A Surprising Second Life for Second Life

I came across an interesting piece by Alice Bucknell recently about the curious longevity of Second Life, the virtual world that served as impetus for this blog.

Having returned to SL for an occasional round of naval wargaming from the Age of Sail, I think that the piece's title misleads. Second Life lacks the visual depth of modern video games, but the world hardly seems decaying. If anything, graphics quality has vastly improved and performance-based crashes on WiFi connections with a laptop seem rare, even for naval combat. Fifteen years ago, my students' avatars could barely move from one sim to another without crashing, and they were walking, not sailing a square-rigger. In 2014 I found a simple mainland driving trip impossible.

To hazard a guess, Linden Lab's integration of Mesh-based builds surely has helped with rendering and running the content on each sim. I understand the servers moved to Amazon's cloud long ago, which may explain a lack of what we used to call Black Wednesdays, when the entire grid would crash midweek with alarming regularity.

Why stay in such an old game...I mean virtual world? I think for many SLers it remains a community of long-time residents, Linden Lab's term for those who log on to their servers. More is at play in my case. Here the author nails why I love SL still, for "the platform’s refusal to submit to the always-be-optimizing logic of other MMOGs is precisely what grants Second Life its enduring appeal among a certain cohort of loyal users. Bucking larger trends of the gaming industry enabled the user experience to evolve in weirder ways....there is no boss to beat or competition to win, the vibe on Second Life is ambient."

Exactly. I don't go online to kill boss-monsters or level up, and the occasional glitchy build in Second Life landscape or gear simply does not bother me. I enjoy Eno's ambient music, too.

Minecraft boomed despite its Legoland look; it's the fun of building things and playing with them, rather than trying to recreate the real world's look and feel, that draws me still to SL's giant sandbox. As Bucknell notes, the virtual world does not always embrace the "heteronormative, linear, violent" tropes of video gaming, though she could find those tropes easily enough had she looked hard.

If there's one thing different now as compared to 2010, it's the emptiness of the Mainland where Iggy once had a parcel of land as a premium user. I gave up that status some time back, but I log in with a Pirate ALT for naval battles or with Iggy's pre-mesh laggy self, to walk or drive around the world. 

Instead of empty mainland, I took Iggy back to Svarga, as close to a National Park as you'll find in Second Life, for a flying tour on the back of a giant bee. The island is now run by Patch Linden, Senior VP of Product Operations for Linden Lab. His otherwise human avatar wears squirrel ears.

Some things do not change about the Lindens. That's a comfort.

I set graphics in Firestorm to "Ultra" and enjoyed the data-sucking view. When done, I hopped off my mount for a photo using Bryn Oh's "Virginia Alone" Sky.

I was, indeed, alone on Svarga, where Iggy spent his first Linden dollars to buy a pair of sunglasses. That was 2007? What amazes me most, beyond my failure to crash my client as I did regularly then, was that so many years have flown by but the world remains.

That's something special, likewise comforting, right there. 

Perhaps I should look about a little more at some old haunts.