Dispatch from a Vampire-Hunter

Location: Undisclosed
By Skye Wolf, Vampire-Hunter, Guest Writer

Iggy's Note: We here begin what I hope to be a series of dramatic posts from one part of the in-world roleplaying community...or is it only a game?

I’ll just say it. Monsters are real.

I’m not talking symbolically either, like how serial killers or politicians or someone’s mother in-law is a monster. I mean the kind of monster with claws and fangs, horns and leathery wings. Yes, you heard me. They are real. Now, for those of you who are still reading this, you fall into two categories. The first category is made up of people who think this is a joke, or a piece of fiction, or just some nonsense from someone who likes talking bullshit to pass the time. You’re not going to take any of this seriously. It’s going to be purely entertainment for you, nothing else. I’m fine with that. Have a nice life, for however long that may be. The second category is made up of people who know exactly what the fuck I am talking about.

You know. You have seen them.

It’s really kind of funny. Parents used to prepare their children for that horrific moment when they came face to fanged face with a monster. They used fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk. I mean, the old, old stories, the ones that taught kids to observe, improvise, and act swiftly, before they got eaten alive by a werewolf, or a witch, or some other terrifying fucker. And then one by one, all of our storytellers started losing their balls and self-censored themselves. All of the old fairy tales got sterilized by uppity people who thought it would be a better idea to entertain kids with shiny, happy stories rather than save them from getting horribly killed.

And now? Now there isn’t anything to fear. Monsters aren’t real, right? Thank Jim Henson for that. Monsters don’t eat children anymore, they eat cookies and sing the alphabet song and laugh when we tickle their fucking bellies.

Even in the face of cold evidence, people don’t believe. We can upload shit to Youtube or Facebook and share movies and photos of whatever it is we experience. Even monsters. Even people dying because of monsters. And what do people say when they see reality in all its gory details?

FAKE. It’s not real. Photoshop. Digital trickery. The shadows are all wrong. Blood doesn’t splatter like that. That guy isn’t animated right, he doesn’t even look human.

Doesn’t look human? No shit.

People have somehow repressed the very thing that has kept the human race ahead of these ancient predators for the last millennia: Our survival instincts. People have become too reliant on science, too reliant on technology to notice the dark things that lurk in the shadows. That’s how the monsters are going to win, and feast on every last one of us.

Except for one thing: People like me. We bring the light of hope into the shadows. Also, we kill the fuck out of every monster we come across. But mostly it’s the hope thing.

It’s a thankless, lonely, and brutal job that we have. Most of us don’t live to see middle age simply because as we get older, and slower, and weaker, the monsters don’t. Sometimes it’s the very people we protect that get us killed—just because we know the malicious fucker we had just staked through the heart is a fanged beast, doesn’t mean the cops arriving on the scene of a witnessed “homicide” pointing their guns at me knows that. I’ve had one too many friends end up shot to death by police officers, or worse, end up in prison.

So, now you know the truth. The truth about the world, about the monsters, and about the people that live and die trying to keep the monsters from eating us. I’m not really sure why I felt like blogging this, except for maybe that I’ve lost a dear friend of mine last night. There are precious few times when someone like me affords themselves the weakness of loving someone else, but dammit, I couldn’t help it. And now that person is dead, and all I have left are my tears, my emptiness, and a burning rage to find the monster that killed my friend and fucking tear it to pieces.

I guess I’m hoping to spare whoever might be reading this the agony that I’m feeling right now. But I’m not going to beg and plead for you to believe what I’ve said. I’m tired of trying to convince you, so either listen to me or don’t. It’s your funeral.

I’m done talking. I’ve got some hunting to do.

Ask Di: Unfriending Someone

Location: Our Virtual Advice Desk

Dear Di:

What is the proper way to un-friend someone who has a fragile ego, without hurting him? There's a guy who I'm sure wants more than casual friendship with me. I'm not interested in SL romance.

Often when I log on, he invites me to events or wants me to "just hang out." Maybe he isn't after sex, but at least he wants a close friend and I'm not sure I can spare the time for that and still enjoy SL. He's always online and I don't want to log in as an ALT constantly.

I'm tired of making excuses.

Yours,

Ms. Popularity

Dear Ms. Popularity:

If you have truly exhausted the "I'm busy right now", "I won't be on for long" and have done the logging on as invisible, there are only 2 options I see. The one you pick depends on how blunt you are.

#1 (really blunt) - Just unfriend them and mute them. Don't tell them, don't say anything, just do it. They will not be able to contact you, and you move on with your SL. Chances are, unless they have few friends in SL, it will take them a while to notice you have dropped off of their list anyway. They will eventually get the hint tho. With this option there is no going back tho, even if they get thru to you somehow you have to ignore them and you can never be friends again.

#2 (not so blunt) - Tell them you are on SL to have fun, but you feel they are looking for more than that, and a SL romance is not on your agenda. Tell them you would like to still be friends and talk to them, but they can't be smothering you and pouncing on you the second you log on. If they can stick to that maybe you can keep them around, and if not, see #1 above.

P.S. Can you set them up with someone else?

XXOO
Di

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.