New World Notes

8 Posts on Confronting Real Racism in Virtual Worlds to Read on MLK Day

Black Second Life User Shares Real & Virtual Experiences With The Confederate Battle Flag:

"I wish people knew how much it hurt to see the flag on TV and in places which are supposed to represent everyone in a fair manner, like court houses. I have been to places in Second Life which had the flag up... We always knew what it meant. That we and others with our color are not wanted around that area. It is like putting up a 'Caucasian only' sign. I have a lot of bad memories with that flag. Like walking past homes of people who have them proudly displayed in front of their homes... while at the same time, the mean stares we got just for walking by their home."

Cajsa's Choices: Celebrating Fantastic Black Avatar Portraits For Juneteenth

 I convinced a couple other friends of mine who are Black to join SL back in 2007, but they were disappointed in the quality and variety of  black skins back then and left the game. It’s true, most skins were shades of bronze, and a deep ebony like this one would be hard to find. I love the way the highlights define this picture so powerfully, the highlights on her hair, her face, and her top. A skin designer told me back then that the reason skinners didn’t make dark black skins is that people didn’t buy them and people didn’t buy them because they didn’t know how to photograph them. 

What People Should Ask Themselves Before Roleplaying As Black Avatars:

If you aren't black, the luxury of throwing on a black skin and playing black should make you think about why you want to do that. Do you know black peoples IRL? Do you think they would be ok with what you do in SL? Do you actively call out the racist thoughts and behavior people have towards a black person, or do you just [say] "LOL I'm white"? Do you think it's cool to be black, but IRL you engage in black shaming, like saying things are "ghetto" or "hood"?

Avatar Skin Tone Experiment Reveals Strong User Preference For Whiteness:

In virtual worlds and MMOs where most aspects of avatar appearance can be instantly changed by a few button clicks -- including gender and skin tone -- do we leave our real world attributes and preferences behind? After noting that avatars with lighter skin seem to get more likes than darker ones on Flickr, I enlisted the help of Mandy Smith, a popular SL fashion photographer on Flickr, to take two photos of the same avatar in the same pose in the same location, with the only difference being her skin tone...

Lack of Avatar Racial Diversity in an MMO Makes Black Users More Likely to Create White Avatars & Hide Their Real Race, Academic Study Suggests:

Lee gathered 56 study participants — half identifying as white and half identifying as black. She then had them read a fabricated magazine story titled “Meet the Coolest ‘Second Life’ Residents.” The eight “Second Life” avatars profiled in the story were either all white, in the low-diversity scenario, or an equal mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian, in the high-diversity scenario. She then had them perform two tasks: Create and customize their own virtual avatars, and rate their willingness to reveal their real racial identity through the appearance of their virtual avatar. She found that black participants reported less willingness in the low-diversity scenario, and that they also created whiter avatars, as judged by objective raters.

Three classics after the break:

How Many Second Life Communities Will Follow Pfaffenthal 1867 to Sansar?

Linden Lab has created Sansar partnerships with a Hollywood movie, e-sports groups, and YouTube/Twitch personalities (including the just-announced comedian Steve Hofstetter), but little has been reported about any outreach with the many communities and brands in Linden Lab's Second Life. One possible exception is Pfaffenthal 1867, a sub-community built around roleplay in a detailed recreation of a Luxembourg City district from the 19th century. But last week, Pfaffenthal 1867's leader, Hauptmann Weydert, announced the roleplay sims would be closed, so the project could move to Sansar:

The moment has finally arrived, for the 1867 project to move on to SANSAR, were land is free, where we can have better graphics,VR headsets and real physical interactivity. Note that Sansar works very well on a normal PC [Editor: Some would argue otherwise] for desktop mode you do NOT need a gamer PC. IMPORTANT! All the 1867 sims in second life will be shut down next Monday, on the 26th of November. Please pack all your stuff by then.

The sudden move is surprising, so I asked Hauptmann Weydert donations were running short to cover tier.

"No," he told me via SL IM, "it was arranged that the museum paid until that date and after this we were to move to Sansar."

The passive voice of his answer was a bit ambiguous, so I asked him if (as many have speculated) that Linden Lab was helping the community make this move. No answer at press time, but I'll update this post if I get a reply. Until then, and until Pfaffenthal emerges in Sansar, here's a lovely tribute by Pepe Cometa to what the community created in Second Life:

Cassie's Clips: Important Etiquette Tips for SL Shoppers & Merchants

Among the reasons given for the apparent SL recession that we're currently in, is the high levels of drama and social strife among merchants and consumers. So NWN's Cassie Middles and some of her friends are here to lay down some basic principles of etiquette and best practices -- watch above. Guidelines include:

• Treat others how you wish to be treated
• Customers and designers are people too.
• Check merchants profiles and see who to contact [with questions]. "The designer might not answer because they have a person who would.
• Say Please and Thank You. "I cannot emphasize this enough."
• Please try to contact a designer first before writing a bad review. They might be very happy to help fix the issue [you're complaining about].
• Don't jump straight to anger. "Be polite, kind, and considerate. You'll get much better results than anger ever would."

Most of these principles, discerning readers might have noticed, are equally applicable to real life. Except when it comes to contacting an SL merchant, that's pretty unique and ridiculously counter-intuitive:

Inside Elysion: How Second Life Group Admission Fees & 18,000+ Members Help Subsidize Experiences Like Its Tribute to Stranger Things' Upside Down

When I wrote about the impressive Stranger Things tribute in Second Life last week, I should have been more precise about its "admission fee" of L$1000. It's not actually a fee to access The Upside Down, but a membership fee to join the private SL group Elysion (Flickr page here). I've since corrected the original posts, and in the process, found out there's an even more interesting story here. Elysion is a gargantuan group: As of last week, group founder and manager Syn Beresford tells me, it counts over 18,000 members, amassed since its founding in 2013.

That size, and the Elysion membership fee, does much to cover the costs of its Second Life sims, and the complex, temporary experiences they create, such as the Stranger tribute:

"My fee has increased over the years as more and more things have been added to Elysion," Syn tells me. "However, it is not a public sim; never has been, never will be. I do this because it affords the people who join a level of privacy (setting my land to group access). Land like everything else in SL in my view is not a entitlement. Most of that member base has grown simply because people come, they enjoy the sim, and they bring their friends, which to me speaks volumes." (She doesn't advertise her sims beyond her Flickr account and within the group message boards, she tells me.)

Perhaps thanks to that exclusivity, the Elysion community has thrived, and now owns six regions, with weekly DJs and live singers, performance art, a residential sim, and a diverse community, albeit with a decided gothic edge: 

Sign of the Virtual World Times: SL Universe, Second Life's Longest Running User Forum, Becomes Multi-World Discussion Site

VirtualVerse is a new online discussion forum that's also another sign of the Second Life community evolving: It's the new home of SL Universe, Second Life's longest running third-party discussion forum. (Founded in 2004/2005 era, I believe.) Its owner, longtime SL veteran Cristiano Midnight, has just announced SL Universe's closing and rebirth:

The SLU forums will be closing within the next few weeks, depending on how long the transition takes. These forums will be archived - they may be unavailable for little while but will come back as a read only forum... VirtualVerse, which expands the scope of SLU to all things related to virtual worlds, whether it is Second Life, Sansar, other VR worlds that are gaining in popularity, or game related worlds like MMOs and open world games. I've wanted to become less SL centric, but it has been hard to do that with SL as part of the name.

It's a smart move and probably a necessary one. Based on the latest Linden Lab data, Second Life's monthly active userbase has dropped over the last couple years from 600,000 to now, about 450,000-500,000. SLU has always been a tight knit, highly positive sub-community with much great conversation on many topics, but in recent years, seems to have been declining in usage. For example, compare its page views with SL Secrets, which as I said yesterday, now seems to be the largest blog devoted to Second Life:

Inside Secrets: Did Linden Lab Ban the Owners of Second Life’s Largest Blog to “Protect” the Virtual Community?

Virtual world gossip leads to death threats, doxxing, and a suicide hotline

Update, 9/24: While SL Secrets is currently among the very most visited user-run SL blogs, it's not necessarily the largest sites -- see this correction post.

If you want to know the current state of Second Life, the virtual world that turned 15 years old this year, consider [one of] its most visited user-run blogs: It’s not about virtual fashion, or in-game events, or roleplay. No: The most popular Second Life blog by far is SL Secrets. According to Similar Web, the site attracted 140,000 visits last month, slightly down from a peak of 170,000 visits, last May -- which very roughly translates to about 20,000-40,000 monthly readers, a significant segment of SL’s total active population of some 500,000.

Launched about a decade ago and loosely inspired by the popular PostSecret blog, SL Secrets operates on a similar premise, publishing anonymously submitted confessions every Sunday -- except with SL Secrets, they’re confessions about life in the virtual world. And where Post Secret entries tend be unspoken revelations about the sender, SL Secrets largely traffics in Second Life-based gossip, virtual drama, and scandalous avatar-to-avatar accusations -- in other words, less like found diary entries from random nameless souls, than a slam book composed during a high school reunion by bitter attendees high on Jack Daniels and amyl nitrate.  

If you want to know the current state of Second Life, consider what just happened to the co-founders of SL Secrets, Lourdes Denimore and Kesseret Steeplechase: For reasons that aren’t completely clear, Linden Lab has blocked both from using Second Life. This week, Kesseret’s SL account was put “on hold” (she sent me a screen grab indicating as much), while last May, Lourdes’ account was “terminated”. (Copied here, the e-mail Linden Lab sent her.)

“I had to call them in order to get that e-mail,” Lourdes Denimore tells me. It explains the ban for repeated violations of Linden Lab’s Terms of Service, specifically pointing to sections 2.7, 5.2, 5.3, and 6.1. Lourdes flatly denies she has done such a thing: “No I did not violate the Terms of Second Life in Second Life.”

However, 5.3 of the ToS includes this highly broad, nuclear option clause:

"We may terminate your Account if we determine in our discretion that such action is necessary or advisable to comply with legal requirements or protect the rights or interests of Linden Lab, the Service community or any third party."

And since both women describe themselves as not currently active in the virtual world, a consensus among many in the SL community has emerged: Lourdes and Kesseret were banned not for anything they did in Second Life, but for what they did on the web, with SL Secrets.

“Banning people for only hosting gossip memes created by others is unfair and ridiculous,” as Cajsa Lilliehook, a longtime SLer, well-known community figure, and occasional New World Notes contributor, puts its. “People should be banned for violations in-world.”

For the record, I asked Linden Lab about the official reasons for Lourdes and Kesseret’s banning, but seeing as the company doesn’t publicly comment on policy enforcement, it’s unlikely they’ll reply. However, the invocation of 5.3 strongly suggests the company sees SL Secrets as a threat to “the rights or interests of Linden Lab [and] the Service community.”

Is SL Secrets a threat to the user community and the company that depends on it? Speaking on condition of anonymity, several well-known SL content creators emphatically say yes -- or at best, characterize it as highly corrosive:

SLers of Reddit Mourn Beloved Second Life Places Long Since Gone

Nostalgic conversation on Reddit's /Second Life (now with nearly 5,000 subscribers!): "What's your favourite place that's now gone?" Among those mentioned most is Greenies, one of my own personal favorites -- a giant-sized kitchen full of comical wonders (see above) which emerged in Second Life in 2007 to much acclaim and popularity:

Why the Elf Clan Became a Virtual World Roleplay Community Without a World (Comment of the Week)

Wayfarer in 2012 (Via the Metaverse Tribune)

The Elf Clan is among the longest-running virtual world communities online, first started as a group in Second Life, but around 2012, due to SL's unsustainable land costs, moved to the OpenSim-based InWorldz. And now that InWorldz has gone defunct, Elf Clan founder Wayfarer Wishbringer stopped by NWN comments to explain the future of his community:

Greetings all. It has certainly been an "interesting" 5+ weeks for InWorldz refugees... a time that has kept the Eldar of Elf Clan hopping looking not only for a new central home... but viable homes for our members as well. In this we have focused not on mourning our losses (which are certainly significant), but upon re-building and growth... we realized by the end of the first week: the longer time passes, the more members will scatter in search of a new home. This isn't just a matter of, "Well that game is done, let's find a new game." For many people, the virtual worlds are their lives. The will not sit around waiting for someone to re-structure their social community.

At the same time we realized that Elf Clan was no longer "land-locked". Our arrangement with InWorldz was done (by their own statement), our members were finding homes on new grids... and we came to understand this was fine. Elf Clan is not a land-bound group; it is a concept. We are basically a family-friendly fantasy, sci-fi and steampunk group, and we can be anywhere and everywhere. This is especially true on the Hypergrid.

One can learn about latest group developments at our website.

We invite our current members (and anyone who is interested in the group) to visit that site and (if desired) become an affiliate Elf Clan land on a grid of your choice. We realize Elf Clan will continue regardless of how many or how few lands form our group. Wherever the Elf Clan Banner flies, people know they will find visitor-welcoming, family-friendly lands of fantasy-themed beauty. (Or space ships and robots, whatever. We're flexible.) The concept of Elf Clan is changing, our horizons expanding. When we left Second Life we grew from 2 regions under one owner to 54 individually-owned lands. We cannot predict the future-- but the potential offered by OpenSim and the Hypergrid is definitely bright.

To judge by its website, which has very few prominent virtual world images, Elf Clan is very much more of a concept, than a "physical" community. This movement actually seems part of a larger trend -- sub-communities which originally started in Second Life moving most or even all of their activities away from the 3D experience, to become largely web-based:

Elf Clan, Ancient Virtual World Roleplay Community, Emigrates Off InWorldz to Become Multi-World Society

More fallout from the closing of Inworldz, a commercial spinoff of OpenSim which was recently beset by financial troubles, and is currently trying to re-open as "Islandz" . The Elf Clan, one of the largest and oldest virtual world roleplay communities, is not joining that move, but seeking new OpenSim territories:

When we were on Second Life we were forced into a small, concentrated land area due to excessive cost.  When we moved to Inworldz, in order to maintain our group's "early adopter" discount status we had to maintain a minimum of 28 regions (which we exceeded considerably).  Both situations required us to be stationed on one central grid and remain "land-locked"... Today, eight years later, things are different. OpenSim has grown. The severe lag once experienced there has improved.  With the appearance of VARs (VARiable land-size regions) sim crossing has become far less an issue.  OpenSim now has group functions and fully-functional inventory, as well as the Hypergrid which connects grids together on a virtual teleport highway. What this means is that Elf Clan members can now choose from several grids.   We are no longer limited to one, single option.

Much more details here. Even for non-members who aren't extremely familiar with the roleplay group (loosely inspired by Lord of the Rings), it's impressive that the Clan has been able to maintain much of its unity across different platforms for so many years. (It was founded in 2004.) Much of the backstory to this new move can be found in this long New World Notes comment thread, where Elf Clan founder Wayfinder Wishbringer (yes) raises concerns about the InWorldz transition. You won't be surprised to learn they're less about fidelity to Tolkien, than over intellectual property rights:

Cassie's Clips: How to Cope With Online World Addiction

Exclusive to NWN, beloved SL YouTube vlogger Cassie Middles (subscribe here!) discusses the problems of addiction to online worlds like Second Life, in a deeply personal and bravely honest way. Rather than explore that touchy topic in the abstract, Cassie discusses how it's impacted her life, and how she's learned to cope with it.

Here's a cheat sheet from Cassie: