Regular readers will by now, know that I have a rather unfashionable vice. Everyone has at least one, those awkward quirks in otherwise good friends, those little things that you don’t approve of, or like, but put up with out of a greater sense of comradeship. We put up with them because we hope that the favour will be returned, I guess. Mine, or at least one of mine, is an enduring fascination with [Name Removed For Legal Reasons], an online virtual world where users are encouraged to build things, sell them, show them off to friends, make a bit of beer money out of it all, and occasionally dress up as foxes for hot cyb0r action.

I know its not an MMO, and I know that most of you, dear readers, couldn’t give a toss what goes on in there. And yet I occasionally post about it anyway; its one of my vices and one of my own particular failings. Or at least was.

In amongst the welter of news which my RSS reader seems to have become swamped with lately, (someone check on Brent…I think his PC has gone all ‘Shodan’ on him), I saw a link to this:

[Name Removed For Legal Reasons] Official Blog: More on Trademarks

In which ShortStraw [What Americans Call Lime Trees] attempts to defuse the powder-keg caused by this new page on their website:

The [Name Removed For Legal Reasons] Brand Center

It comes as no surprise to see that the 150+ comments appended to the blog post are pretty much all “Nevermind that…fix the damned game!” I’d say its been going through a bumpy time lately, if ‘lately’ didn’t stretch back to 2003, and one wry commenter, quite rightly, points out that the only thing that hasn’t gone bananas in all that time, is the billing system.

So aware of the dangers of Rhetoric and Inflammatory Kneejerk, I spent at least half an hour of my life, (which I’ll never get back), trying to work out what the hell had actually happened here. As far as I can tell, it seems that there have been people in [Name Removed For Legal Reasons] being rather cavalier with the IP, running their little pretend businesses and pretend websites with [Name Removed For Legal Reasons] logos all over it, giving the impression that they are officially endorsed [Name Removed For Legal Reasons] people, and probably cheating and scamming people in some fashion as a result. Most likely, [Name Remove For Legal Reasons] has had enough of the…petitions, complaints, whichever. Rather than police this in a one-to-one manner, it looks like they’ve lawyered up and then some and gone a bit ballistic with New and Improved Terms of Service, which now include the link above.

One regrettable area of collateral damage seems to be us, the hard-working and largely voluntary Blogging Community at large, who it seems, are now no longer allowed to use the name [Name Removed for Legal Reasons], (or even the letter before T and the letter before M, next to each other!) without all sorts of arseing about in the extended character-map for symbols, which must be put behind The Name, and footnoted with all manner of extraneous trademark guff, or…well, I’m not entire sure what will happen actually. Probably one of those ridiculous Real Life Civil Court Circuses that make me cringe so much, in the Real People News.

The whole thing seems to have caused a fair amount of fuss, including, wait for it…a Blogger’s Strike! Aw, bless! Something like 30 ‘prominent’ [Letters Removed For Legal Reasons] bloggers did indeed down tools for three whole days, no doubt causing no end of disruption, although last I heard, management did not come to the table. Ahh… its like Thatcher was never gone…

Partly because I didn’t want to be a scab, but mostly because I couldn’t be arsed, I didn’t blog about it either! Solidarity Citizen!

I’d be flattering myself if I thought anyone reading this old e-Rag was then inspired to go and try out [Name Removed For Legal Reasons], but on the off-chance that the ultimate sanction for such ASCII related transgressions as I have committed in the past, is indeed an opportunity to win a life-time subscription to a place where you get to dress up in a boiler-suit costume and have very r3alz0r hot action with a large gentleman named ‘Bubba’, I’m removing all law-breaking posts, and shall not be committing the heinous crime of talking about [Name Removed For Legal Reasons] ever again! No great hardship, I must admit, and I’m sure you’ll all be somewhat relieved. Let them do their own publicity for once; I’ll be damned if I’m going to have to open CharMap just to fill in my own damned blog posts!

We now return you to your scheduled ranting about Proper Games!

(Incidentally, just to see if this wasn’t just what all the normal MMOs do, only with far less pretentious fuss, I’ve just sat down and read the Tabula Rasa™ EULA, (another half hour of my life I’ll never get back), picked at random out of the other games I currently play. Couldn’t see anything about the above nonsense, although the loading screen does note the various trademarks NCSoft® own. Don’t think I’ve ever heard of any other company go quite so berserk about the whole thing actually, or have needed to.)

NCsoft®, the interlocking NC logo, the interlocking DG logo, the Destination Games logo, Destination Games, Tabula Rasa™, Character Cloning System and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCsoft Corporation.

It was Burning Life week again in SL last week, and in customary style, I bring you a guide to an event that ends…er…today in fact. No playing along at home for this one I’m afraid. What can I say? I’ve been busy of late. Anyway, I did manage to get a visit or two in on the big old sandbox of expression that makes up the bulk of the festival. For a number of weeks, various in-world arty types have had all been busy building, and for an intentionally short period of about two weeks, the rest of us got the chance to fly around it all trying to make some kind of sense of the thing.

My previous little SL write-ups have very much been on the theme of static builds; semi-permanent exhibitions, PR ventures and Web3.0 experiments by people not traditionally approaching it all from the “Gamer Angle”, as I have. Its been interesting to see what those types of organisation have made of it all, with varying success. The Burning Life thing is very different. The real life Burning Man festival, upon which this little event is based, is supposedly about as far from Corporate Presentation and Promotion as it’s possible to get, being something of an anarchist new-age communal-spirited type of thing, or so I gather. I have private cynicisms about the thing to be honest, as I’m sure do you all; “Burning Man has like, totally sold out dude!”, etc.

But at any rate, the SL one is certainly no place for shops, vendors, slick marketing, PR departments or Business Week features, and is basically just one huge Sandbox on acid, a place where pretty much anyone can roll up with a vague proposal, and have at it, in the knowledge that the whole thing has an ‘auto-delete’ timer of about two weeks. In a way, the place was very much an antithesis of the IBM Campus, and made for a fascinating contrast.

The event took place on a specially set aside set of regions, shown in the map. These were laid on by Linden Lab for free, and even had curious ‘Prim Limit Bonus’ multipliers on the various plots, allowing more blocks to be used than would usually be allowed elsewhere. Some time today, these regions will be switched off again, and presumably, their hardware reassigned to other tasks.

Movement around these very busy, and very full sims was painstaking at best, and down right impossible at worst. Loading times were horrific, and to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, it was necessary to spend at least five minutes stationary at each point of interest, just to let the surroundings finish loading properly. It all illustrates both the necessity for prim and population limits per sim on the mainland, and the exceedingly long way to go that the SL platform in general has before it can really start calling itself any kind of ‘Metaverse’.

I was patient though, and here’s a few things I saw that caught my eye:

To the left, the main entrance. In a world where anyone can instantaneously teleport form any place to any other place by an act of will, geography is the first thing to go, making this little entryway something of an affectation at best. It even had ticket turnstiles! Presumably, its modeled on the entrance area of the real Burning Man camp in Nevada, an event that happened some weeks before the SL one this time, instead of at the same time, like last year. I guess the idea was to allow folks to attend both if they wanted to.

To the right, soem kind of central stage area. Billboards mentioned an extensive timetable of live events, and this was the first place I headed for on my visit. There were about 30 people already here when I arrived (The large cluster of green dots on the maps, lower centre), in all manner of quite typical SL outfits, dancing away to some streaming show that I was too scared of bandwidth overload to turn on on my client. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to turn off sound effects being played by individual avatars, and the ever-present “;;;;;,,,,;;;;HoWwWwWlLlLlLlLzZzZzz;;;;;,,,,,,;;;;;;;;” Gesture (A kind of combo emote/ animation/ soundclip) was much in evidence. It sounds worse than it looks by the way, but these folks seemed to be having fun, so I guess that’s the main thing anyway.

Lagging away for my life, I headed out to the periphery sims where the actual exhibits were, which I’d come to see in the first place.

I’m not sure if this is new, but this year’s Burning Life had a theme; ‘The Green Man’, a kind of focus on the various environmental issues of the day, which most of the artists adhered to in varying degrees of relevance. Its a quite anarchic thing though, and many either didn’t know, or didn’t care, and just threw up something they liked anyway. Some of the more thematic examples here:

Picture One was a very well built piece that attracted my attention immediately, amid the rather slipshod three-dimensional cacophony surrounding it. Its a square diorama blending a dense urban metropolis, through agricultural plains into forested hills, all watched over by a very literal ‘Green Man’ face. The detailing is quite small, but intricate, and the whole thing had a very high standard of construction. I guess the message here was that forests and hills are nicer than towns? Regardless, it was just nice to stand and look at for a bit.

Number Two was a sophisticated and elegant Roman style offering, all columns, forums and so on, all surmounted by a large statue of a Roman Emperor type holding aloft a globe. The statue seemed well done, and appeared to be made mostly with the recently added Sculpted Primitives, new to this year’s expo. No need to go looking for hidden meaning here; the panels at the bottom highlight and explain a variety of ecological woes, rather strangely, via the medium of ruined Roman relics. I’m dubious of the conceptual link between the Roman Empire and 21st Century Environmental Issues, but the point was well made; informative without the preachiness found on a lot of the ‘Eco-Exhibits’. (“By the time you’ve finished reading this, eight trees will have died, maaaan!”)

Pic Three was an unassuming, but highly skilled crafting of a tree. Treehouse rooms adorn the canopy, and the thing sat there in it’s small plot without explanation or agenda, and it very much the sort of thing you’d find elsewhere on the main grid, for sale, and in use. Furry’s gotta live somewhere, after all. I doubt whether it’s creator made it especially for the event, or just had one in their ‘pocket’ anyway, but even so, it still stood out.

Four was quite novel, a fair rendition of Stonehenge, only constructed out of rusty pipework, girders, bolts and the like. Not entirely sure if this was intentionally ecological and just very obscure, or simply something the builder thought would be a neat idea. I thought it was a neat idea though, so here it is!

Number five was something of an interactive piece. As well as being a very well made and believable mountain in it’s own right, it was also riddled with internal tunnels, making it a bit of a three-dimensional maze. Spent a good ten minutes lost inside that thing. It looks quit plain from a screenshot, but again, the Sculpted Prims were much in evidence, and the more I looked at it, the more detail I saw, for such a simple basic concept. Its often the Simple Idea, Executed Well, that looks better than the Complicated Idea, Made Badly.

Not everyone got behind The Message though, and to be honest, I’m quite glad. I’m here for the craftsmanship, not a sustained, rambling and disjointed lecture about putting empty bottles in a separate bin, thank you! Here are some of the better ‘Other’ exhibits:

The first is a very large, and quite highly detailed, crashed spaceship. Well, why not? The next plot over had a lake of lava, (which you could ice skate on), with an island in the middle with the original Globe Theatre on it…it was that kind of region. The detailing on the spaceship was impressive, and from this angle, it kind of reminded me a bit of a Cormorant from EVE Online. Anyone else see it?

The second pic was a bit of a find. Quite possibly someone who does this kind of thing with their SL time anyway, with a gallery and shop some place. A series of large black blocks acted as display podiums for a series of extremely intricate sculpture (as opposed to Sculpted) pieces of captivating primcraft. All in all, a more modest type of thing, and indeed, some of the few objects that I could point at and agree that “Yes, that is Art”.

The third was an unexpected Steam Train, complete with section of track and telegraph wires. A bit odd, sat there on it’s own, without motive of message, but I couldn’t help be drawn by the detailing on it. I’m not really a Stream Train Buff, so couldn’t tell you what ‘class’ or gauge it was, but excellent work none the less, despite it being static and not actually moving or going anywhere. Behind it, you can see a quite awe-inspiring Alien City of some kind. Done out in a kind of 30′s Toytown style, with bright colours and large bold styling, this piece occupied about a quarter of it’s region and stretched up into the sky to beyond my rendering distance, all floating pods and sky-bridges.

Number four was another large quarter-sim build, this time, an ice fort, with battlements, walled gardens, chapels of ice, and some excellent statuary work in the centre. These were done the old, pre-sculpt way, and showed a meticulous attention to detail, and surprisingly ingenuity, given the very basic non-sculpt building blocks you get to play with. Mostly I liked this one because everyone else had gone out of their way to recreate a late-summer desert-based event, but there’s still one person that will look at all that, and build a snowman instead. Bravo! My kind of obstinacy!

Number five was another work in non-sculpt statuary, this one a woman taking a shower. Much of this one is lost as a still image, as it incorporated a lot of texture animation work, and moving prims, making it quite a captivating view. The plot directly next to it was a similar sort of construction, only a lot more abstract, and more of a lightshow with moving kaleidoscopic elements, and accompanying soundtrack.

All of the above are highlights mind you, and with a much larger number of plots than last year, and evidently, much lower standards of entry, this years Burning Life was mostly a right old mess. Its one of those irritating situations where some muppet with flap their foam head at you and say ‘There is no wrong in Art!’, and most right-thinking but rational, people, such as my self, are left there gritting their teeth, thinking, ‘But…’ and eventually having to agree. Many of the plots were full of junk; freebies, untextured prims, basic prims shoved in a heap with not real attempt at theme or coherency, and unfinished builds. Well, I’m giving the benefit of the doubt on the ‘unfinished’ anyway. I get irritated about the Turner Prize as well, usually.

Here are a few choice gems from the ‘I don’t know much about Art, but I know Bollocks when I see it’ category:

I’m not quite sure what number one was all about. If I was being kind, I’d say it was a testing area for another, further away and much better looking exhibit. You’ve got flying saucers in there, campfires, badly tinted animated flames aplenty. Rainbow staircase that goes nowhere, check, bowling pins, check, bicycle, check! Are those toadstools? Moving on!

Number two wasn’t badly built, as such, but my god, did someone miss a meeting on The Theme. Its a quite stark and brutal exhibit which preaches hellfire on the subject of Feminism; how badly women are treated, what pigs men are, etc, etc. I’m a modern kind of guy; I know a lot of bad things happen to some women, often at the hands of some men, but bloody hell… The huge angry pseudo-fascist ‘Venus Symbols With Fists In’ motifs gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies. On behalf of my entire gender, I’d just like to apologise…for everything. Ever. Please don’t hurt me. Clearly a very angry young woman was involved in this build, who probably ought to seek counseling.

Number three is an exercise in extreme minimalism. The track-marks you can see making up the rectangle were actually put there by the event’s organisers, marking out the building plot, an organisational improvement on last year’s event. Our Damion Hurst Wannabe here has simply strolled up, dumped a black ’2001′ monolith arbitrarily in his plot, and then thrown his hands up; ‘Annnnnd I’m spent!’ That plot, by the way, is one of the larger ones, occupying about an eight of a sim, and has a build limit of around 1000 prims or so. 1/1000 is also the score I’d give him for effort!

Number four was just way too subtle for me. What do you think he’s saying there? Oh, wait…I see what you did there. A dismally popular ‘concept’ as it turned out. (That globe texture really was that low-res…wasn’t my PC not loading it properly)

Number five was my winnah though. “Just how much more stuff can I cram into this plot?” If (Quantity > Quality) == TRUE Then Win!

Once again, I found the whole thing almost paralyzing in it’s over-stimulus, and doubt I could have visited for much longer or more often than I did, without it doing my head in. Interesting in parts, but sharing a lot of the fundamental properties of the more regular Linden Sandbox regions, and Sturgeon’s Law was very much in effect. I suppose the principal difference with Burning Life, is that the builders here want other people to see, to appreciate and to understand the things that they’ve built. While the sandboxes are often used as construction yards, Burning Life is very much the finished product.

As for the ‘Burning Man Spirit’ of it all? Well, I wouldn’t know…I’m just a tourist, but it’s possible those who got in involved got more out of it all than a snotty review on a blog some place! Burning Life does seem to sit at almost the polar opposite end of the spectrum, to the IBM, Playboy and Swedish Government sims though, giving an interesting alternative perspective on what people think SL is for, for them. I’m not sure we all learned anything here today, but good or bad, the exhibition was certainly interesting.

And now it’s gone. The sims hosting it all are to be taken down on the 5th Oct, which is today. I just hope everyone building there took a copy of their stuff!

I’ll be giving the SL Tourguide thing a bit of a rest for a while. I expect I’ll be as busy in there as I ever have been; tinkering, constructing, scripting and chatting, but there’s other games to write about and other feature-ettes to come up with. If you want to learn more about SL, I suggest you go visit the website and grab a Basic Account!

More in the ‘There’s More To (Second) Life than Fox Costume Bumpfuzzling’ series here! Having seen different attempts at how the real life corporate sector approach the quirky online virtuality with the Playboy Island and the IBM Campus, I was curious to see the Second House of Sweden, a Second Life project orchestrated by the Swedish Institute. This organisation seems to be a part of the Swedish government, somewhere between Tourism Ministry and Public Education Bureau, and which seems to be all about the promotion of Sweden in the wider world, using a variety of media. This all makes this particular Sim very much an ‘Official’ enterprise, and somewhat unique in the otherwise chaotic playground that is the greater Second Life Grid.

The place was opened on 30th May this year, (complete with ribbon-cutting and visiting diplomats), making it about four months old now, and the first ‘Virtual Embassy’ in SL, and possibly any other 3D World, (unless Belgium has a Pre-NGE ‘Large Tattooine Guildhall Style 2′ in SWG that I didn’t hear about). I’m not sure if other nations have since followed in Sweden’s pioneering footsteps, but the very notion fascinates me.

I’d been once before, at the recommendation of one of my long time online friends, who happens to be Swedish themselves. This was quite soon after it’s launch, and I must confess to not paying nearly as much attention as I ought to have done, that visit. So a few of us popped along this week, and this time I took notes and pics.

To find the place, look for ‘Swedish Institute’ in the regions search box on the map. The place is modest compared to IBM, consisting of only two connected regions, largely given over to green, lightly wooded and landscaped islands, in blue seas. Almost immediately, the aesthetic of ‘Realism’ makes an impression. There are no hovering globes, lurid particle explosions, streamers of light or inexplicably spinning cubes here, and the whole place is very much a model of a place that could very easily exist for real.

The western island contains an quite extensive ‘Getting the hang of Second Life’ orientation trail, much like the one I saw at IBM, further suggesting that if you want, its quite possible to have brand new visitors to your place, come directly to your build out of the gate, probably via some kind of slightly customised client. I had a quick fly around it and it seems well enough done, covering all the basics.

The eastern, larger island is dominated by the Second House of Sweden itself. This sweeping angular modern construction is based on the real life House of Sweden, Sweden’s embassy to the USA in Washington DC, which is a nice touch. I know all this stuff because the entire sim is helpfully littered with concise yet informative signs pointing out the various features, and the background behind them, making the trip a lot more educational than I was expecting. The build itself is clean, well-executed and good attention has been paid to the texturing of it too, which is an area that is often skimped on in large-scale SL architecture. I was a little disappointed to discover that much of the actual work in primcraft on the project had been done by a third-party SL company, the ‘Electric Sheep Company’, rather than put together by actual Swedish Diplomats, but in all fairness, the level of building skill I saw in evidence does take a while to get the hang of. Its a serious project by a world government, in effect, so there is a bit more reputation at stake if people turn up to find the usual horrific pile of badly aligned and poorly textured plywood that passes for ‘buildings’ in the rest of SL.

The ground floor is tastefully done and is divided up into a number of areas, each containing various smaller exhibitions, all relating to the real life of Sweden.

To the left, the front desk and reception area. Despite the times listed on the wall behind, we found it unmanned. Mind you, the whole place is well-documented and largely self-explanatory, so I didn’t feel that a guide was needed as such. Four months in and the place is fairly quiet, although far from abandoned, and while there over a couple of hours, we saw perhaps 10-15 people pop in and out for varying durations. Presumably scheduled events are still happening now and then too. There was a ‘Now Hiring’ sign up though, so if you speak Swedish and English, can put on SL clothes without ending up with a box on your head and are generally a helpful sort, go check out the details!

In the middle, a free-hanging set of reproductions of (presumably) famous classical works of Swedish Art. I’m a philistine, from Philistia, so have no idea what they’re called, or who they are by, but the accompanying sign mentions the Swedish ‘Nationalmuseum’, noting how it often loans these works out to other museums and galleries throughout the world, to let more people enjoy them. I guess this virtual exhibition is another way to do just that. At a guess, these textures were created by the museum, for SL, from the original works. (There are three more on the reverse of those panels)

To the right, a more contemporary exhibit, a series of large panels cycling through a large pool of photographic imagery of modern Sweden. Very much Travel Brochure stuff, but nice nonetheless, and by an hour or so in to my visit, I was having to fight a distinct urge to emigrate.

Its a not all uplifting art and tourism though. In the far corner we came across this:

As the sign, left, explains, this is a multimedia exhibit which recreates the office of Raoul Wallenburg, a Swedish Diplomat working in Budapest during the Second World War. Something of an Oskar Schindler figure, Wallenburg worked extensively to help Hungarian Jews escape being sent to Nazi Concentration Camps, by giving them Swedish Passports. Toward the end of the war, he was taken by the Soviets, never to be seen again.

To the right is the exhibit itself. Its a grim thing, and quite thought provoking. It combines all the best techniques available in SL, and you stand there, listening to a reenactment of the man, a phantom voice in the air around you, dictating a final letter to his secretary; a somewhat resigned correspondence, filled with pathos, inevitability, wistful hopes and a pragmatic kind of surrender. He knows what is about to happen, but doesn’t quite want to believe, wants to hope. On the desk, a period typewriter clicks away, keys moving under an invisible pair of hands, and all around the grubby office, objects, when touched, wordlessly hand you notecards and images, further enveloping you in the stark days of Budapest, 1945.

A far cry from the usual hedonism of The Rest of SL, at once sobering and informative. Just as I’m in danger of forgetting quite where it is that I actually am, some Friend of Humanity comes lollerskating in, wearing an 8-foot wide tarantula costume, ‘WAZZZZUP!!1!” and the moment is lost. I sigh and move on.

Another little exhibit I found very clever, was the Geoglobe:

A fun idea, the place is accessed via the small spinning Earth next to the ‘gift shop’ area. It whisks you up to a skybox, a gravity defying mini-build, placed far above the height of normal unaided avatar flight, or rendering distance, usually for privacy. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. This one has been cleverly textured inside to show an inverse Earth, with you on a platform in the middle. On the continents around you, the locations of all the various Swedish Embassies, missions and enclaves are marked with different coloured map pins. I’m not sure when exactly I’d need to know where my nearest Swedish Embassy is in a hurry, but the whole thing was very ingeniously executed, so top marks there anyway!

The item on the left may look like just a bookcase, but all of the leaflets on it, when clicked, fire up Internet Explorer and take you to relevant web pages, mostly at www.sweden.se, allowing the interested to learn more about various aspects of Sweden; culture, education, industry and so on. I did notice a few broken links here which need updating, but most of them worked, and its not just the bookcase either. Most of the items in the whole building seem to take you off to a relevant web page when ‘Touched’. All very Mixed Media, and something Playboy could learn from. I was a little surprised to see that many of the furniture pieces take you off to the Ikea website, but I guess there’s a loose national connection there, so it isn’t all just shameless advertising. The ‘Gift Shop’ bit isn’t really a shop at all, but does have some bags of free SL Ikea furniture you can take away as a souvenir for your own SL domicile, which is a nice touch. The Gift Shop also has a large display of ‘Other Swedish Places in SL’, a kind of Further Reading section. I didn’t investigate further, as many are likely to have vanished by now, and some will quite possibly be Swedish only in the ‘Massage’ sense!

The upper two floors of the building were mostly empty. I guess if you are a Swedish company or institution, you can probably get in touch with the sim owners and arrange to have a little bit of the upper floors to promote your own Swedish Thing, but mostly, I got the impression that the building only had three floors for the exterior look of it all, to better resemble the RL building it is based on. There’s even a little rooftop cafe up there.

Away from the building proper is the ever-present Outdoor Stage, left, here done in typical modern Scandinavian style. It seems to be the done thing to have one of these auditorium areas in any large ‘for the public’ build, but I’ve yet to actually see one used in all my time in there. Possibly over-enthusiasm on the designer’s part I guess. This one had a ‘Come to Sweden!’ promotional video clip looping on the back wall media texture, but not a lot else going on. I guess that’s more me not checking event schedules, rather than actual disuse.

And what trip to Sweden would be complete without The Sauna, right. We found this little hideaway tucked at the far corner of the Orientation region, again, all meticulously crafted, complete with icy shorefront to plunge in afterward. We were going to pop in and relax, but this being SL and all, we arrived to find the thing occupied by a small group of avatars, who may or may not have been Swedish, having a minor orgy of sorts. My Swedish friend was grumbling about the impracticalities of having sex in a real sauna at that point; high temperatures, extreme humidity, etc. I was in no position to argue for or against the case to be honest, so we packed up the camera and notebook and left.

I have to admit, I was very impressed with this place. Its an idea that is honest, open and accessible. It also lacked the pretentiousness that can often go hand-in-hand with these ‘cutting edge multimedia experiments’, which was nice. It isn’t worried about a ‘bottom line’, but has a clearly defined, and relevant real-world, purpose, which most SL projects seem to lack, namely showcasing Sweden and informing people about the place. As a person whose main conceptions of Sweden came from ‘The Muppet Show’ at an early age, I found the whole trip to be time well spent!

Like IBM’s Campus, its hard to imagine the place being a substitute for a real world version of itself, with actual Swedish Ambassadors logging on to meet up with actual Foreign Dignitaries, also all avatared up, conducting matters of International Diplomacy via the clanky old Second Life marionettes, but like IBM, I don’t imagine it’s creators really thought that this was what it was for anyway. As a kind of combination tourism website, art gallery website and historical exhibition website, it does seem as good a way as a regular flat web page, to get those kinds of audio-visual ideas across, and in this case, works hand-in-hand with those more conventional web page methods.

A good example of the kinds of things that can, and indeed, should, be done with the platform Linden Lab have provided, and a good antidote to the bland Main-Grid Mediocrity. All in all, worth a visit!

Next time, and probably the final time for now, in this mini-series, Burning Life 2007, Second Life’s anarchic replica Burning Man festival of Self Expression!

It doesn’t get any more Corporate than IBM, and their no-nonsense, hands-on, take up of the Second Life Dream is typically held up as the prime example of the SERIOUS BUSINESS that many hope SL will some day become. Indeed, the mere presence of the respected and well-known Real Life brand, along with select others such as Sun Microsystems and similar, lends a fair deal of credibility to the platform, simply by them being there at all, perhaps helping in some part offset the widely held other view of the place; a place of Sims Online-like play, virtual hedonism and online deviancy.

Which is all very well, and its nice to see the odd headline that this generates, that isn’t about ponzi schemes, gambling misdemeanours and people turning out to be a lot younger in RL than they said they were on the sign-up page. But when you get right down to it, what does a large multinational manufacturer of hardware server solutions and consultancy, actually do in a virtual world which on the whole, is constructed from big blocks of imaginary pine, painted to look like imaginary houses and such? Curious, I went to have a look.

(Click to enlarge)

Finding IBM in Second Life is easy…open the map, type ‘IBM’ in the Region box, and away you go. Finding which IBM to start at is trickier, and as seen above, the IBM section of Second Life is pretty huge, consisting of 12 connected ‘main’ regions, and at least that again in curiously named regional offices – IBM PDC Vancouver, IBM Boeblingen Lab, etc. Presumably, in addition to the main IBM bit, any regional office within the overall corporation that wants a little play area of their own, can have one, and overall, it possibly makes for one of the largest grouped set of singly owned regions in the entire grid, eclipsed only by career professional Second Life Landlords, such as Anshe Chung and similar.

The best place to start any visit would probably be be ‘IBM’ itself, which has a large open avenue, all done out in a clean white plastic look, all curves and comfy seating, along with more traditional paraphernalia; street signs, pavements and so on. The overall design of the main section of the area does seem very well done, and hints at a great deal of planning and a unified execution on a professional level. Mind you, when presenting a public face for a serious corporation like this, a certain standard is necessary, and it would be hard to maintain any kind of reputation if people showed up to see the usual cacophonic pile of jumbled pine cubes and half-finished concepts.

The plaza has lots of helpful pointers, and even includes a newbie orientation trail of sorts, replicating, if not surpassing, LL’s own Orientation Isle; the place where you or I would arrive upon first creating a character. Poking about, I saw the occasional brand new person standing about the place, identifiable by their clothes and hairstyle typically, and I suspect that IBM have a slightly personalised client and account signup, directing folks from inside the corp to here, instead of the somewhat traumatic experience a non-IBM user would get. (You know the stuff; stumble about the island, be shown how to put a T shirt on, then get kicked out into the cruel world, harassed by naked people with todgers on display for Teh Voice Secks, scammed mercilessly, and driven out in about 20 minutes never to return)

It makes sense, and if you are a business, trying to engage real people in real things, albeit online, having a modicum of extra control over where the potential customer first arrives, and whom they meet when they get there, is probably a very desirable thing.

My favourite bit of the area was this:

Which is a neat little scale model of the surrounding environs; an actual model campus, in a virtual model campus, both of which are inside my PC! The red arrow is you, and the model shows the entire of the twelve-sim build. (I checked, and no, the model does not contain a model of the model where the model should be)

Numerous side buildings fill the periphery, and the whole thing is dominated by three very large theatres:

The black object in the centre is a Media Texture, capable of being fed any online streaming video clip, and the venue looks to have seating for about 200. Distance is no real issue, as everyone can zoom their personal camera about with reasonable ease and to a fair distance from their actual ‘body’. (There are more chairs on the far side, but my poor old PC was struggling to download and render them all) Regular readers will know that most of these sort of venues fall over at 40+ people, but what they’ve done here is quite clever. The theatre straddles the junction of four different regions, each with it’s own hardware in theory, and each supporting it’s own 40 or so people. Avatar info in sims next door is still sent, but the whole thing stands a far better chance of surviving full attendance than otherwise possible.

Presumably these areas are for the more frivolous kind of company meetings, seminars, lectures and the like, and I suppose, provides a cheap and accessible alternative to video conferencing, particularly if you have offices all over the world. SL runs like a dog much of the time, but can be run with a fairly bare minimum of a PC, and easily the sort found on the average IBM office desk, I shouldn’t wonder.

All around the sides and edges of these landscape dominating trumpet-roofed buildings are smaller offices, exhibitions, displays and curious, including, oddly enough a recruiting office near the main landing point. A small glass and stone affair, with two chairs in; the mind boggles at the idea of a job interview conducted entirely in SL. Mind you, speaking personally, I’d probably feel a lot more comfortable doing it in there than out here, if my last one was anything to go by. I’m not sure they’re specifically trying to recruit the Gorean Fursuit Set’s Finest Minds for the future growth of their business empire, although there is certainly a sprinkling of talented designers, scripters and all-round geniuses in there. I think its more of the left-field abstract video conferencing alternative, for real life purposes. Mind you, SL is a fairly technical kind of place, and its not so far-fetched to assume that a random cross-section of it’s userbase will contain a higher percentage of the kinds of people IBM would like to employ, than a similar cross-section taken from the nearest RL shopping centre.

Magnanimously enough, they also have an area set aside a Sandbox – a publicly available area where anyone is allowed to build things. The standard of building going on here seemed far higher than in LL’s generally open public sandboxes, and far less full of three-dimensional spam constructions. An example here:

The sandbox has large helpful signs around it’s edge, explaining the basics of manipulating the primitives, and I even saw a person with a group title tag of ‘IBMSandbox Moderator’ flitting about the place, implying that IBM actually pay someone to work in the place, policing it and making sure no Friend of Humanity starts griefing everyone with cage-guns, genitalia or the ever popular nuclear missile spam. All in all, a much more pleasant place to work on projects than the ‘proper’ sandboxes. Its almost as if IBM have gone out of their way to create all the basic facilities of the rest of SL Proper, and reduce the need for it’s own people to have to endure the horrors found outside. Far from being sinister though, this idea sounds like a great way to approach the platform, and filter out as much of the undesirable aspects as possible.

Elsewhere are groups of buildings dedicated to single products, projects or other areas of IBM”s corporate life:

The one on the left seems to be some kind of model of a telesales or phone support centre, possibly intended as an illustration of some system or another IBM offer. The right-hand one is a series of displays detailing IBM’s ‘SOA’ Server Oriented Architecture…er…thing. Much of it was beyond me to be honest, but it just goes to show how serious and grown-up parts of SL can be, although I do wonder how many actual sales pitches, to real life buyers from public and private sector industries, are given in there.

It’s not all work, work, work though, and the campus also contains a number of art installation type areas, virtual museums, a very well done Wimbledon tennis thing, which I guess IBM were part sponsors for during the Real tournament, a kaleidoscopic water-art thing, and a large building based on some kind of ‘Ex-IBMers Keeping In Touch’ club.

To the left is the back of the ‘Second Life Ballet’, which from the look of it is a travelling thing, currently in residence in the IBM Campus. I’m sure its all terribly highbrow and erudite and all, but at the end of the day, dancing in SL consists of right-clicking a poseball and selecting ‘Sit’, so forgive me if I’m somewhat sceptical of the form as a medium for excellence in self-expression! Actually creating the animations on the other hand…

The right hand picture is a bit more worthwhile however, and shows a section of the campus set aside to cover a charity initiative the SL-going staff of IBM seem to be involved with; Habitat for Humanity. Various little items on display and for sale, T-shirts and the like, all for about 30 times the typical going rate for similar items elsewhere. It’s okay though – the intention seems to be to take those $L and cash them out, and send it all to Durban in South Africa, to help build homes for orphaned AIDS victims. If you’re going to try tackling real life problems, you need real life money, rather than the piddling amounts of value the average Linden Dollar represents. The accompanying displays were informative and it was nice to see a part of SL dedicated to helping others, rather than themselves.

Population on the campus was low but steady throughout, and the green dots on the map, (first pic), do seem to represent typical usage, UK late evening. How many of those were curious sightseers from the outside, and how many were IBM staff tinkering away on a lunchbreak, is anyone’s guess. Wandering around, its very easy to fall into the belief that this is a real campus of sorts, and that inside the various strange structures around the place, microchips are being manufactured, sales strategies are being worked over and hundreds of people in business suits are having meetings, answering calls and so on. Of course that’s not it at all, and mostly its all modelling, I think.

I wonder how SL is regarded inside IBM. Is it a serious tool for business, or more of a community-building hobby for lunchbreaks, part of a kind of future-looking company cultural thing? Clearly, the place is nowhere near suitable enough for doing actual business in – multi-million dollar contracts and the like. Its bad enough buying a T-shirt to find its suddenly vanished from your inventory!

I’m also dubious about the platform’s ability to act as a R&D tool. Throughout my visit I had to wait patiently for the surroundings to actually show up, and I’d imagine that the in-built scripting tools probably aren’t quite up to the kind of advanced simulation or design processes that are most likely needed in the day-to-day of IBM’s ‘shop floor’, as it were.

As a social, communication and promotional tool though, I’d say SL comes into its own, and I suspect its this that IBM mainly use it for; a fun kind of alternative to conference calling and endless meetings half way around the world. 30 odd sims might seem like a pretty extravagant spend to most users of the place, but this is a company with a net income of $9.4 billion ’05-’06. I’m sure they can spare the several thousand dollars a month keeping their sims alive costs.

Pocket change, and in exchange, what? Well, the ever popular big news stories about Metaverse, Cyberspace, The Future and all that jazz, of course. But wandering about the place, I really got the impression that, unlike my visit to Playboy, it wasn’t really about The Second Life Dream. Seemed to me more an internal thing, and quite an experimental one at that. They’re an industry very much concerned with the Future of Technology, in all it’s forms, and this could well be just another iron in the fire. We’re all quite welcome to turn up and have a wander about, look at the exhibits and so on, but its not really about us, the itinerant cyber-hedonist, so much.

What it is about, was less clear, but in a way, I wondered if they really knew either. Maybe its nothing that high-powered or corporately sinister at all. Perhaps, like me, they just find the whole idea interesting and want to see where it goes, but unlike Playboy, they seem to be exploring SL’s possibilities, and testing it’s potential, as they go, in a much more proactive manner, rather than just waiting for stuff to happen and being disappointed when it doesn’t.

I left after an hour or so, still having seen only a fraction of the various bits and pieces on display, and the place definitely needs several visits if you want to see it all. Actually understanding it all, may take longer…

Next visit in the ‘RL in SL’ series – The Second House of Sweden, an unorthodox attempt by a national government to get involved in it all!

So where was I? Ah, that’s right; morbidly curious about what all this was about, and amused enough by the whole thing to go have a look for myself. I am sort of a Second Life ‘Resident’, after all, and this kind of thing is what it’s all about.

I do appreciate your indulgence in these matters by the way, dear reader. I know you mostly come here to watch me being bitter about Enforced MMO Grouping, or hold forth at great length about tips, tactics and strategies that everyone else already worked out for themselves a long, long time ago in Guild Wars, but everyone has the occasional bad habit, and one of mine is a continued fascination with SL, which shows no sign of abating. Mind you, if you’re still reading this far, I’m sure the odd SL post won’t kill you, and it’ll be back to the Usual tomorrow!

Getting to the Playboy Island is easy enough; simply open up the world map, type ‘Playboy’ in the ‘Region’ Box, and the map focuses on the island sim in question. You’ll know you’ve got the right one, as the entire landmass has been carefully fashioned to resemble the familiar bunny logo. You’ll also know you have the right one as there will be no green dots (which represent actual people) on the thing.

(Click to enlarge – all of the slides accompanying today’s lecture are SFW, if a tad risqué in places)

The ’1 Person’ listed on that mouseover is your intrepid reporter by the way, making the place ideal as a calm, solemn oasis of tranquillity, reflection and solitude, which I quite like, but is probably somewhat counter to the traditional image of the Playboy lifestyle. This was around 10-11pm UK time, granted, and perhaps the bulk of the West Coast Jet Set weren’t out of bed yet, but still – global village and all that! The place has been in existence since 12th June, making it almost three months old, and in perhaps half an hour of flying about taking pics and peering around in curiosity, I saw two other people there, both of whom teleported in, took one look, saw that someone else was already there, panicked and teleported away again.

It’s actually quite a good build. The island is done out in a tropical paradise theme, all palm trees and that, and has beach towel and hammock poseballs a plenty. A ‘poseball’ is typically a small scripted sphere, which when sat upon, causes your avatar to run a stored animation. While these are indeed used for ‘teh cyb0r’, (check the colour of the ball carefully before getting on it!) they do have many quite innocuous uses as well, and offer a way for people to sit, dance and so on, without them having to have that particular animation in local inventory themselves.

The main feature of the island is a two level open plan wooden building of sorts, shown below.

I know a little about construction in there, and it all seems quite professionally done; clean lines, well textured and not the usual blocky mess of 10m3 cubes. Likely put together by one of any number of in-world design and building ‘companies’, all staffed by enthusiastic and skilled amateurs, and bought and paid for with $L. Or perhaps its an in-house affair, and one or two of the Playmates harbour a secret inner geek, and flair for 3D Modelling as well as more conventional modelling?

To the lower foreground of that shot, is a decent sized stage area, complete with grand piano and harp.

I’m not quite sure what this bit is for – recitals? Graduation speeches? At any rate, it is likely to suffer the same ‘curse of popularity’ that plagues all other spaces in Second Life, in that this venue has a practical maximum capacity of about forty people, performers included. Things tend to go a bit peculiar with time and space after that point. Just in case we begin to forget where we actually are, a number of artistic lingerie-shot posters adorn the back wall, somewhat at odds with the otherwise genteel nature of the trellis work and classical instruments.

The lower floor of the main building itself appears to be some kind of gift shop.

The items on sale are mostly in the promotional category, rather than anything really dirty, and each of the vendor panels shows both an in-world Second Life version of the article, and photo of a real person wearing a real one, implying that these items can be bought for real too. Not quite sure how, mind you, as those panels there were only selling SL clothing items, and there seemed to be no clever linking system offering the opportunity to get the real swag, beyond a sign effectively telling you to go and find Playboy’s real website yourselves.

Curious, as although beyond my own ability and knowledge, I’m fairly sure that a great many clever things can be scripted using XML-RPC to talk to proper, non-SL, web servers, to do all manner of online transactions, both for pretend Linden Money, and indirectly, for real US Dollars. www.slexchange.com is a good example of this kind of thing, offering a great deal of in and out of world interconnectivity, and which takes $US micropayments for SL items.

This suggests to me one of two things; either Playboy are not convinced about SL as a platform for anything more serious than larking about by the virtual poolside, or that they simply couldn’t find the necessary know-how to get that kind of advanced scripting project done.

Anyway, I bought a Hefner dressing gown (centre of the pic), mostly because I felt sorry for the place really. Quite reasonably priced too – about $L70 or so I think! Of course there have been items of clothing with “The Bunny” on, knocking about in there since they first allowed texture uploading I expect, but at last there is the chance to have an “Official” Playboy T-shirt, or cami top, or whatever. The shop is a nice touch, certainly, but it’s quite clear that this is not the reason they’ve set the place up, and I severely doubt that proceeds from the place are anywhere near the cost of maintaining the island’s existence in the first place. The whole shop almost has an strange kind of ‘Roleplaying’ feel to it, as if the designers didn’t quite know what to do with the floor space, but figured that a clothing shop was kind of ‘expected’ somehow:

“What do people do in Second Life?”

“Uh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh…”

“What else!?”

“Uhh…they buy virtual clothes?”

“Better have some of those then!”

Upstairs is the main focus of the place, the VIP Lounge:

This resembles a kind of jazz lounge, along with the usual paraphernalia of a mainstream Second Life nightclub – dance floor, lights, DJ podium, sofas a plenty. Was empty when I visited, but a sign out front of the place tells of a weekly club event thing, and perhaps the place has regulars and a less desolate feel during those.

Around the walls are Playboy magazine covers, and these are perhaps the most ‘shocking’ thing on the entire island. To be honest, without these reminders dotted here and there, the branding in the shop below, and of course, the minimap island shape, I really felt as if I could have been anywhere on the main grid. The ‘tropical atoll’ look and ‘chill-out beach club’ theme are both very popular in Second Life, in varying degrees of respectability, or otherwise.

In the corners of the lounge stand large media screens, which seem to offer snippets and teasers of some much more elaborate web-based service, and perhaps here we start to see a point to the place. Presumably Playboy run some kind of more traditional online premium video thing, outside of SL, and hope to pick up new subscribers by referral from in SL?

Hard to imagine though, because SL itself seems far more… er… sophisticated in that field as it is, and I’m fairly certain that no matter what your particular tastes run to in matters pornographic, SL has at least one Group of like-minded folks, a dozen shops selling the outfits and/or equipment necessary to get on with it, and all manner of clubs and/or venues in which you’re positively encouraged to go about doing it. Brent and Brendan, on a Virgin Worlds podcast, once described Playboy as the ‘tamest thing in SL’, and they’re not far wrong. At the very least, SL smut tends to be more interactive than anything the magazines have to offer.

I know, I know….it’s not just about the girls…it’s about The Lifestyle too, the affluent, indolent, and decadent parties at The Mansion, the yachts, the limousines, the bling and the champagne pyramids. Trouble is, as commenter Ace Albion notes quite astutely in the thread that got me curious about the whole thing in the first place; this is a world in which people, irrespective of class, upbringing or station, can pull yachts, swimming pools and champagne flutes out of thin air, using only the power of their mind, and some moderate ‘Lego’ based shaping skills. Anyone in there who finds The Lifestyle appealing, is already living it quite happily, just without Bunny Logos on it all. Playboy has nothing it can add to that.

It’s hard to say what the real point of the place is, to be honest. Clearly a lot of it is simply the headlines; the PR of it all, coming at a time, as it did, when Main Stream Media were getting awfully excited about what they thought SL was. Three months on, and the novelty seems to have well and truly worn off. I don’t think Playboy are going to have to suddenly pack up and leave though, and the island may still serve a useful purpose, internally – a little online chat room of sorts, a venue for their own meet and greets in cyberspace, whatever.

Unless there’s some super-secret Business Rates some place I’m not privy to, it’s cost them US$1,675 to set the island up, (plus whatever the building people charged for the actual build), and continues to cost them US$295 a month in ‘Tier’ fees to keep going. I imagine they spend more than that a month replacing lost, damaged and stolen champagne glasses at the real life Playboy Mansion, making the whole endeavour a blip on a blip in the overall Playboy Empire accounting books, I shouldn’t wonder. An SL sim is an awful lot of money to you or I as a hobby thing, but for a Corporation, would barely register in their marketing budget. How useful a marketing tool it is, is another matter entirely though.

But when you look at it like that, the project probably doesn’t really need a ‘point’, and far from being required to cut and run and cover any ‘losses’, there’s no reason they can’t keep the thing going indefinitely, purely to be able to point at it and say ‘We’re still there’. The only reason I can think of to actually axe the place would be if enough other people looking about and saying ‘But no-one else is’ will shame them into withdrawing the place entirely. Mind you, I doubt the place is really for folks already in SL, but instead a little something edgy and ‘cutting edge’, good for the odd article in the magazine, for those folks who know nothing about SL to begin with.

Preparing to teleport out to a sandbox and do a bit more building of my own, I look about. The place isn’t that offensive, or nearly as laughable as folks make out. It’s a relaxing, well put together little getaway that just seems a bit confused about itself. And of course, woefully underused. Its as if they felt like the needed to be in Second Life, but didn’t quite know why, or what to do once they got there. Still, if you’re looking for a quiet beach with a bit of privacy in SL, I can’t recommend it enough!

Next time, in this somewhat loosely cobbled together ‘series’, IBM in SL!

(Incidentally, the answer to the question posed on the wall screen in shot number five turned out to be; ‘Third Date’. I forget exactly if that was on the third date, or after it, which is potentially a very critical difference! My bad! Your mileage may vary, of course!)

Meanwhile, in Second Life, (pop. 8.3 million, give or take 6.7 million or so…) the sky seems to be falling…again…

Official Linden Blog: Wagering In Second Life: New Policy

(via Broken Toys)

In which we learn of the next stage in Linden Lab’s ongoing programme to clean up the Metaversal Mean Streets of my favourite online Lego set. Effective immediately, it is no longer permissible to play in Virtual Casinos in there.

The exact definition is that it is now against the TOS to wager in games that:

(1) (a) rely on chance or random number generation to determine a winner, OR (b) rely on the outcome of real-life organized sporting events,

AND

(2) provide a payout in

(a) Linden Dollars, OR

(b) any real-world currency or thing of value.

There’s a big old list of example games that meet these criteria, which are now no longer welcome. The comments thread is a fair indication of the general reaction to it all, and the accompanying messageboard behemoth, (which you probably need an account to see), is up to 22 pages and going strong, and has all the fervor, panache and sheer bloodymindedness of a stray match dropped into a box of fireworks, only fireworks made from Hyperbole.

The usual crowd of armchair TOS lawyers are out in force, along with the ‘Why does LL hate Freedom?’ types, and a not insignificant faction of ‘Good Riddance’ types. A great many people seem to have troubles with the boolean nature of the above declaration, and there’s a lot of histrionics about what actually constitutes the nature of ‘wager’, ‘risk’, ‘thing of value’ and ‘random’. I’m sure I saw the words ‘Communist’ and ‘Free Speech’, and bonus marks if you can spot the today’s winning phase ‘First they came for the Casinos, and I said nothing…’ No sign of any Godwins though, which is a shame.

Some clarification seems to be needed on a couple of the more popular borderline items.

A “Sploder” is an object, usually found in social venues – nightclubs and the like. Each participant pays it a small amount of $L, and after enough people have done so, it counts down, and then ‘explodes’, paying most of the pot to one randomly chosen participant, and some lesser amounts to others. It also causes no end of chat spam in an environment where it’s quite difficult to follow conversations anyway. Very popular, very tacky, but basically a chance-based lottery system, and now a no-no.

A “Lucky Chair” is somewhat different. Usually employed by stores to artificially improve ‘Traffic’ score for search listings, these items, often literally a Chair, sit there and after a period of time elapses, randomly draw a letter from the alphabet. If your name starts with that letter, and you’re the first person to sit down on the chair, you get a prize – usually a low-value item of stock from the store owner’s product range, for free. All the Traffic of Camping Chairs, without the cost of paying campers! Genius!

This gives rise to a whole culture of chair hopping locusts, often frighteningly methodical and organised about The Harvest, with dedicated Group IM notification on popular chair status and everything. But they’re mostly harmless (unless you happen to get in the way of one when you have the same lettered name! Yikes! Worse than pensioners at a jumble sale!), and for many genuine newfolk without an actual source of $L income, a good way to stock up the starting inventory a bit. They also require no stake or wager to take part in, so are probably exempt from the new rules.

“SLingo”, and it’s many variants, is less clear. I’ve never actually had a go at this, but as far as I can tell, it’s a sort of camping variant of the more widely known and real world game of Bingo. A grid of numbers is involved, and random numbers are called out. Despite my own ignorance, it, and it’s stepchildren (Tringo, Zingo, Ringo, John, Paul and George), are terrifyingly popular in the world of SL, and it’s continued survival will depend on the nature of the actual game. If you have to pay to take part, it’s almost certainly now illegal. If the prize is given freely by the owner, with no entry fee, then it can probably stay. I must try this thing out one of these days, see what all the fuss is.

The list is quite emphatic about the more traditional types of online gambling though, poker, roulette, blackjack, slot machines…all that stuff is now for the chop, presumably along with the venues that house them. Cries of ‘Conservative Conspiracy’ on the boards not withstanding, it’s easy to see why. It’s illegal to gamble online in the US nowadays, and despite shrill utopian assertions to the contrary, Second Life is kind of a part of California – or at least that’s what any investigating FBI are likely to maintain, which for the purposes of this argument, are probably the only people whose opinions matter. This move seems like a preventative measure by LL to save themselves an awful lot of explaining and/or fines and/or jail time, at some point in the near future.

Tough love for those of us who in our Meatspace moments, fall under the jurisdiction of other nation states than the US, but not a lot you can do about it really. I don’t even have a Congressman to write strongly worded letters to! Some of the more desperate are calling for LL to up and move their entire operation to Vanuatu, Sao Tome, ‘Some Place In Africa’, or another similar backwater, where they have slacker gambling laws, such as Europe. In LL’s place, I think I’d probably find it easier just to shut down the online casinos, rather than relocate the hardware, staff and banking to somewhere with less possibility of earthquakes, but more potential for Military Coup, to be honest.

Naturally, the mechanism by which this clean up is to take place, is us, the Citizens of Second Life, using their time-honoured ‘Shop Your Neighbour’ policing system. Mind you, I personally won’t be sad to see the casinos go. I’m not really one of life’s gamblers, and never bet, wager, or speculate. This isn’t so much a puritanical thing, more a combination of pessimism and statistical awareness. Sure, I may have a 1 in X chance of striking it lucky, but I can’t help but think that I also have a X-1 in X chance of not doing so. Just doesn’t add up, for me, so I simply don’t bother. Talk to me again when X < 2! Plus I know about scripting, and know how easy it is to ensure that The House Always Wins… did I mention SL gambling is entirely unregulated?

Anyway, my objections to the casinos in SL, and I suppose RL for that matter, are mostly aesthetic. For those of you who have never been in there, it’s quite difficult to describe how pervasive SL Casinos actually are. These things are everywhere. When I set up my little shop, for my Mystery Invention, the area I chose on the mainland wasn’t too bad. A few other stores further down a gently rolling slope, a residential house or two, and a number of spinning ‘This Land Is For Sale’ blocks. A bit unsightly, but better than average for mainland. I built a light airy ‘studio’ type of store, which, I hope, doesn’t clash too badly with the surrounds, and wasn’t too obtrusive. I even landscaped a bit, to make my plot meld with the adjoining plots, in contour and style.

I may as well not have bothered, of course, because within a few weeks, some Friend of Humanity bought the plot next door and dropped a ‘Business In a Box’ casino on it.

The Business in a Box phenomenon is a newish thing in SL I’m noticing. It’s basically a complete line of products, set to ‘full permissions’ for resale, made by some genuinely creative and skilled builder or designer, who has come to terms with the fact that there seems to be more and more ‘Entrepreneurs’, and less and less ‘Customers’ in SL these days. I blame the reckless big media talk of ‘Success Stories’ in SL for one, and the abolition of pocket-money for Basic Accounts, for the other.

So instead of trying to sell lots of low value one-offs to people who are less and less able to afford it, against a growing amount of competition, why not just sell copies of the entire business, for a much greater figure, to would-be online millionaires, and let them worry about Step 3) Profit! My own business is somewhat different, as in essence, I’ve been selling tools to other builders, right from the outset.

Anyway, I log into the shop one evening to find this huge blocky, glitzy…monstrosity, crowding out my own elegant studio – flashing textures, spinning advert blocks, noises, the lot. Las Vegas has a certain tongue in cheek retro kitsch style to it, which can forgive a number of architectural sins. I wouldn’t want to live there necessarily, but neither do I want to drop rocks on it, from space. This thing on the other hand, has all the charm of a…well, neon pink cube 20m a side, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Until now, that is…

NIMBY, indeed. I wouldn’t mind so much if I’d ever seen anyone using the wretched place, but it was just set up (by someone who hadn’t even put the effort in to build the damn thing themselves), and left running. Presumably there’s some kind of associated advertising campaign for it, (which by the look of it, isn’t actually working in the slightest), and it’s owner is now sat some place else, wondering when the wheelbarrows of money are going to start arriving.

Still it could be much worse – it could have been a success! 30+ avatars in that close proximity, 24/7, would make my shop effectively cease to function; scripts, lag, etc, and again, the only recourse I’d have would be to try to sell the place (probably for a massive loss…who’d want to buy the place?) and move somewhere else – to wait for it all to start again. And that’s just the neighbours! There are at least three other Casinos within mini-map range, all of varying degrees of desolation. An ugly waste of prims if you ask me, but no-one did, and so there they are.

I know any number of evil tricks which could be employed to render the place useless, of course, but I don’t want to stoop to that level, and anyway, they aren’t necessary. The fact is that there’s simply a massive oversaturation of get-rich-quick gambling dens in SL. There’s probably one for every logged in avatar by this point…it wouldn’t surprise me. I suspect many of them operate at a loss, once the camping payouts have been taken out, (Payments to the penniless to get them to be there in the first place, and go AFK for a few hours), and of course, the monthly ‘Tier’ fee you have to pay to lease the land off LL in the first place.

Just the very possibility that a Casino will spring up next door, (or an massive spinning advert for one, which is nearly as bad) is enough to seriously suppress the value of Mainland land plot prices, and yet, so much of the economy of SL is deeply rooted in the various forms of gambling that exist there. It’s easy for someone like me to say ‘Good Riddance!’, but there’s no getting away from the fact that many, many people in SL, are simply there to gamble, either in and of itself, or because they have no other way to afford the things in-world they really want. And now they can’t.

The sky may not be falling this time, but today’s new twist will definitely have a lot of lasting effects on the place. Interesting times ahead.

Incidentally, and on a related note, do visit AnotherHere.com, where Brenden has a fascinating series of articles about what SL was like circa 2003, back before most of the worst things it’s currently known for, were even invented:

Another Here: A Time When Second Life Was Wonderful – Part 1

(Plus Parts 2 and 3 which you can find yourselves!)

Rather a dismal weekend, all in all, mostly characterised by obsession, frustration, resignation, and stubbornness, in various measure, as I attempt to get my head around the actual practicalities of Sculpted Primitives in Second Life, which look good on paper, but are frankly, a bitch to make in practice, and I’m still not sure I really understand what is going on really.

I’ll spare you the technicalities, partly because it’s not very interesting reading, and partly, because I really don’t understand them myself. It started innocuously, enough, with me finding this rather good tutorial:

I Ramble… Sorry

In which we learn how to make a Martini, using only Blender, a freebie 3D modelling application which seems to inspire admiration and fear in equal measure. So I downloaded, installed, read and followed, and much to my surprise and delight, the promised Martini Glass appeared in Second Life, exactly as described. Right, I thought, now for something a bit more complex! And that’s where it started to go terribly wrong. The project was a series of sculpted objects, based on the Second Life Default Avatar shape, available as a download here, in .OBJ format. I’ve no idea why I’d need a fake SL avatar – shop window manikins perhaps? The standard method for displaying clothes in that manner so far is to take a screenshot of a person wearing the thing, cut it out in Photoshop and upload the result, to be plastered on a flat surface – a cardboard cutout, in effect. Or might be useful for making realistic statues, perhaps.

The point is, it’s a good test of what the sculpts can do. Or so I thought. The rest of the weekend saw me lost in a sea of menus, options, meshes, NURBS, UV Maps, and managing to successfully create any number of nasty looking tangled objects that can only be described as ‘Hyper-Lichen’, which is all very well as Modern Art, but far from the desired result. There then followed a repeating cycle of me thinking I knew what had gone wrong, trying something a little different, working through the stages again, making another Hyper-Lichen, swearing a lot, and going off to play Oblivion instead. A few quests in there later, and I’d have calmed down enough to have forgotten that I can’t actually do it, and the cycle starts again. All very stressful, although on the plus side, I’ve now finally completed the Main Story, Fighters Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest arcs, and am making good headway into the Mage’s Guild, so not a completely lost weekend, I guess.

I think a lot of the problem is that ‘one does not simply walk into Blender’. It’s a completely new application to me, and I’ve no 3D modelling experience whatsoever, beyond just piling up cubes in SL. Blender, 3DS Max, any of them, are all Serious Applications, for Real People, and here’s me casually expecting to just pick it up and go, when the reality is that it’s likely to take months, if not years to get familiar, and then competent, using these tools.

Add to that, the very unique requirements and specifications that a sculpt-map usable by Second Life requires, further specialising the missing skills I need to know; all UV Maps, Active Quads, Vertex Ordering and whatnot, and it makes for a very hair-pulling experience all in all. Things aren’t helped by the fact that although quite a lot of folks are using Blender for the job, much of the really clever work, tutorials and advice on the forums is being created with 3DS Max in mind. Stands to reason I guess, the real experts are likely to be the people who do this sort of thing for a living, and those that do, are likely to have the professional tools to do it with. I don’t have a spare £2695 ($3495) to blow on 3DS Max though, so it’ll have to be Blender for me.

This whole ‘Sculpt’ thing pushes the bounds of ‘hobby’ to breaking point I think, and it’s only a stubborn refusal to give up trying to understand every aspect of what, to me, is still a ‘game’ of sorts, that keeps me beating my head against it. The Explorer in me just won’t let it go. Still, it’s a new thing, and like me, hundreds of other SL Residents are struggling to get to grips with it too. Given long enough, I expect we’ll start seeing all sorts of homebrew 3rd party converters, editors, previewers and the rest, and the Blender Knowledge Base is likely to be filled in by those folks who, like me, feel the need to explain things in great detail to everyone else, in order to achieve some level of self-justification. Hopefully, unlike me, they actually understand what is going on here.

For me though, I think a more considered approach is the key, and I need to sit down with the manual, and actually learn how Blender works before I can think about turning my Hyper-Lichen into something resembling a human body. RTFM! I’m sure many variations of this manikin will be made available in-world in that time, and long before I can make my own, I will be able to just buy one, but that’s not the point. Nothing irritates me like an MMO game mechanic I don’t understand, and more than anything else, it’s this irritation I use as fuel…

Fascinating expedition into Second Life this weekend, partly to ‘mind the shop’, (which surprisingly, still shows no signs of dying a death yet), but also in part to have a go at the latest in Linden Lab’s long line of weird and wacky new features, in this case the new Sculpted Primitives.

Regular readers will of course, by now, be somewhat familiar with my somewhat derisive, and frankly ungrateful, attitude toward most things ‘SL’, somewhere between enthusiasm and scorn, and in particular I often derive an enormous amount of pleasure picking holes in the new features as they’re announced. I’m very much a ‘Glass is Half Empty’ person, I think. So it was with no small amount of irritation  and annoyance that as I poked about, fiddled, played and read around the topic, the genius behind these new prims became increasingly apparent, and after a few hours, I was forced to grudgingly admit that not only are they a Good Idea, cleverly executed, but that they were in fact, nothing short of revolutionary.

I’m still not entirely sure I understand exactly how they work, but by using some form of 3D Game Design Witchcraft called a Normal Map, these new class of fundamental building blocks can be set to look like, well, any solid three dimensional shape at all, all using the same, single primitive. The process is arcane to say the least, but basically revolves around having a second texture applied to the prim, upon which surface information is encoded in the form of colours. These colours are then applied to the prim in such a manner to cause Space, or at least SL’s virtual equivalent, to become twisted and warped into new configurations, allowing unprecedented control of matter in this traditionally very Lego-like world. Fascinating, and not a little frightening, and it takes a lot of digging around to understand how the trick, for trick it is, is accomplished:

Ben Cloward – Graphic Designer: Normal Mapping Tutorial

In which some chap I’d never heard of, but now greatly respect, explains exactly how the smoke and mirrors work. (It’s quite technical, and should only be read through if you really are that curious.) It’s a technique we’ve somewhat taken for granted in recent titles like Doom 3, and allows the graphics card to ‘cheat’, and represent extremely detailed objects in real-time, without needing an equally extreme, and PC-Crushing number of polygons to do it. The Second Life wiki has a more terse, but less helpful explanation here:

Second Life Wiki: Sculpted Prims Explained

In which we gain some insight into how the colours work, but are probably left more confused than when we started. It’s probably best not to go mad working out how it works, and just be content that it does, allowing one to consider the payoff:

Second Life Wiki: Sculpted Prims
(The head in particular is impressive – one prim)

8 Prim Leg, by Chip Midnight
(The SL forums have a very good ‘Show Us Your Sculpties’ thread in the ‘Gallery’ forum, but requires login to see – shame)

While the system seems to allow only for complete solids, the resulting object can still be textured in the usual manner, including alpha layer transparency, as used to create the eye-holes in the head above. The leg is especially stunning (by SL’s usual graphical standards), as it’s actual visible surface texture seems to have been painted to create ‘pretend’ shine, and shadow, which will look a bit odd when it moves about, but makes for a very effective static display.

In a world where almost everything previously had to be constructed from a series of various twisted, compressed and stretched Cubes, Spheres, Cynlinders, and other similar simple shapes, all painstakingly linked together, and where the fundamental unit of economic scarcity – the basic ‘resource’ – is a land parcel’s capacity to maintain the existence of a finite number of distinct primitives, this new technology will truly revolutionise how things are made, adding a new order of detail, while at the same time, freeing up lands for many more ‘things’ per parcel, and I can’t help but be quite awed by the potential of the new system.

But…

Yes, there’s a but, and after mucking about with the things for a good hour or two, along with associated side-surfing, and experiments in Photoshop, it quickly became apparent that this new stuff is Not For Everyone.

Leaving aside willingness for the moment, at present everyone in world can if they want to, make a pine cubes out of thin air, and then manipulate them into a gun, a car, a hairstyle, a shoe, or whatever, albeit with varying degrees of skill. Everything you need is right there – the Edit Palette contains most of it, and lets you work on the prims with a fair degree of control, once you have the knack. Not so Sculpts. Most of the work that defines those, is carried out outside of SL, in a proper, commercial 3D modelling application, such as Maya, 3DS MAX, whatever. The resulting Surface Map texture, a 64×64 pixel riot of rainbow colours, along with a suitably corresponding visible texture to clothe it in, must then be uploaded just like every other shrub leaf, wall tile, skirt pattern or fur texture.

All in all, this means that most residents are not going to be able to make these, and what LL seem to have done here is not so much add a feature, but create an industry. Now along with the Animators, working away outside in Poser, and the Clothing Designers and Texture Artists, busy in Photoshop, we’ll soon have the Sculptors too, burning the midnight oil out in Maya, and selling their wares in little shops with the rest. Only the Scripters can work wholly in-world, and that takes a different kind of determination and skill.

The ability to make stuff using the cubes and spheres still exists, of course, but it’s going to be hard work selling such crude and prim-costly artefacts in the face of this new and sophisticated competition, and Primcraft, the basic business of playing with Lego, in-context, which remains the main attraction of SL for me even now, is likely to become something of a hobby in the future.

A futile half hour in Photoshop, working with guesswork, luck and rainbow gradient tool soon showed me the impossibility of trying to paint these maps by hand, resulting in a bunch of the most bizarrely twisted shapes, which not only could not exist in reality, but probably would have punched a hole in it if they did, so I can see that this most peculiar of online games is going to make me learn yet another skill-set I have no idea about, and I’m going to have to track down some kind of open-source 3D app and teach myself how to use it, if I’m to get the most out of these things. I’ll only get cross if I can’t do them, I can tell!

Still, despite all the difficulties involved in actually working with the ‘Sculpties’ as they’re being called, I remain impressed, at both the potential of what could be done with them, and the surprising lack of general disruption caused by the implementation. Next up is Voice Support, which I’ve bitched about quite enough already, and most people seem far more excited about that, than the Sculpted Prims, which is understandable I guess – more Residents can actually use that, but to my mind, the advent of Sculpts is far more significant. Of course the ‘T-T-C’ on them is likely to be alarmingly small – this is SL, afterall – but as well as mind numbingly lifelike dangly bits, there is also likely to be a great deal of impressive sculpture in the months ahead, and I’m quite looking forward to see what people do with it all…

I really need to put my back into keeping in touch with MMO Gossip and Scandal more – that’s two minor Industry Implosions in as many weeks now, and I know almost nothing about either. There’s “Sigil-Gate” of course – good round-up coverage here for that one:

AFK Gamer: Vanguard, Sigil and The Vision

In which Foton helpfully links up pretty much all the relevant places at which one can gawp at the unfolding drama of Vanguard, a Hardcore MMO in a Softcore Century. (Reblogging a reblog…how decadent!)

I’m still trying to work out if the game itself was to blame, or whether all this is purely down to mismangement, money and people. Personally, I was scared away from the thing shortly after it was announced, due to it’s early spin as a game for people who enjoyed Everquest 1, circa-2000. Having seen how much more pleasant and relaxing games can be since, I no longer do. Anyway, with luck, that’s the last we’ll see of “The Vision”, a game design philosophy based not so much on what players want, but on what certain designers think that players need – cruel to be kind, etc.

Interestingly, the Kranky Kraut is back from year-long hiatus, although whether coincidentally, or driven to post in apoplectic rage, it’s harder to say. It’s all very well pointing from the sidelines and smirking, as I do, but Kranky Kraut is about the only blogger I know who actually plays Vanguard with any degree of apparent commitment, and yet is anything but a fanboi.

Kranky Kraut

Then there was the one where the World of Warcraft Forum Moderator/GM/Bluename  had a bit of a ‘Falling Down‘ moment, ‘live on air’, as it were. Scott has that one covered:

Broken Toys: Community Relations Is Hard

In which Scott asks the crucial question – are you a dying robot named Rutger Hauer? Having sometimes directed a shuddering glance at the unmitigated cesspool of internet-anonymity-meets-deep-seated-psychological-problems that is the typical WoW board thread, (i.e. One person posting a whine, followed by four-hundred variants of ‘yo mama’ and ‘lern2playkthx’) I do have some sympathy with the poor bluename, but not much, as he is essentially being paid to surf a gaming messageboard, for a living! I think I could put up with a certain degree of flak in that situation, even in the Armpit of Online that is the WoW General Discussion forum. Professionalism!

There must be some gossip I can bitch about with authority, surely! Ah…here we are:

Official Linden Blog: Coming your way soon: the Support Portal

In which we learn about LL’s plans to split their tech support into a three tiered system dependent on how much you pay, with the Basic Account Memberships, (The free memberships – currently about 6.3 million out of the 6.4 million Residents shown) soon to only be allowed to submit petitions for login issues or downed regions. Conversations with actual GMs are to become the privilege of the paying elite Premium Accounts, and Super Platinum 24/7 Phone Support reserved for the dizzying heights of Island Ownership ($125 fees or more a month). It’s unclear if Basic Accounts are still allowed to file petitions for human-related problems – abuse, harassment, greifing, etc. One would hope that that’s all on a different system.

A popular move, going by the comments thread, but as ever, bear in mind that anyone who cares enough to comment, is probably also as a Premium Customer anyway. All very elitist, and despite being Premium myself, the whole thing irritates me on a very sociopolitcal level. Having grown up in the UK, with the National Health Service,  (free healthcare for all, regardless of means), the idea that Petitions and Support might not be free to all players, regardless of account status gets my goat somewhat. I wonder if Americans, or any other nation without state healthcare, sees it differently?

Is it right, or indeed, even possible to tell players they’re not to be helped with their bugs or other technical problems dealing with your world, purely because they’re on free trial? “Ah, I see from our records that you aren’t a Premium Account Member. Bye!” Is that more likely, or less likely to make them want to pay you anything? And anyway, in SL, Basic Accounts can still buy and spend Linden-Dollars, and the game has an worrying tendency to sometimes ‘dissapear’ parts of your inventory, totally destroying items (which have implied real-world value), usually necessitating GM intervention to get them rolled back into existence. They way I read it, if that happens to you and you’re not Premium, too bad for you. [Insert Nelson Laugh Here]

Mind you, any help is better than none at all, which seems to be the current system in place, with their ‘Live Help’ System having been out of action for some months now. At the moment, you can press F1 for the HTML-help browser window thingey, and that’s largely it. I’ve never tried to get hold of an actual person, so wouldn’t know where to begin getting assistance for a real problem though, and just do what I suspect most do in there; suck it up and grumble a lot. We of Second Life talk about broken features and hardware instability in the same way you of Earth talk about the weather…

Second Life continues to twist and writhe in an attempt to find a workable place  to live, between the Utopian Dreaming of Cyberspace, and the Pragmatic Efficiency of Business, making for quite fascinating viewing in a way, and these days, there really is no telling what kind of phantasms will emerge from their Official Blog next..