Camping Crackdowns: Is Linden Lab Being Unfair?

Mary (not her real name) feels picked on. Her mall and club would have been typical in an earlier era of SL, when mainland sims often hosted businesses that encouraged camping. Often enough campers and regular visitors piled in to make the region fill up, and other SL residents could not get in.

This got Mary in trouble. When a neighbor complained about the lag and the filling of the region, Linden Lab came in like a SWAT team.

"They left me the camp master and 6 camping chairs, Then returned 12 dance pads, 4 beach towels to my lost and found folder before they disabled my account," Mary told me in an e-mail. "My staff told me they shut the Sim down to do this."

While she got off relatively lightly--a one-day suspension--she claims that she also did not first receive a "Warning, followed by Suspension," something Linden Lab notes in its Community Standards (see "Disturbing the Peace"). She got the warning and suspension all in one notice.

Here's the note she got:

Disturbing the Peace - Camping Chairs Linden Lab desires that the Residents of Second Life share all simulator resources fairly. It has been determined that your use of objects generally referred to as camping chairs is either adversely affecting region performance or preventing access to the region which is a violation of the Disturbing the Peace portion of the Terms of Service. Your camping chairs have therefore been returned to your inventory.

While some sim-owners park a pile of zombie-avatars near their business to put dots on the map and attract traffic, Mary's club does not use this approach to bring in visitors. She has a pole-dance/escort service that brings in adult-themed business. She also needs customers to buy goods at the shops, and she's tried a number of strategies:

I been trying to encourage people to come buy what I sell or rent a shop in my mall, also have advertising displays too, have to keep the traffic numbers up to get shop renters. One thing I have been putting in is Lucky Money Chairs, and traffic seems to be a little better since I put that in. My traffic was around 35000 or so, but now its down to around 22000. So in effect when they did this, it caused my traffic rating to drop.

Linden Lab hurt Mary's employees by returning not only camping devices for visitors but also dance-poles that pay Mary's staff a few Lindens each hour, while they dance and flirt with club-goers. Mary plans another system to pay her staff now.

I expect a few snarky comments about "a crisis in a strip club," but a business is a business.

Losing access to her account means real problems for this owner. She adds, "I have thousands of dollars (Real $) in the inventory of my account and I don't want to lose that."

The camping probably attracted too many zombie-avatars, who converge on places with open chairs, beach-towels, and dance-pads. They stay around, afk, when their camping spot maxes out and another camper takes their place. Thus a sim fills up quickly. It's not uncommon to see campers who are afk piled up like cord-wood on a camping bench (as in the pic above).

There is no perfect solution to the camping issue. Most SL residents who comment on blogs about camping hate the practice; at New World Notes and The Alphaville Herald, readers regularly call on the Lindens to ban the practice.

Perhaps Linden Lab is being preemptive, and heavy-handed, with owners like Mary in order to warn the community. With only 100,000 or so regular SL users, we are a small town with a great telecom network...and a better gossip network. So rumors and news travel fast.

What CAN be done about camping? Even at camping sites like HippiePay, that transitioned to a bot-resistant system based on IP addresses, other troubles followed. HippiePay, Welfare Island, the The Pharm--all popular sites with their own islands--closed in the past six months when they began to lose money.

Campers--noobs, bots, and others--are being pushed into fewer and fewer locations. I expect many more stories are out there like Mary's. Until Linden Lab comes up with a better system for search and classified ads, what the company decides to do about camping will have a large impact on business owners who use it to drive traffic.

Qwaq and the Suits: Should Linden Lab Worry?

Location: Qwaq Web Site

I feel a long way from Buddy's live music and Olivia's Art Garden. I'm in the dreaded Land of the Suits, a culture I fled for academia decades back. But these suits are not the ones I knew; they are using virtual worlds: They are the Suits from Gibson's fiction.

Though Qwaq's solution for project management has been around for some time, it offers a few features that may pose problems for Second Life.

Isolation from SL Weirdos (like me): In SL IBM and apparently other corporations are using a "behind the firewall" solution, running their own part of the Metaverse walled off from the rest of us. This has the important benefit of keeping data and conversations private in those regions, so competitors, griefers, and nosy journalists cannot snoop. Yet employees can leave the "walled garden" to explore a wider world.

Qwaq takes it one step further. I'm reminded of a few lines from Neuromancer, when Case finally regains the ability to jack into the Matrix again:

Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

We may see such a constellation of unreachable systems in the distance soon, as we grubby "ordinary" folks bumble about in virtual worlds that are locked out from corporate and government invented realities. Read the April 2008 article on IBM's work in Virtual World News for more detail, but essentially its boils down to how "the private sections will be blocked off from regular Second Life users, though IBM employees will be able to transition between locations without exiting Second Life."

Qwaq, unlike the IBM solution, offers no connections to other virtual worlds. It's a meeting space, perhaps a virtual operations center or factory, floating alone and untethered in cyberspace. Why should Linden Lab worry?

Document Sharing: After spending some at Qwaq's site, I found that inside one may: "Share common document formats such as Adobe® PDF and Microsoft® Office, as well as traditional and Web-based enterprise applications."

In a recent SL Education Roundtable, we discussed what features would make for a "killer app" inside (or in an alternative to) SL. My claim was that document sharing would be key to using SL for "immersive" learning that seems as natural as passing a physical document from one hand to another. It is a game-changer. To cite another cyberpunk classic, Stephenson's Snow Crash, such document-share does not "break the metaphor" of a place we want to seem as natural as possible.

"Business Friendly" Avatars: To quote from CIO's review of Qwaq, "This vendor takes virtual-world meetings beyond cartoonish avatars sitting at a table." Ouch. That's a barb aimed right as SL. The very creativity that many SLers embrace is incredibly put-offish to the senior people in business and academia. And they hold the purse-strings. Unless you are a scientist from M.I.T., these buttoned-down folks are not so likely to fund your project if your avatar is a gorilla or robot or tragic vampire.

And as cool as the Web-based MetaPlace is, it is deliberately cartoonish, showing another divergent direction for virtual worlds. Thus Qwaq fills a niche that some companies want. Nowhere I'd work...but somebody's gotta do it.

I stumbled upon "ROI in Virtual Worlds - Anatomy of an Avatar" by Caleb Booker. I think I'll have my students read this in the fall. I highly recommend it for understanding the business challenges that "dressing up" poses for different virtual worlds.

An Easy-to-Use Client: Here SL could be in trouble. Qwaq also promises an intuitive interface that can be set up in minutes, not hours. That would prove to be a clear advantage. My students, not slouches with technology, struggle every semester with the SL client.

Conclusion: Wait and See

Are the benefits of Qwaq--more-than-a-firewall security, document sharing, "serious" avatars, and an intuitive interface--enough? SL offers the latter with the IBM approach (I have heard of dress codes at company meetings), and document-sharing is, we were promised, a feature Linden Lab will implement.

I began my blog thinking that Qwaq would lay IBM's efforts low. Now I'm not so sure.

For the stodgiest firms, association with a culture like SL's might not appear prudent. Better to have carefully vetted avatars in a space completely walled off, so they can share work and meet cybernetically instead of traveling long distances. That makes a lot of sense in a time of Hobbesian conditions on airlines and in the larger economy. At the same time, these firms miss the creative synergy (and potential customers) of the larger SL economy. For IBM, that lies--splendor and squalor alike--right outside the firewall.



Big Blue: put a Suit into a gorilla suit, and he'd fit right in.

Best Old Blues I Ever Done Had: Buddy's in Second Life

Location: Buddy's Club, Skyes Stand

My old friend Twyla Tomorrow, former manager of HippiePay, IMed me seconds after I logged on.

"Wanna see something?"

I'm game, because Twyla is usually busy. It had to be important. And it was. We met by the stage at Buddy's, a club run by Limerick Ireland native Derric Foggarty.

That night, SL singer/songwriter Von Johin was on stage, and I was floored. This is the sort of blues I pay a LOT to hear live in the world of matter, and there I was, dancing like a madman (the only way to dance) with Twyla right by the stage.

This is a shout-out to Derric and a call to you all to visit more live-music venues in both lives. These musicians will go silent if we don't support them.

For a full list of events at Buddy's, hop over to their blog at Blogspot.

New Show at Olivia's Art Garden

Location: Commerce Sim, Olivia's Art Garden Opening
I'm continually impressed by what I see in the SL artistic community. Sure, we can recreate venues and modes of expression possible in the world of matter, but in SL we can do even more.

Feathers Boa, for instance, creates "fully immersive pieces, interactive digital 'paintings,' giant robots, aesthetically innovative avatars, and full architectural builds." It is amusing to have a painting of a clockwork robot reach out for you as your stroll by.

I'll be back to see more; the exhibit grabbed me in many ways. There's also a feature piece on Boa's artwork in ROLE Magazine.

Kalle Contepomi's "World Downfall 4in frame" and "World downfall 10in frame" impressed me, because I consider post-apocalyptic art one of the most vital forms of expression for our times.

Conempomi juxtaposes images of wreckage with, in "10in frame," an avatar dressed in a festive dress with glowing white go-go boots, It's as if she's just come from a party to find herself at the world's ending.

We need doomsday rubbed in our party-goer faces, because every day our tailpipes, power-plants, car-based civilization, and outsized consumption make the day of reckoning that much closer. But it's hard to wallow in such musings. Maybe such art will spur action, not despair.

This artist's work is not all about the end-times; his "The House" looks like something Wyeth might do on acid...I was actually chilled by the clever composition of this piece.

After Conempomi, I needed a bit of respite, and Olivia's own photographs of natural settings, as well as Lolly Dovgal's black and white photographs brought me back to a modicum of comfort.



Olivia has an eye for old cars, too. I also take junkyard photos, so I had to see her work "Rusty," that captures an old Buick-in-ruins, and "Old Blue," of the sort of old truck I'm always longing to save from perdition.

List of artists showing:

Atomic Gaffer - Sculpture
Balthasar Constantine - Fractal Art
Catriana Ninetails - Original oil and water color
Feathers Boa - with *NEW* reactive art pieces
Friday Karu - Real World painting, photography, and printmaking
Kalle Contepomi - *FEATURED ARTIST* with his dark interpretation of the Apocalypse
Lolly Dovgal - Real World Photography
Lou Laa - Gazebo Build
Olivia Hotshot - Real World Photography (oceans & vehicles)
Zizi Rabeni - Digital Art "Seven Deadly Sins"