Second Life in wartime, talking flamingos in springtime, and other entries still percolating...

(An ongoing entry highlighting the best architectural design and interior décor Second Life has to offer.)

Cantilevered above a placid river, Deeblue Zeeman's elegantly designed, azure-domed bachelor pad (Hawthorne 67, 87) is three levels of open-ended spaces, outfitted with casual hip flair and GenX touches, like lava lamps, 50's furniture, abstract expressionist paintings -- and an adoptable, furry-cube creature known as Domo Kundddda, which growls at you, when you click on it. While the owner is away, I sneak a seat on his band-in-a-box set -- it's a Linden Lab utility which lets several Second Lifers "play" several rock instruments at once, and when played together, automatically syncs them up, so they stay on key and on the beat. So after I fire up the auto bass riff and program a lead guitar line, I go all crazy Neil Peart-like on the drum kit:

Sorry if the neighbors came complaining after I ditched the place, Deeblue.

To me, the most interesting thing about Xylor Baysklef's floating balls is how they interact with each other:

The way Xylor's created their collision script, they tend to jostle into each other erratically, then change speed and direction, drifting away until they collide into another ball, which starts up the same bouncing serendipity all over again.

"I was planning on putting in a sensor sweep," says Xylor, "that would combine the sensor function with a visual sensor light coming out of the red portion." In other words, his ultimate idea is to turn them from balls into spherical robot drones. But I look at those jostling balls, and I think they act more like a group of grazing animals. So I wonder if the script which generates their random movement might work just as well with a Lifer who wanted to create, say, a flock of sheep. (Or maybe even a zoo of Second Life animals -- see April 30th entry.) Just a hint to the Lifers out there trying to animate life-like objects: Xylor may be your man.

... or a brick and mortar chapbook (Taber 20, 180), where the author, Eternal Leviathan, puts his or her lyrical musings on display. Appropriately enough, it's poetry in Second Life... about writing poetry about Second Life.

Left panel, first stanza:

"Alone in my apartment/
I sit, like a solitary confinement/
Upon myself I put this detention/
With only one intention
Alone I feel sheltered and safe"

You get the sense the author is trying to piece out the odd sensation of feeling isolated by the game, while playing it -- even though the game itself is all about reaching out to thousands of other people.

A couple weeks ago (May 1st entry) we featured a Second Life peace symbol, so in the interest of equal time, here's another object I recently came across, representing the other side of that debate:

(Also pictured, in the background: a billboard-sized tribute to the late-lamented Mr. Fred Rogers -- a sentiment everyone of all political stripes must surely be down with.)

While the peace sculpture was a lot smaller, and sat alongside the water, this one's atop a high tower, spinning counter-clockwise. In the game, a player has to pay a weekly "tax" on their user-made objects, including buildings, and that tax tends to increase, the larger or higher a building gets. So while this builder's message is a lot more prominent, the overhead to keep it up there is pretty high, too. As his or her income takes a hit, you have to think they'll wonder if the message is important enough to keep paying the overhead. And there might be an interesting point in there, about free speech and money, and how they work (or don't work) together.

Because if the builder wants to sustain the message, but can't afford to, their next option might be to start asking for donations. After all, the architect of this cloud-high tower in a nearby simulator has already gone that route. Which would lead us to the next interesting question: What would you call it, if a group of Lifers began investing their Linden dollars to put out an explicit political point of view like this one, in the world? A non-profit advocacy group, or the Second Life equivalent of Fox News?

...back to my conversation with Bel Muse (picked up from yesterday):

So after having enough of the "rate mining" accusations, Bel started The Heathers, as a satirical response to the brouhaha. "Just a weird late night joke, 'cause we were fed up with a small group making all of Second Life paranoid," Bel says. "Because in the movie the characters were ruthless and had a reversed ethics. Here we were supposed to be guilty about being popular, but we didn't feel like we should."

"But which of you was the Wynona character?" I ask her.

"No one was Wynona," she jokes, "'cause none of us had a conscience." And as in the movie, "it was really only a group of three," she says, "and we addressed each other as Heather... but late-at-night sense of humor is not always easy to translate to the next day." And soon enough, someone dropped a hint to her, that important Second Life players did not think much of The Heathers. "You have only such a sliver of this particular story," Bel warns me, "it's hard to flesh it out, and it involves people still in the game. Some players have more influence than others, have followings. So if you get in bad with one person, it can have wider consequences...I did not want to stir the hornet's nest, so I let it pass." The controversy waned, but according to Bel, "The effects linger. The movement on the leader board is starting to speed up, but had stagnated for long while, 'cause folks were inhibited [about rating] -- still are."

"So that's the story of the Heathers," says Bel Muse, "the group that never was." Bel is quick to acknowledge that she's only relating her side of the story, and some of the major participants on the other side have since left Second Life. (And for those that are still here, I'll gladly let them present their side, in this space: hamlet@secondlife.com.) But ultimately, The Heathers and the anti-Heathers really came down on either side of a judgment call that really isn't so far removed from what happens in real life. If a co-worker is extra friendly to the boss, for example, can you safely conclude that he's just butt-kissing to get a promotion? But what if he really likes the boss, and getting a promotion is only an afterthought -- while *you* don't like the boss, and your own desire for a promotion is clouding the way you see things with them?

Or, as Bel Muse puts it: "How can I tell if you are genuinely socializing with me... or just stringing me along for a rating?" But even if someone might be acting friendly, with an agenda, she asks, "[H]ow can a third party decide with assurance what is going on? And what if I don't *care* you had an agenda? What if I enjoy talking so much, I give the rating 'cause I consider fair exchange? Then what business is it of [a] third party?" A good question. In any case, perhaps the continued growth of Second Life makes a repeat of the Heathers incident unlikely -- and that odd eruption of jealousy and cliquish infighting a thing of the past. (Though human beings being who they are, it'll undoubtedly come out, in some other form.)

Meanwhile, says Bel Muse, "[N]ew waves of immigration have changed the shape of the board, as new people come in, without pre-conceived notions. "They rate others in their group, while oldsters rate at a slow pace, and so are overtaken ultimately. Evolution!"

In "Heathers", the 1989 black comedy starring Wynona Ryder, a trio of girls, all named Heather, all among the most popular at their high school, form a nuclear-powered clique that manages to both beguile and terrorize their peers. While the humor is totally over the top (quoting lines like "Corn nuts!" is sure to make your cooler friends giggle), the movie is also credited for being dead on in its portrayal of cliques and ostracization, especially among young women. (It was a reference point, for example, in "Girls Just Want to be Mean", last year's fascinating New York Times article on the subject.) The movie's a cult classic (and deservedly so), so when I exchanged cards with Bel Muse, and I noticed that she belonged to a Second Life group called The Heathers, I first assumed it was comprised of folks were fans of the movie, or maybe just Wynona.

Not quite either, as it turns out.

The Heathers of Second Life were formed (and quickly disbanded) a few months ago, says Bel, in response to a controversy "about a phenomena called 'rate mining'. Basically some players felt that people were playing the ratings systems and taking advantage of it." So after kidding about it with some Lifer friends, she says, "We decided to be The Heathers...kinda like a joke about popularity."

All that probably requires some translation, for non-Lifers, so here goes: In the game, players have a menu which allows them to rate other players, for qualities such as Building ability, Appearance, and most key here, Behavior. (I.E., how likeable you are.) For the most part, rating is a fun way for players to reward each other's creativity and friendliness-- though there is also a cash value for a high rating, because those with a top ranking get a bonus amount of Linden Dollars, added to the stipend the game pays out to all players every week. And if you're up there in the top ten of a category, your name is also published on the website’s Leader Board-- so everyone can see, for instance, whether you’re the most popular person in the world.

(Bel and I discuss all this in Cyberpunk City, amid the giant pipes and belching smog of the "Blade Runner"-esque metropolis, while bUTTONpUSHER Jones sits and listens quietly, and a guy outfitted as a hitman, Nate007 Groshomme, well, quietly freaks out. A fighting script he acquired makes his avatar execute a barrage of karate kicks and pistol-whip chops-- but a bug prevents him from turning the function off. "To himself he appears normal," says Bel. "But to us...hyper." So while we discuss this fairly subtle story of Second Life psychological conflict, Nate continues to perform action movie choreography behind us -- a surreal distraction, but somehow appropriate.)

Back to Bel, and the birth of The Heathers: Eventually, there was a reaction against the leader boards. Some Lifers began to complain that others were 'rate mining': that is, pressuring other players, especially newcomers, to rate them. "According to the myth," she says, "[rate miners] would show up at social gatherings with the intention of rating people in order to get ratings back. Some people will return a rating out of politeness, so there's a certain percentage you might get back, just by rating every person you saw. Other people are so bold as to say, 'I've rated you... now rate me'."

"But how do you know you'll get a good rating from random strangers?", I ask her.

"You don't. But if you are socializing, interacting with people, being nice," she says, you tend to rate people well. "So I felt that the system encouraged socializing and decent behavior, and had a mechanism to chastise outrageous abuse. But that was not good enough for other people."

Arguing that it was an abuse of the game mechanic, some of them began lobbying Linden Lab to change the rating system, to somehow crack down on rate mining.

This struck Bel as absurd. "It wasn't as though you can 'rob' a rating a knife point, or coerce them. But to read the [Second Life website] forums, you'd have thought newbies were being clubbed like baby seals for their ratings. 'Don't do it for me, do it for the poor defenseless newbies!'" And while you might expect these protesters to come from the less popular players, bitter that the ratings system was making them feel left out, that wasn't the case at all, says Bel. "The ones that demanded the rating system be changed to protect the helpless newbies were popular themselves." In other words, the argument broke down between popular players who were fine with the ratings, and a group of equally popular players, who weren't.

"Competition of cliques, seems like," I suggest.

"Yep. All dressed up to look like it protects the little guy."

One of Bel's main objections to this argument was the judgment it made on the way people played the game. "I think people accused of 'rate whoring' were no such thing; they were just social, or popular because they were nice. But because they appeared on leader board, the assumption was that they were [there] through unsavory methods.” Accusations of rate mining got so heated, she says, when people would rate someone, they'd try to distance themselves from the debate by saying something like, "'That was freely given with nothing expected in return'." Trouble was, that just led to accusations of reverse psychology, because, "people even considered *that* rate whoring, because that was taken as a pre-emptive rate." The back and forth accusation sometimes felt like "a witch hunt", she says. And after some midnight grousing, she and two of her friends giggled themselves into hatching up their comical protest against all that.

(More tomorrow...)

This is the week where the gravitational pulls sucks the whole game industry into downtown Los Angeles, for the electric madness that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3.

Among all the giant booths displaying their mammoth, big budget games, the little MMOG that could will be there too, in the NVidia booth, to show the world its world, and the people who are still building it from the ground up. Which means that thousands of game industry folks, and even more thousands of hardcore gamers, will be there in Los Angeles, staring into Second Life, and the Lifers inside. (It's a little like sea monkeys, but... different.) It'll be interesting to see what all of them make of the game.

I'll be there, as much as I can, and hope to be reporting from the floor. If you're there, come by and visit. And if you're there in online spirit, be sure to wave at all the faces poking their heads into the screen, to have a look at what you’re doing in there.