Lalo, Telling

Or, My Third Life in “Second Life”

If you have not yet heard of Second Life (ubiquitous as “SL”), don’t worry. I hadn’t, either, until just before Thanksgiving. Someone posted about it in an old-school BBS forum where I hang out. Intrigued, I read some stuff, went to the official website, and looked at a bunch of screen-shots taken “in world”. I resisted for all of three weeks.

This is me. My name in Second Life is Lalo Telling.

Yes, I’m a fox. If you have not yet heard of the furry subculture, don’t worry. I stumbled across it five years ago, randomly searching for images of foxes on the web. It was my first idea for a way into this column, because I decided to enter SL as a furry. I’ve decided to make it the topic for next issue, instead. For now, it’ll do to think of it as a costume.

First Aspect: Second Life is software.

It’s a program you download and install to your computer, which allows graphical interpretation of the data stream you log into. SL is also the data stream itself, including your contribution to it, and that of everyone else in the sim (simulated environment) with you, and of the owner/designers who built it, and of the code monkeys before them who wrote the stuff behind being able to design and build in SL. It’s all ones and zeros.

It manifests itself for your entertainment as a two-dimensional picture rendered from the data in a three-dimensional mathematical abstraction; that is, virtual space. You manifest within it as an avatar, whose appearance and movement is under your control. You walk using the arrow keys. You can fly (also steered with the arrow keys). You can teleport point-to-point, in a second or three. You don’t need a transporter pad to do so, either — all you need is a record of the destination coordinates, known as a landmark.

I explore a lot, and I’ve barely begun my wanders, compared to the available terrain. There are some beautifully crafted sims in SL. You can also find a lot of mediocre constructs jumbled together on plats within a sim, subdivisions with no apparent building code, let alone a homeowner’s association. There are residential-only sims which have homeowner’s associations, and it shows. Then sometimes trash is art: I came across a carefully reproduced and extremely tacky trailer park, right down to the wallpaper, missing only the occasional tornado.

There are uncountable commercial establishments as well, which also run the architectural gamut from glass box to “converted” church to postmodern Japanese towers to open-air booths of all styles. There’s no weather in SL, so roofs are optional. A variation possible only in SL includes displays so high off the floor one must fly to see them.

I’ll get back to the retail angle on SL further down. Now it’s time for sociology.

Remember: It’s all ones and zeros.

Many more of what you and I would consider commercial enterprises in SL are “clubs”. You see, another thing you can do with your avatar is give over control of its movement to an animation. The most common I’ve discovered so far is dancing (but more about the second-most common in a bit — can you guess?).

I say, we can go where we want to
A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind
And we can dance

(Men Without Hats, ”Safety Dance”)

Dancing is popular in SL. Part of that is, I’m sure, that it’s fun to watch your avatar do things you never could. And, there seems to be a club for every style and era of dance music you might want (which is done by feeding an Internet stream into the sim), and a bunch more who vary what they play. Then SL can become a kind of Internet radio — and since it doesn’t take over your full screen, you can multi-task while your avatar dances the night away.

Dancing gives also you the opportunity to abandon the arrow keys for the rest of your keyboard; that is, letters and punctuation. You have made friends, or at least become acquainted with the other regulars at your favorite place where — surprise! — you’re now a regular, too. I suppose it is possible to see SL without ever interacting with anyone, but humans (and their furry counterparts) are social animals. We can’t help but to interact. (Honestly, have you never once struck up a conversation in a grocery check-out line? Or at a museum, or the zoo, let alone the local pub?) So there you are, socializing, in some venue that might be a wooden platform in a tree, or something that would give nightmares to the set-designer of Saturday Night Fever, or anything else in between. Leading us to…

Second Aspect: Second Life is the fanciest GUI yet devised for chat rooms.

“GUI” is “graphic user interface”. Everything you use your computer for has one: the menus, the rows of buttons, the display style itself… That Second Life data stream I mentioned — all those ones and zeros — can be boiled down to a ton and a half of bells and whistles piled onto a good old chat room network, the kind you type into and see your words, and everyone else’s, in a window. Voice chat is a possibility, though not in all sims, and I haven’t tried it. Some disable it in favor of the traditional typed conversation. You can also IM anyone you can see, and anyone on your friends list, no matter where they are in-world.

For years already, chat networks have been ‘places’ where some people feel free to be whoever else they might care to. They are also places where the suppressed feel free to be themselves, for good or ill. Anything that you’ve ever heard about chat rooms and online role-playing is true in SL, including what’s called “drama”.

Say, we can act if want to
If we don't nobody will
And you can act real rude and totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile
And we can dance

And naturally (in a virtual sort of way), role-playing can include sex.

Ah, yes! Now, the naughty bits!

Remember those dance animations? Guess what else they’ve got animated?

Like you needed to guess…

A common way of indicating that an animation is available – say, for sitting down, or lounging, or dancing, etc. — is a small sphere that floats above the furniture or whathaveyou, with a text tag saying what it’s for. They’re generically called poseballs. Usually they’re white, indicating a simple unisex animation. The sex ones come in pairs, natch. One blue and one pink, with labels like “BJ” and “Ride” (I’ve found a lesbian poseball set, in two shades of pink). My “first life” girlfriend, who in SL is the hottest little bunny you’ll ever see, tried out a boy-girl set with me last week. Interesting.

heh

Oh, naughty bits? Right. Those are an upgrade. The default avatars, human and furry, come Disneyfied. No nipples, no sex organs, and no more than a dark color patch on otherwise-untextured human skin to suggest pubic hair (furries don’t even get that consolation). However, one can purchase “bits” — yes, that’s what they’re called in SL — in certain locations. They can be put on and taken off like clothing (more accurately, like a strap-on), which is a good thing, because PG sims don’t allow them.

Remember: It’s all ones and zeros.

Upgrades. Everybody wants them. Cooler clothes, costumes, special occasion outfits and accessories… more realistically textured skin and hair… and those naughty bits you’ve been dreamin’ of. And you can settle down in SL, too. Buy or rent land; buy a pre-fab building in dozens of styles and unpack it on your land, or rent one someone else has built; buy furniture and lamps and tschatskes to put in it (and those everpresent poseballs). There are ground vehicles, flying contraptions, and something called a skybox which I haven’t looked into yet, except it appears to be a way to have a home without land: an airborne apartment.

The key word is “buy”. The medium of exchange in SL is called the Linden Dollar (for Linden Labs, who owns and runs the whole shebang), sometimes abbreviated L$ and sometimes just L. You can’t get much of anything without them. If you don’t want to buy a full membership from Linden Labs, obtaining L$ isn’t easy, unless you have a talent to import in-world.

By the way… If you do buy a full membership, you can then purchase Lindens on your account — charged to your credit card, of course — at the average rate of L$250 to US$1. Example: My fox avatar cost L$800, equivalent to $3.20. I have a tail upgrade I bought directly from its creator for L$175 (70 cents). Average rent I’ve seen for an apartment (or one of those tacky trailers) is L$300 a week. Sounds like a lot, until you remember it’s a dollar-twenty American. Bite the bullet, and get the cool stuff for a virtual song.

Third Aspect: Second Life is a business venture.

Obviously, at the level of the owners, it’s a business. Part of their plan is to market its membership to other marketers — real-life companies who might buy or rent space from Linden for advertising and selling copies of their wares — or at least, copies of their logos. There’s been a lot of buzz, and if this recent story on NPR’s “Marketplace” is indicative, there’s been some fizzle, too.

Second Life's endless possibilities attracted broad media attention in 2006. It was suddenly the virtual frontier, the Wild Wild West. The online population grew to 10 million.

Companies soon followed. They wanted their brands in front of these early adopters. Toyota and Apple among others, created stores to sell virtual products. But for some the payoff hasn't materialized.

[…]

Marketing expert Mark Hughes says it's not usually worth the trouble. “The people in Second Life, they aren't worth reaching. It's just a weird place. It's never gonna catch on. It's a fad, not a fashion at all.”

Yankee Group Research found that less than 2 percent of people it surveyed had ever even been in a virtual world. Compare that with 32 percent who'd visited online video-sharing sites like YouTube.

(from the Marketplace story)

Something else should be mentioned. Maybe I believe the following because it’s my own behavior, but: Why would anyone think that the real people who log into a virtual place like Second Life (and there others, I’ve heard) want to drag the trappings of their first life in with them? Isn’t that the whole point to a virtual world — the escape?

Sheesh…

I haven’t encountered any first-life corporate presence in Second Life, with the single exception of sneakers with authorized Nike and Adidas logos on them. But I would avoid them if I knew where they were, and I suspect I have plenty of comrades that way.

Nevertheless, trade thrives in SL. But it does so at the level of the village craft masters and the market square, even if the attempts at shopping areas tend mostly toward Suburban Mall Tacky. If you have any flair at all for it, and are in a sandbox where building is allowed, you can create things. The software gives you a few basic shapes — “primitives”, or prims in SL — and tools to stretch, cut, warp, combine and color, then save to your inventory for more work later, or as a complete piece. You own it. You may sell copies, rather than giving them away. This is where the upgrades come from, and all the other stuff: the village smithy.

If you become one, your customers pay you with Lindens, of course. Theoretically, those can be exchanged for US dollars and credited back to your bank account. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to market your wares by word of mouth, as SL is populated so thinly at any given time. It may take a few vendors — GUIs inside the GUI – to display your wares and automate the transactions. Then you have to find space to place your vendors. Then you wait. Meanwhile, you pay rent. A few artisans only work on word of mouth and commission, trading overhead expense for spottier income. My tail upgrade came from one such, who’s also going to build my av’ some custom hair with much better rendered texture.

Clubs work this way, too, except they use the “tip jar” concept. Entirely voluntary as to whether you leave anything, or how much — but a L$100 tip is a 1/3 of a week’s rent to the owners, and costs you all of 40 cents. But they had to buy all the animations and effects to make their place the dance mecca of their dreams, too… I doubt any of them do better than breaking even.

So, what is SL? All of the above, and then some. It’s an experiment. An obsession. A cool place to hang out, a gallery of computer geekdom, an open-ended social possibility… unscripted participatory entertainment.

It’s not for everybody, obviously. Neither is first life, sometimes.