Whilst the celebrations on SL10B draw to a close and in the few remaining days before the switch gets flipped on server-side rendering - changing forever the way in which avatars are served up in Second Life - I decided to revisit my roots in SL and take a few pictures of the places of my first few metaverse days. Of course, I didn't know back then how to take photographs in SL, so the experience itself went unrecorded. Luckily, the places themselves - or rather, copies of them - continue to exist, so I donned my SL10B celebratory t-shirt and cap (I can't quite yet bring myself to wear the special edition bear avatar, at least in public) and made for the very first place ever to rez on my screen - Orientation Island.
Linden's developed several 'First Hour' experiences since Orientation Island and all that exists of it now is the single 'public' copy. Back in 2006, there were loads of copies of the island, accessible only to brand new residents: once you left it, you could never go back. But they did create a public copy that you could visit if you were feeling wobbly once you'd passed the point of no return.
Sunday 30 June 2013
Sunday 23 June 2013
Absent addiction
It's SL's tenth birthday today. And here's the final part of my 'Absent' series.
Absent
addiction
In
AFK I wrote about a character who was – by her own admission – addicted to
Second Life. She spent as much time
inworld as she possibly could; she even slept logged in so that the dingding of
any IMs coming to her during the night would wake her up.
I
can’t say that I’ve ever been that
addicted to SL, but for sure there was a long period – of several years – when
any day without at least some metaverse time felt hopelessly incomplete. I’d even go so far as to say that I regarded
SL time during these years as the period during which I could be most true to
myself as I felt myself to be in my non-working hours. SL was where I existed, socially. To a certain extent, I had good reasons for
that.
Monday 17 June 2013
Living in your gender, in SL
Here's my June column for AVENUE magazine.
A professional acquaintance of mine in RL recently transitioned from male to female identity. Involved as I have been only on the very periphery, this and a similar occurrence several years ago have both been very interesting events to reflect on. I am lucky to work in a tolerant, progressive organisation that prides itself on its self-perceived inclusivity. Hypothetical principles are all well and good when it comes to anti-discriminatory employment policy; when a concept stops becoming abstract and gets real, however, we discover all sorts of fine detail to conflict with our deeper, our less intellectual modes of being.
A professional acquaintance of mine in RL recently transitioned from male to female identity. Involved as I have been only on the very periphery, this and a similar occurrence several years ago have both been very interesting events to reflect on. I am lucky to work in a tolerant, progressive organisation that prides itself on its self-perceived inclusivity. Hypothetical principles are all well and good when it comes to anti-discriminatory employment policy; when a concept stops becoming abstract and gets real, however, we discover all sorts of fine detail to conflict with our deeper, our less intellectual modes of being.
For example, an issue arose in the earlier of these two cases
regarding use of the female toilets. A number of female employees who were okay
in principle with the idea of – as they saw it – a man dressed as a woman doing
office duties, voiced anger at this person being allowed to use their
conveniences. What this illustrates is that ‘tolerance’ only goes so far when
it comes to how people actually relate to someone going through a change in their
identity. Interestingly, a recently-built high school near where I live did
away with girls only, boys only, women only and men only toilets, opting
instead for single toilet facilities with wide open entrances and cubicles with
doors from ground to ceiling: a few people were similarly uncomfortable with
this idea at first, but the end result of it is that toilet bullying – a long-standing
problem in British schools – has been all but eradicated there. This new
approach to gender division (or rather, lack of) has been accepted, ultimately,
because people empathise with the idea of being bullied in out-of-sight,
isolated places. We can adapt to significant changes when we are sufficiently
motivated and when we are sufficiently personally connected to their rationale
that they make sense.
About twenty years ago, my mother told me about a person in
their early twenties who sat next to her on the train to work each morning.
Having made the transition from male to female identity, this young woman
wanted to talk to her about ‘women stuff’ like clothes and hair and make-up and
shoes. A lot of her questions seemed at first to my mother to have a sort of
clichéd superficiality about them – they were almost child-like in their complexity;
the sort of questions, perhaps, a young girl might ask her mother. Although she
‘played along’ with the conversations, a part of her doubted the sincerity of
the context. It felt incongruous. This was not, after all, a young person with
learning difficulties. When we discussed this further, however, we realised
that a recently transitioned female who’d spent most of her life being
socialised as male would have few common points of cultural reference with
women. Put simply, she’d had little experience of talking to women as a woman
and needed a non-threatening, non-judgemental role model with whom she could
learn some of these female socialisation ‘basics’ that life’s conditioning so
far had denied her.
Perhaps more importantly, she also just needed to have
conversations with someone where she was spoken to as a female – and what
better way to do this than through female topics of conversation? In thinking
now about the issue of the colleague using the female toilets, I’m struck by
how essential to acceptance female ritual must be to someone recently
transitioned to female (or how essential male ritual must be to someone
recently transitioned to male). The complainants might have defended their
proposed restrictions to toilets access (none were ultimately made, thankfully)
as some sort of limitation that ensured one person’s ‘preferences’ didn’t
impose on others, not realising the fundamental importance of such ritual and
not sensing that this issue of identity begins way deeper than the surface
layer of clothing and hair style and make-up.
But perhaps most important of all is how this case
demonstrates that the supposedly ‘tolerant’ co-workers revealed through this
complaint that they weren’t really thinking of this person as a female at all,
but as a male, and thereby ultimately denying her her need to be spoken to as a
woman for the sake of her own developing identity. To what extent is our
identity influenced by that which others project upon us? Quite a bit, if you
consider such theories as Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s hugely influential
‘Social Identity Theory’ as valid.
But even if you try harder than these women did to
empathise, it’s still not easy to think about a person of one biology as the
opposite gender when you’re face-to-face in conversation with them,
particularly if you knew him or her before they started their transition.
Ultimately, it’s the presence and absence of a hundred tiny little details
which create the sense of incongruity we feel, much as we don’t want to feel
it, far less acknowledge it. We do our very best to take manual control and
override all these automatic associations, but we have a lifetime of
conditioning to overcome in those moments. The end result can often be that we
come away worrying we haven’t been natural with our friend or colleague and
that they might have sensed our subtle disorientation – and we might be right. To
a certain extent, there’s not a great deal that can be done about this in the
short term other than maintain our very best efforts to think of transitioned or
transitioning friends as belonging to their chosen gender: eventually, the
societal associations concerning gender will weaken and become rewritten, and perhaps
future generations will consider our mental inflexibility absurd.
In the meantime, though, where can transgender people
experience being treated and spoken to as – or, perhaps more importantly, thought of as belonging to – their
chosen gender? Where can they explore their identity unencumbered by the
baggage of others who are at worst overtly prejudiced and discriminatory and at
best struggling to overcome their own institutionalised conditioning? The
Internet in its widest sense has, to some extent, provided this medium for some
time now: there was internet chat before the web and social networking now
allows us to build whatever personal profile we desire. The metaverse, however,
takes this to a whole new level of interaction. Second Life® allows the
anonymity that other forms of internet interaction provide, but it also allows
us to adopt the visual appearance of our chosen gender and to exist in three
dimensional spaces with others. As an opportunity to experience being treated
by others in a chosen gender role on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis, it
must be without historical precedent. Yes, it’s a reduced sensory environment
and communicating in text is not the same as spoken interaction, but it is at
least an equal playing field with everyone else.
Concealment of biological gender does, of course, carry with
it the uncomfortable issue of deception. If a transgender person exploring a
female identity chooses not to make known her male biology inworld in order to
experience properly being regarded as female, is she then guilty of deceiving
what could potentially become very important friends in her life? Even though
SL’s terms and conditions are clear that no person is under any obligation to
reveal their RL gender and that telling others the RL details of a resident –
including their gender – is a serious breach, the perception continues that
knowing such fundamental information about someone is some sort of human right.
What we need to understand is that a transgender person is not ‘pretending’ to
be the gender they adopt. They have always felt themselves to be this way, but
that is not to say that they have had experience in living it. All too often,
SL gets spoken of in the same breath as comments on sexual behaviour, with
concealment of identity assumed to mean some sort of sexual misdemeanour; one
of its most praiseworthy qualities, however, has to be the opportunity it gives
people to just be in whatever way it
is they want to be: through going shopping together, through irreverent chat,
through looking at art together, through whatever.
And if a close SL friend should choose to reveal that they
are transgender, we should look upon this as nothing less than a gift. For us,
also, this is an opportunity. Those two hundred tiny details won’t be anything
like as apparent in metaverse interaction as they are in RL and our own sense
of incongruity will be greatly reduced. As it does in so many other ways, SL helps
us to experience something abstract as something plain and ordinary; the
absence of detail allows us to see through that which might normally distract and
to connect at that level where we are all of us just everyday people.
Perhaps it and the virtual worlds which will follow might
even speed up in RL the weakening of our socially programmed associations. I,
for one, won’t miss them.
Thursday 13 June 2013
Absent products
In part five of my 'Absent' series, I discard some obsolete products.
Mega prims
Oh how I cheered when the switch got flipped removing the
ten metre limit on prim length (I think it was at about the same time that mesh
got introduced). I didn’t immediately
optimise my skybox, but when I did I managed in the space of about an hour to
reduce the prim count for the building shell by almost fifty per cent. More to the point, I was able to ditch every
last mega prim I’d used in my previous optimisation. If I could have, I’d have lit a fucking great
big fire and burned the lot of them in celebration.
Mega prims were a necessary evil if you wanted to build
anything bigger than a garden shed and not have it suck dry the measly 117 prim
allowance on your 512m plot. Imagine a
shoe box with the lid taped on and one of the long sides cut out and you pretty
much have the shape of my skybox. It
measures now 32m by 16m and is 10m high.
To do this in old, ten metre restricted prims would cost a staggering
twenty prims; today, it can be done in two. Of course, to reduce this number, I originally
built the skybox as 30m by 15m but that still cost me sixteen prims – and
that’s before I got to the windows, let alone the furnishings. With mega prims, I managed to reduce the
sixteen to a very respectable five. But
not without pain.
I don’t understand how mega prims were made: through some
sort of black SL art, I suspect, that involved naked dancing and incantations. Or possibly a viewer bug which talented
residents exploited for the brief period that it existed (you decide which is
most appealing). The thing with mega
prims was that they only came in certain dimensions – dimensions which you
couldn’t adjust (because the moment you attempted to do so they snapped
instantly back to the ten metre limit) and dimensions which very rarely
coincided with the actual size of prim that you wanted. You only realised this, of course, after
you’d trawled through the eye-bleedingly long list of mega prims in your
inventory – twice, because you just couldn’t bring yourself to accept that your
perfectly reasonable dimension needs could not be met. Even the builder’s HUD I later obtained ended
up making me want to stab myself: although it conveniently took size requests from
the command line and searched for something that matched, it didn’t realise
that a 15m x 30m x 0.5m prim was functionally the same as a 30m x 15m x 0.5m
prim, making every ultimately unsuccessful search six commands long and a
headache in trying to make sure you’d exhausted all the X, Y and Z combinations. I’m an ungrateful bastard, I know; mega prims
ultimately saved me a great deal of land impact prior to the ten metre limit
removal, but Christ they were a pain.
Of course, mega prims are still around today: the ten
metre limit might have been removed, but a sixty-four metre limit was then imposed
and mega prims exist at sizes up to sixty-four thousand metres (that’s 256 whole sims lined up next to each other). Thankfully, since it’s unlikely I’ll ever be
able to afford a land parcel that exceeds 64m in any direction, using these
things again is a horror I will never have to contemplate.
Flexi Jackets
In much the same way that I kind of like the way 1980s programmers
became increasingly ingenious at getting more and more from the old eight bit
computers, I have a certain affection for the ways in which clothes designers
overcame the limitations of the old ‘painted-on’ shirts and jackets prior to the
introduction of mesh. As mesh continues
its apparel assault, I imagine there must be designers now lamenting that their
once clever tricks for adding hoods and collars and cuffs and rolled up sleeves
and all manner of other bits in some way embellishing an avatar’s upper body (a
single jacket could have 30+ prims in its folder) will soon become about as relevant
as Ray Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion modelling techniques are in the
digital effects era. Unless they sell in
InWorldz, of course…
Well, their day isn’t over just yet. Lots of this clothing still gets worn today because
the best of it still looks pretty good. I
have a tuxedo, bought years ago from Blaze, that continues to look perfectly respectable. Amazingly, this doesn’t even use that little
prim flap to be found at the bottom of so many men’s jackets of what I propose
become known now as the paint-prim hybrid (PPH) era. The only prim garnish to be found on it
anywhere is a little sculptie bow tie.
Awww.
Any jacket that employs those strips of flexi-prims in
order to give them a ‘loose’ feel, however, may now become extinct. Seriously; I really hope I never see another
of these again. Similarly, any jacket
with one of those wrap-around cone-shaped prims to give it a wide flare at the
bottom has my permission to die. It looked
great in the static picture you clicked on to buy it; as soon as you tried to
move, however, it looked like you were wearing some sort of portable iron lung.
Nobody especially likes deleting inventory, so dump all
of this stuff in a special ‘retro’ folder and intend to wear it again for
laughs at the 2023 SL reunion. Of
course, by then we’ll all be wearing the rigged mesh version of ‘Ruth’ and
commenting on how perfect the emulation is.
Ah, the irony.
Sunday 9 June 2013
Absent ideas
In part four of my 'Absent' series, I remember some SL ideas.
Business
Business
When I joined SL, there was one big thing that it was
renowned for and two that it wanted to be renowned for. The one big thing it was renowned for was
sex, which Linden ended up moving onto its own continent and adult sims,
causing huge controversy amongst residents at the time. For example, enormous helicopters came to
airlift entire adult clubs across the sea – some still with dancers in them –
resulting in three venues being lost at the bottom of the ocean in a series of “unrelated”
in-flight accidents. Actually, it wasn’t
that controversial, but you’d have been forgiven for thinking so at the time.
The first of the two things it wanted to be renowned for
was business, by which I mean RL companies establishing an SL presence. I’m still not entirely certain how it was
that Linden actually visualised the manifestation of this idea. What exactly was there that a car company,
for example, could achieve in the metaverse?
Were they expected to bring products to the SL market such as officially
licensed versions of their RL creations?
Were they expected to promote their RL business through inworld sales
reps and SL freebies? I’m fairly certain
I must still have an old Mazda hatchback in my inventory from this period;
thinking of it now brings back a fuzzy memory of a gleaming showroom in a
pristine sim – spoiled only by newbies zooming and bumping around in their free
Mazdas. I might be wrong, but I think it
possible that a constant stream of simulated fatal road accidents just outside
the store wasn’t quite the image the company had been hoping for in the
metaverse. It might not have been Mazda,
by the way – there were quite a few car companies in SL back then.
Then again, the very same question – what were they
expecting? – could probably have been asked of the web back in the days of its
early expansion prior to the dotcom boom.
Companies practically fell over each other back then to throw themselves
onto that bandwagon, with little actual strategy as to what they were going to
do on the web once they got there. Much
the same could be said today for the continuing stampede of businesses to
Facebook and Twitter. Does anyone
actually follow these organisations for reasons other than a Like getting you
some sort of discount voucher or extra levels in Angry Birds? Is there anything other than simple raw
exposure to be gained from establishing your business there?
I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that simple raw
exposure was about the only bit of the SL business boom that was actually
worked out. In came organisations like
Vodafone, Sony, Mazda, Renault, Mercedes, Coca Cola, the BBC and Calvin Klein,
lured by Linden’s seductive talk of SL as the ‘3D Internet’. The rhetoric was all about developing new
ways of “interacting and developing our relationship with our customers”, but
really this was just another stampede of organisations wanting to be part of
the Next Big Internet Thing. The details
of what they were actually going to do could be worked out once they’d opened
their nice shiny building with their logo on the front: basically, a website
made 3D.
But Second Life didn’t become the Next Big Internet
Thing; once that was obvious, all the businesses left.
Education
The second of the two things SL wanted to be renowned for
was education. There was a lot of talk
about this back in 2007, with a number of universities signing up and
establishing virtual presences, encouraged in part by the reduced tier Linden
was offering at the time for educational organisations. I’m not unduly bothered by the departure of
business, because I see that only as a consequence of SL’s mainstream
popularity: if SL were to become big one day, the businesses would return in the
snapping of a finger; no-one’s really the worse off for their absence and it’s
not like they attract new people to the metaverse. But the failure to establish SL as a worthwhile
platform for learning is an enormous shame.
Unlike business, it’s not
hard at all to imagine how education could work in the metaverse. In the real world, training sessions are
hampered by two key logistical and financial factors: venue and travel. For sure it’s a swings and roundabouts
situation: no-one would deny the benefit of being in the physical presence of a
skilled trainer for a teaching session, but if that trainer happened to live on
a different continent to you and attending a session run by him or her in
Second Life would cost you $50 instead of the $1000 you simply couldn’t afford
on travel and accommodation, wouldn’t that be an acceptable compromise?
Obviously, SL isn’t the only
way in which online education can be achieved.
There’s a staggering number of educational videos to be found on YouTube
these days, from filmed speeches to custom made animations: many of these are
excellent and I think it would be true to say that the earnest learner has
never had it quite so good. But teaching
has always held interaction close to its heart and this is the unique selling
point that SL has – had – to offer online education. When you’re in a class you get the
opportunity to ask questions. The
teacher gets to gauge from your questions your understanding and can modify his
or her strategy. As an RL trainer myself
from time to time, I often find myself branching off – pulling up completely
different slides from those I’d originally intended to talk to – because a
question from an attendee reveals something I need to explain better.
And learning, let’s not
forget, is a social experience. The
conversations we have with our fellow learners help us to make sense of the
material we’re hearing. No YouTube video
gives you the opportunity to whisper in the ear of classmates who are hearing
the exact same thing as you are at the exact same moment.
Second Life is now marketed
by Linden as a ‘shared, creative space’.
In one respect, that’s fine: I’m certainly not going to undermine the
value of creativity. But most of the
education institutions have gone now: it’s an opportunity missed and a lesson
not learned.
Saturday 8 June 2013
Absent places
In part three of my 'Absent' series, I remember some SL places.
The Greenies home
The Greenies home
Stepping into the Greenies home six years ago was like
stepping into an entirely new metaverse, one where everything basically didn’t
look like printed out pictures stuck to the sides of variously shaped cardboard
cereal boxes. Next to today’s mesh
buildings and objects, I will grudgingly admit that this wonderful sim of a
giant 1950s lounge-kitchen overrun by miniature Little Green Men probably
wouldn’t look quite so stunning as it did back then, but it would still measure
up pretty well. This was pre-mesh, pre-sculpty technology; knowing what I
know now about building today, there are still things about that place that I
can’t work out. How, for example, did
they line up all those prims without the joins being visible? Even in firestorm now, with its extra decimal
points for X, Y and Z location, this is still an operation that ends up making
me want to punch myself repeatedly in the face.
And the texturing – oh, the texturing.
How did they do that Coca Cola flowing out of the tipped-over
bottle? How?
If you never visited the Greenies sim, you have missed
out on a treat. Starting under the
floorboards and emerging from a mouse hole (later, the starting point was moved
to one of the kitchen cupboards), your mission, as such, was to locate all the
little green aliens in their various humorous locations around this scaled up
house – which, in its 1950s decoration, was the very embodiment of the science
fiction B-movie. You found them dizzy on
the turntable, you found them in the kitchen drawer and driving a remote
control car and down the back of a picture frame. You found one sitting on a vibrator. Enjoying it.
The detail was staggering; the build quality exquisite. The atmosphere (in particular, the repeating
black and white sci-fi clip on the TV if you had stream turned on) was
extraordinary. The Greenies was a
glimpse of the graphical future potential of the metaverse, one which we are
now becoming acquainted with through mesh – and already starting to take for
granted.
Sawtooth
I’ve lived in a skybox over the same spot of mainland now
for nearly six years. For most people
living in such circumstances, the flow of neighbours in and out of your region
is fairly constant, as it was for me for the first six months or so. And then a lady called Lorene moved in and
bought up what she could (nearly half of the sim) and turned it into Sawtooth
Mountain Resort.
Sawtooth was a peaceful community of rented log cabins,
with space allocated also for communal areas: a camp fire, a paddock with
grazing horses, a small river, a greenhouse, a church and a pond. I was happy for my own land at ground level
to be a part of this as an open space, since I’m not keen on living on the
soil; my concrete brutalist building would have looked quite out of place down
there and it was perfectly happy floating at 200 metres on its atomic motors
(you do realise that’s how skyboxes float, right?).
I got on with Lorene, but a year or so after she’d
established Sawtooth, she decided SL was not for her and moved on. Perhaps she wanted to leave a return open to
her, however, because she left Sawtooth in its entirely. For something like three years, the resort
remained untouched, the cabins completely unoccupied. I used to drop down from time to time for a
peaceful wander in what became over time in my head my secret personal
relaxation zone.
Compared to modern mesh builds, there was nothing
especially remarkable about the constructions in Sawtooth, but taken as a
whole, the resort had a tranquil cohesiveness about it. Lorene eventually realised she wasn’t coming
back and, about a year or so ago, she got rid of the land. I’m back to the flow of neighbours in and
out, now, but I’ll always remember Sawtooth as something special.
Wednesday 5 June 2013
Absent activities
In part two of my 'Absent' series, I turn my attention to some of the things I used to do in SL.
Camping
I don’t really miss camping. I miss the excitement of camping, although camping, of course, was never in
any way exciting. To this day, I still
can’t quite believe I actually did it; I still can’t believe I voluntarily
stood around doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time in return for three
measly Lindens an hour, thrown at my shoeless feet with contempt by whatever
management it was that was hoping my mere presence in the vicinity of his or
her establishment would bring people with actual money and a desire to spend
it. If camping wasn’t bad enough, there
was also queuing for camping: a wait of additional nothingness for a camping
spot to become vacant, only this time you got paid nothing. And then there was
the wait to get into a sim with good camping spots, because the sim itself was
full to capacity from people a) camping and b) waiting to be camping. Nobody ever even spoke to each other whilst
they were camping because they were so full of self-loathing at having sunk
this low any exposure of personality just made the loss of dignity worse. You came, you sat, you kept your mouth shut
and you avoided looking anyone in the eye.
What was exciting about camping was the thing you wanted
to buy with the money you got from it. This
was your First Big Second Life purchase.
You’d done the rounds on the freebie shops, flirted with trying to
create a more interesting body shape by manually tweaking the slider bars and
experimented with different colours on the lump of plasticine on your head
which Linden so optimistically referred to as ‘hair’. Slowly, but surely, the realisation had
dawned on you that your avatar looked shit.
Slowly, but surely, you started to covet the costing-money things which
would make it look better. I estimate
that the average newbie back then spent no more than a fortnight doing camping,
because by then the desire for costing-money things had overwhelmed the ability
to delay gratification any longer (as delays go, earning money though camping
was a pretty fucking long one). Out went
the policy on not spending any real money on SL and in came the Lindens,
freshly minted from the LindeX. Camping
was exciting because it was one of the things that represented our transition
from ‘I find SL interesting’ to ‘I find SL absorbing’. Camping was when we got hooked.
Exploring
In the early days of my SL, exploring meant walking along
a road and seeing where it took me. An
inventory devoid of landmarks and a friends list empty of, well, people, it was
pretty much the only strategy I had available to me. Through this approach I discovered my first
SL art gallery and had there my first SL conversation with another avatar. There was a sense, back then, of SL unfolding
around me and that I was in control of the pace at which it unfolded. I could explore one sim of an evening; I
could explore two or three or four: it was up to me.
It wasn’t that I was unaware of other distant places, nor
that I was totally ignorant on how to get to them. Back then, before both adult venues and their
advertisements were moved to their own continent, the newbie avatar had virtual
billboards declaring pleasure beyond their hedonistic dreams practically crammed
down their throats the moment they took a step outside of whatever info hub it
was they’d been sent to. I was indeed
curious about ‘cybersex’ as a newbie (chiefly because I thought it sounded
ridiculous), but I wanted to discover such places by myself. The idea of hopping about the grid, from one
random point to another, made SL seem less like a world – less like one big
place – and more like a collection of 3D websites. I wanted it to be a world.
All of which begs the question, why do I no longer
explore SL in this way? In part, I
suppose it’s because most of the really interesting stuff for me tends to be on
private sims disconnected from the mainland; now that my concept of SL as a
world is established, it doesn’t really need protecting any more. But I suspect the main reason is pure
laziness. I’ve established my places and
my people. I’ve grown my avatar
identity. Whilst I do from time to time still
do new stuff, I’m generally ‘settled’ in my SL ways. Is this a good thing? Probably, it’s not.
Performing
I made a ‘stand’ of sorts about 18 months ago. A newcomer to the poetry events I was
attending had various racial hate statements in her profile. She was a perfectly nice person to talk to in
chat before you realised what she had listed in her profile; she certainly never
in my company brought any of these views into conversation. A friend of mine then discovered these
profile picks and stopped attending any events this avatar was present at. She dismissed event hosts’ views that banning
avatars with hate speech in their picks was a restriction of their freedom of
speech.
By coincidence, I attended in RL a couple of days later a
talk given by a black UK celebrity about her life in the 60s in Britain. Her family was one that had moved to the UK
in response to the drive back then to recruit migrant workers, and they arrived
only to be discriminated against in virtually every aspect of their lives. She would go into a shop, for example, and
the shopkeeper would refuse to acknowledge her, far less serve her. I felt ashamed at my willingness to find a
reason to ignore this person’s hate speech.
I decided that my friend was right, that if we’re agreed
that hate speech should not be tolerated – and it’s not like there’s much legal
doubt over that – then profile text should be treated alongside public chat. If I perform in front of an audience knowing
that one or more people there are displaying hate speech in their profiles like
little placards they've sneaked in with them (and, let’s be clear here, I’m not
talking about statements such as ‘Immigration to the UK is a problem’, I’m
talking about statements such as ‘UK SHOULD BE WHITES ONLY’) then I’m passively
endorsing such comments. A very easy way
to not do this is simply to withdraw my performance. Which is what I did.
And I've hardly performed since. And I miss it.
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Absent friends
To coincide with Second Life’s tenth birthday, I thought
I’d put down a few reflections on my own SL, focusing on some of the things that
are no longer present. I’m going to start
with friends.
Dizi
‘You never forget your first friend in Second Life’ is a phrase I’ve heard used exactly
zero times in SL, but I’m willing to bet that if I dropped it in to an
appropriately philosophical conversation I’d receive nods of earnest agreement
from all my fellow participants. Dizi
was my first SL friend and I couldn’t have asked, paid or emotionally
blackmailed for anyone better. With a
fine knack for intelligent, irreverent banter, a quick grasp for the
technicalities of the metaverse and a wonderfully clear way of explaining
things, Dizi was exactly the right catalyst for turning my vague meanderings in
the virtual world into something with some sort of purpose. She taught me how to build, she taught me how
to emote and – perhaps most importantly of all – she taught me the pleasure of
a tango at Bogart’s. She also bought me
my first pair of decent shoes, which might be an odd thing to list in any context,
but I mention it here because it illustrates so perfectly her nurturing manner,
not to mention her eye for the aesthetically pleasing (especially when it came
to shoes).
Dizi eventually moved on from SL and I miss her
enormously, but we still keep in touch from time to time via email. I’m lucky to have known her during her time
inworld and I count hers amongst the most important friendships I have ever
formed.
medi
medi was introduced to me by Dizi and I can honestly say
that I’ve never met a more actually laugh-out-loud person in SL. This incredibly intelligent and literate
woman adopted a porcelain doll as her avatar and dressed it up in all manner of
outrageous outfits – blue and white gingham being a particular favourite
design. Her condemnations were hilarious. Her insights were profound. I will never forget a conversation we once had
where she told me she can’t avoid in RL looking at how light falls on objects;
I can’t forget it chiefly for the reason that I have never looked at light in
quite the same way since.
medi was ardently against sharing any sort of RL details,
taking the view that this tarnished the illusion created by SL. Voice communication in particular was absolutely
out of the question. It wasn’t that we
used this in our trio anyway, but when I did one of my first ever readings in
SL she turned up (to show support) but refused to turn her speakers on, saying
that hearing my RL voice would ruin the voice she had allocated to me in her
head.
medi announced one day that she was leaving SL and that
was the last that either I or Dizi saw or heard of her. She didn’t leave in anger or sadness, and I
rather suspect that she left her announcement until the last minute in order to
avoid any drawn-out goodbyes. Much as I
miss her, I can’t help but grudgingly admire the way she managed this
exit. But then, medi was magnificent in
every way.
Nancy
Nancy was my first reader. We met in rather embarrassing
circumstances. At a dance club, I was
browsing her profile and saw an entry in her picks for an SL comedy club. Fascinated by this idea, I immediately
clicked on the teleport button only to discover that the club didn’t yet
actually exist and she’d created the pick in her own house. In and of itself, turning up unannounced in
someone’s house isn’t a total toe-curler on the embarrassment scale, however
what I’d failed to notice whilst reading her profile was that Nancy had left
the club before me and was partway through an outfit change in the moment that
I materialised in her bedroom.
Nancy, however, was a wonderfully friendly and laid back
person, and a moment’s worth of awkwardness soon dissolved completely once we
got chatting – the subject of which quickly became the Second Life novel I was
halfway through writing at the time.
Perhaps because of my memorable entrance, she read AFK the moment it was
finished and became the first person to give me positive feedback.
I wish now I’d spent more time with this kind, gentle,
lovely person. Nancy and I would occasionally
IM each other and chat, and after a while she started coming to the Blue Angel
Poets’ Dive on Sunday evenings for the open mic poetry sessions I regularly
attended back then. It was on one of
these Sundays that she told me she was going to be away from SL for a while for
health reasons. It never occurred to me
that these would be the last words we would exchange, and Nancy died just a
couple of months later.