly 1 million subscribers? Based on data shared to me by Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey, it sure seems that way. 

"There has been a rise since September (though there are signs this is falling in October) but not anything as dramatic as we saw in March/April," as Tyche tells me. March and April is when Second Life saw a spike in usage due to, well, the COVID-19 pandemic and a global quarantine. "See [chart] attached which shows the underlying trend in median daily concurrency after controlling for weekly seasonality."

See above, click to embiggenate. Before Carmen's videos, median daily concurrency for SL was declining to around 38,000. That's since grown to roughly 41,000 at peak. To be sure, her videos aren't the only factor at work (Tyche tells me the upward trend started in mid-August), but seeing as her SL videos have amassed over half a million views so far, they're almost certainly a major factor.

They've definitely been a major factor on Carmen King's inbox:

"All of my direct messages are filled with people asking me to help," she tells me laughing. 

Despite this sudden surge, she tells me Linden Lab has hardly connected with her -- but as a longtime social game doyenne, she does have advice for the company:

Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Spend First Week of Independence Looking at Art Made in Second Life

New World Notes has spent little or no time covering the British Royal Family over the last 14 years, but here we are: This Tuesday, a day before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced an official withdrawal from their royal duties, they spent some time looking at art made in Second Life.

Yes indeed they did:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle took in Skawennati’s exhibit "Avatars, Aliens, Ancestors" on Tuesday while visiting Canada’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom to say thanks for the hospitality they received during their recent trip to Canada...

The show imagines indigenous life past, present and future. It opens with the video work Words Before All Else, in which Skawennati’s avatar recites the Haudenosaunee’s Thanksgiving Address.

“My avatar, who is named xox, is an extension of myself,” she said. “She allows me to go places I might not be able to go.”

The artist Skawennati is pretty amazingly ambitious, and makes amazing use of SL in her art. Here's a talk she did about it a few years ago:

Electronic Gaming Monthly Explores the Rise & Fall (& Semi-Rise) of Second Life Through Its Ancient Wiley Guidebooks

Interesting long read on Electronic Gaming Monthly covers the perennial "Whatever happened to Second Life?" story through a fresh angle: The five official guidebooks to Second Life published by Wiley, and the mass of contributors for wrote it. The author Mark Hill compares and contrasts the glowing words wrote or said back then, with Second Life as it is now. That includes SL co-founders Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, though Hill mixes up Philip's real name with his avatar handle:

[T]he final two chapters of The Official Guide, “A Cultural Timeline” and “The Future and Impact of Second Life,” further highlight Linden’s own divided focus between SL’s core users and its media darling status. The timeline is introduced with overwrought claims like “‘I’m not building a game,’ Philip Linden once said, ‘I’m building a new country.’ And in many ways, the history of Second Life thus far resembles the first centuries of America itself.”

... Linden’s own hype reaches its loftiest with comments like “Imagine being able to access from SL from literally anywhere [with wearable computing], holding conversations across worlds, or overlaying your friend’s SL avatar on them when you see them in your first life,” and “What excites me the most about the future of Second Life is its potential to fundamentally improve the human condition.” Second Life may not have improved the human condition, but it certainly highlighted certain aspects of it. Terdiman referenced an infamous 2006 interview that was invaded by a horde of trolls wielding flying penises. 

... In an interview for The Entrepreneur’s Guide, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka went further in painting a picture of Second Life as a corporate utopia. “Even with video conferencing, you can’t really get up, move around, pace. … And Second Life helps with [that]. You have place, embodiment, and a method for having real-world style conversations a la a cocktail party (i.e., multiple, parallel conversations). I think the first new opportunity is going to be helping companies that have dispersed work forces save money on recruiting, on-boarding, training, and collaboration. This is a lot like what IBM has said they are working on. But they are just scratching the surface.”

The article misses the chance to mention that both both Philip and Cory, while no longer working on Second Life, are still actively involved in virtual worlds and virtual world technology, Philip with his new startup High Fidelity and Cory (up until a few years ago), driving Facebook's acquisition of Oculus (for good and ill). But then again, the story of all those who started at Linden Lab and Second Life back in the earliest days and continue to work on reviving the old magic -- even if that means developing other virtual world platforms -- could be a whole other article in itself.

As for what Second Life still is now, DJ Nexeus Fatale and myself reflect on that, also for good and ill:

Listen: Longtime SLer Gidge Uriza Featured in Leslie Jamison's NPR Interview

NPR just featured an interview with acclaimed writer Leslie James, whose new book of essays Make It Burn, Make It Scream features an excerpt from her widely-discussed 2017 Atlantic Monthly story on Second Life. She reads an excerpt featuring SL veteran Gidge Uriza:

Linden Lab Denies Failure to Adequately Prevent Money Laundering, Sex Offenders & Ageplay in Second Life, as Alleged in Lawsuit -- Security Expert Plaintiff Replies: "[I have] Written Proof of Everything That I Am Alleging"

Wired just published a belated story on the wrongful termination lawsuit by a Muslim-American security expert that New World Notes broke last month, but it has some new information on the controversy -- including an official statement by Linden Lab:

The suit alleges company executives retaliated against her for flagging cybersecurity risks and potential violations of anti-money-laundering laws, child exploitation, and data misuse...

“While we will fight her alleged claims in court, we deny any allegations that the company has engaged in any illegal activity,” said Linden Lab spokesperson Brett Atwood. “Ms. [Kavya] Pearlman left the company on March 15 only after she was given the opportunity to improve her work performance. We look forward to all the facts coming out in a court of law,” he said, declining additional comment because of the lawsuit.

I just reached out to Ms. Pearlman, who stands by the security-related allegations in her lawsuit -- and says she has concrete evidence of her claims:

"Having written proof of everything that I am alleging," Ms. Pearlman tells me, "I look forward to discovery of fact and taking those facts to the court of law. Even Linden Lab knows, dismissing these allegations by citing some work performance issue of an industry expert on cybersecurity and compliance is yet another way of potentially attributing 'look away'. This is not new, it happens to security professionals raising security and privacy concerns, only in this case concrete proofs exist and truth is bound to come out."

Earlier this week, an anonymous tipster sent me a link suggesting (if not definitively proving) that at least one of the skilled game applicants is a convicted sex offender. Pearlman confirms that this is a legitimate concern:

"That a sex offender is potentially conducting skilled gaming is an example of Linden Lab ignoring [the] mandated Fincen rule of KYC ( know your customer)", as she puts it.

Notably, the Wired article reports that another former Linden Lab staff member confirmed to the magazine the existence of a likely "smoking gun" memo from the company's former chief compliance officer, one that's mentioned in Pearlman's lawsuit,; in it, she raised these issues, and a related one -- that the existence of age players (i.e. simulated pedophilia) in Second Life remains a constant problem that the company has not sufficiently addressed. It's a problem the CCO reportedly acknowledges in the memo:

Cajsa Lilliehook Profiled in ECLIPSE Magazine

The latest issue of ECLIPSE magazine has a fun and much-deserved profile of Cajsa Lilliehook (starting at page 51), and if you've been touched by her many blogs and articles over the years (basically every active SLer has by now), you'll want to know more about her. Find out how she discovered Second Life, and more about the real life woman behind the avatar. For instance, in addition to writing about virtual fashion and culture for New World Notes and her own blog, It's Only Fashion, she also publishes a high active book review site, and a single-serving recipe blog. (Featuring a baked eggs with kale and bacon dish that looks seriously delish.)

Has Second Life Been Fully Gentrified? Thoughts from My BBC Interview

Pictured: A steampunk city in SL from 2008; a Kim Kardashian ad campaign using SL from 2018

Here's the full episode of BBC's The Digital Human which expands on the short excerpt I featured last week. The show's larger topic is gentrification of the Internet culture and online communities, which often lose their unique character as they become more mainstream and commodified. I talk about how this happened to some extent during the 2006-2008 hype wave, when MTV and other companies became (briefly) interested in Second Life as a marketing platform, and how SL culture has greatly changed since then. For the original early adopters, I say:

They had this unique beautiful thing that existed basically only there on the Internet; they built these really beautiful intricate steampunk experiences and they had the fashion to go along with it... [but] there really was a feeling that they'd lose that uniqueness. That's at least partly right: The Second Life culture that existed in the beginning is still there but it's really been crowded out. Kim Kardashian recently did an advertising campaign using Second Life avatars and it was not actually surprising because the avatar fashion and styles [popular in Second Life now] had started to look more and more like a Kim Kardashian aesthetic, a cheesy virtual version... For a lot of the original users, I think they could feel that they'd sort of lost that unique spark that they had.

This isn't to say there's something intrinsically wrong with a Kim Kardashian style if that's your thing, just that it's so inescapably pervasive across all media -- even now in virtual worlds which once offered a respite from all that. And that might just be inevitable now that virtual world culture has become mainstream (hello, Marshmello), but hopefully we'll start to see the cultural influence flowing in the other direction more often.

Oh, in case you haven't seen the 2008 steampunk city tribute I mentioned above, it's still on YouTube here: