New World Notes

Black Woman Under Pressure to Keep Her Opinions To Herself in Real Life Expresses Them Through Her Second Life

Emuna Zamani, a warm and chatty virtual world YouTuber, recently posted this moving video where she starts by talking about her anxiety and anger over recent real life events -- first the pandemic, and then the international uprising over the killing of George Floyd and other Black people, along with the systematic racism which contributed to their deaths.

African-American in real life, she expresses her unvarnished opinions on all this through her Second Life avatar, who is also Black. In real life, as she explains, she is under pressure to keep those opinions to herself:

"I'm very angry," as she puts it. "I'm glad I'm working from home because if someone [in the office] said the wrong thing... man, lemme just tell you, I don't know. That's how fed up I am."

One day, she tells me, her YouTube channel may emerge from behind her avatar.

"After I leave corporate America," as Emuna puts it, "I want to record my Being Black in Second Life videos as myself. My current career doesn’t give me that freedom."

The video is devoted to the Virtual Black History Museum in SL, a place she just discovered and explored by happenstance. Her tour was so powerful, she records this video in near tears:

Linden Lab Now Removing Hate Speech & Derogatory Terms as Keywords & Product Tags in the SL Marketplace

Last week we noted that the SL Marketplace was allowing racist slurs to be used as product tags -- and that some vendors have been taking advantage of that to advertise virtual world content promoting racial stereotypes. While a Linden Lab staffer said they were looking into this issue at the time, it had not been fully addressed as late as yesterday.

Spokesman Brett Linden tells me why it's taken this time to have them removed:

Racist Slurs Being Used as Search Tags by Some SL Marketplace Vendors; Linden Lab Investigating

New World Notes contributor Cajsa Lilliehook just pointed me to this Second Life forum thread of users complaining that the SL Marketplace allows racist slurs to be used as product tags -- and that some vendors are taking advantage of that to advertise virtual world content promoting racial stereotypes. I've been able to confirm this is indeed happening; an extremely unpleasant thing to research, especially now. (Screengrab below the break, with obvious content warnings.)

This should not be the case, as original poster Aemeth Lysette puts it:

Little by little, SL has changed for the better, but I still see racist slurs used as tags on Marketplace for various products. This should be stated in the TOS as being disallowed, so we can report items that return when you search these tags. Second Life should not be a place that operates on any facet of hate. Not even for the sake of "free speech". This isn't a country--it's a virtual world run by a corporation.

She wrote that last Sunday. Just a few hours ago, a Linden Lab staffer responded in the same thread:

As She Was Dying from COVID-19, Longtime Second Life User Uccello Poultry Wrote a Farewell Letter to Her Virtual Friends & Family

It's the first Coronavirus-related death I'm aware of to hit the Second Life user community, but it certainly won't be the last: Longtime SLer Uccello Poultry reportedly succumbed in real life to COVID-19 recently.

I say "reportedly", but this news comes from Uccello herself. Before she died, she wrote a number of letters to friends and loved ones in her hospital bed, on her iPad. After she passed, her real life brother, who also plays Second Life as CC Columbo, discovered these messages in her iCloud account.

And so he posted her message to her Second Life community on her long-running blog, The Poultry Report. It's also a memoir of her troubled childhood in real life, and a tribute to the SLers she met in the virtual world and who became her adoptive family, and then nurtured her in both realities:

At Lesbos I met my soon-to-be sister, Threshin. She helped me become a strong (if willful) and confident woman over the subsequent years. Always encouraging and loving, I learned that I didn’t need to cling to my brother. I also met my wife, Angela, there. Marriages in SL are real, if you let them be so.

I’m also proud to say I was a citizen of Bay City, the BEST community in Second Life. So many close friends, especially Marianne, Pygar, Rachel, Roc, and the eternal Ever Dreamscape. This was truly the life I did not have growing up. And grow up I did. The strength I gained from being accepted into the city and becoming a contributor (the year I was Miss Bay City was the best year in any of my lives) led to me becoming a productive citizen in Real Life. Getting a job, paying taxes, and becoming responsible for others. Just like a real person!

... Take my Love. I have plenty for all of you. Perhaps I’ll see you all on the Big Grid and we can swap stories. I hear there’s no Grid goo and the Feed there works. Until then, there’s so much I haven’t done. Go out and do it for me.

Much much more here. Much thanks to Dusty Jamberoo (Michael Shaw IRL), who also counts himself as among Uccello's friends, and has his own remembrances of her:

A Black Woman in Real Life Reflects on Being Black in Second Life

Martin Luther King Jr. day should not be the only day we think about addressing racism as it occurs in virtual worlds, so these thoughtful videos from SL blogger Emuna Zamani, a black woman in real life, are worth a watch today or any day. Emuna has a warm and chatty presence, even through her avatar, which helps her broach potentially touchy subjects in a gentle way, including:

• She argues that it's not necessarily offensive when SL skin makers don't offer black-skinned avatars, as they can take time and special effort to make well -- while getting them wrong can cause offense.
• It's not offensive "blackface" for non-black SL bloggers to depict black-skinned avatars in their images -- but it can be disrespectful/borderline blackface when those images incorporate stereotypical aspects. (Which, unfortunately, she's encountered within the SL blogging community.)

In Part 2, she addresses reader comments, including one who insists that there's no racism in virtual worlds (very much not the case), then goes on to discuss other provocative topics:

Watch, Listen: Second Life Podcast on the Magic of the Mainland

After a hiatus, Erik Mondrian's YouTube podcast "The Avatar's Voice" is back with a thoughtful conversation with longtime SLer Bizi Pfeffer, who's been in-world since 2007:

We spoke about his travels on the SL mainland and how having a contiguous world can help foster a sense of community and discovery, especially when the spaces there are user-created; the rewards, and occasional challenges, of sharing that world with a diverse population of people from around the globe; and the impact of decentralization & open-source software development (or a lack thereof) on a virtual world platform's evolution and survival.

Funnily enough, during their interview, Erik mentions the commercial for OnLive's late-lamented streaming service for Second Life -- watch below:

Educator: Second Life as a Teaching Tool Would Never Work on "Woke" College Campuses of Today (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures

There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges:

Second Life Community Moves to Sansar... and Then, To Roblox. Here's How They Compare

1867 is an interesting game experience on Roblox with an intriguing backstory. It started out as a Second Life-based community called Pfaffenthal 1867, associated with a real life museum in Luxembourg City. But as I wrote last year, community leader Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder moved it to Sansar. Yesterday (completely separate from the news of Sansar's recent woes), Cyberpiper posted an update in Comments to that old post, reflecting on his experience -- and his surprising new move:

I miss what we had in SL. But the problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to LL a year out of our own pocket!

Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us.  And... we all know it... no traffic in Sansar... for now...

So we have put Sansar development on the backburner, and decided to develop our own MMORPG, starting off by developing a ‘childrens version’ on ROBLOX.... check it out.

Yes, Roblox -- where it's getting way more visits than what it got in Sansar or possibly even Second Life: Nearly 3,500, since its launch last April. (Not a complete surprise, as Roblox has 100 million monthly users.)

"One thing to say is that we are not completely giving up on Sansar," Cyberpiper tells me now by e-mail. "We still like the philosophy behind it, and might continue building there at a later stage, when it is more developed."

Until then, here's how Cyberpiper compares Roblox's building tools and features, to Second Life's and Sansar's own:

Watch: A Halloween Visit to Cetatea Poenari, Home to an SL Vampire Family

Dark, foreboding, and full of shredding metal, here's Erik Mondrian making a fly through visit of  Cetatea Poenari, a devilishly detailed Second Life sim owned by a "family" of roleplaying vampires. From Erik's description/dedication:

Built by Vlad Drakul-Dragonash & Nazaire Dragonash and named after a ruined Romanian castle that was once occupied by the real-life Vlad III Dracula (also known as Vlad the Impaler), Cetatea Poenari defies description and seems to stretch far beyond the limits imposed by its virtual borders. From the Valley of Horses and Arefu Prison to The Slaughtered Lamb pub and Snagov Monastery—and with the magnificent castle itself keeping watch over all from above—this is a region with many different paths and hidden places for the curious traveler to find. Thanks again to Vlad, Nazaire, Rain, and the entire Drakul family for asking me to film here!

More on it here, and click here to visit in SL. A recent arts school graduate whose thesis was created in Second Life, Mondrian had some incisive thoughts on the social group based within this sim:

No, Virtual World Ageplay By Consenting Adults Is Not Legal (In Many Places)

There's been lots of heated reader discussion about last week's update on the lawsuit against Linden Lab, which alleges the company has not adequately prevented money laundering, sex abuse, and virtual world ageplay in Second Life. Some of these comments, unfortunately, contain a profound misunderstanding of of age play in particular that should be addressed -- for instance, this:

Is it pedophilia when two 45-year-old people using the SL system have pixel sex, and one has a mesh female adult body and the other a mesh child-like body? Is this pedophilia?

Is it pedophilia when two 45-year-old females using the SL system have pixel sex, and one has a mesh male adult body and the other a mesh female child-like body?

Legally speaking, the answer to both questions is yes -- in many countries around the world that are essential to Second Life's survival as a virtual world. To quote this analysis by lawyer Benjamin Duranske from 2007, when the age play controversy as reported by a German TV news story, utterly tarnished Second Life's brand forever: