Second Life

The Samwer hotties brothers

The German newspaper Frankfurther Allgemeine is reporting that the Samwer brothers of Germany have acquired a 10% stake in the virtual real estate and metaverse development company Anshe Chung Studios. The Samwer brothers — Oliver, Alexander and Marc — gained their claim to fame when they started an online auction site alano.de in 1999, which they subsequently sold to eBay for the equivalent of $50 million US. In 2000 the brothers founded Jamba!, which they sold to Verisign for the equivalent of $270 million US in 2004. They subsequently started a venture capital fund called European Founders Fund.

Reached for comment by the Herald, Anshe Chung would not indicate the dollar value of the initial investment, but it has been reported that venture capital firms have previously valued Anshe Chung Studios at over $2 million dollars US. This would suggest a possible investment of $200,000 to $300,000 by the Samwer brothers. More important than the monetary infusion, which quite frankly ACS doesn’t really need given its cash flow, will be the possibility that the Samwer brothers can bring formal business and accounting methods to ACS — a development that will help to bring other investors on board in the future.

Of special interest in the Franfurter Allemeigne article is the claim that the investors plan on ACS expanding to 100 employees by July and opening offices in Frankfurt, Boston, and Tel Aviv. Ms. Chung would not confirm the opening of the new offices, but did confirm the expansion to 100 employees — mostly skilled programmers — and added that ACS would be moving to larger offices in Wuhan.

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Francis Barraud, His Master’s Voice.

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Linden Trees Falling in the Simulated Forest And No One Hearing Them

The Lindens’ announcement that they’re going to add voice to Second Life will likely be met with mixed responses.

In the typical upbeat LL fashion, the Blob tells us that “many” residents wanted to have voice, but in fact this isn’t something we can determine accurately that “most” wanted. Those who truly need voice within SL tend to use Skype, Shoutcast servers, Ventrillo, etc. already. But having it Always On will pose problems for significant numbers.

First, the price tag. We knew when the Lindens said they were “grandfathering the island tiers for a year” that we should count the silverware. We just didn’t think that it would mean they’d add on new features, and then say, oh, you can’t have that new feature unless you pony up the new full freight now. So if you want your island voicified — and the cybering masses may want this or come to feel as if they need this — you’ll have to increase their rent by 50 percent likely, or go out of business, because now you’ll have $295 tier, not $195 tier per month. Mercifully, you may not have to make this radical choice; it seems that IMs between two people can go to voice without having to have the feature on the land where they’re located.

Whenever I think of the voice issue, I think of Richard Bartle’s marvelous essay, “Not Yet, You Fools!” an anti-voice piece about X-box, on gamegirl.advance. It’s perfection. Voice breaks immersion. He’s absolutely right. Here you are all slaying dragons and saving damsels from distress and all of a sudden, thunk, the damsel turns out to be a male trucker, the dragon is your Mom, and you’re bashfully aware that you flat Midwestern accent doesn’t have that Harry Potter plumminess that you imagine your game in, while dashing around a pre-Enlightenment landscape.

The eggheads at Terra Nova talked about this as “Mike Fright”, and while recognizing that voicing breaks the magic circle, they were all for the team-speak of Team Speak because, well, they’re gamerz over there and they got used to X-box.

But you know, we’re not doing NASA flight simulation or organizing raids in WoW as complex as air-traffic controlling a hive of bees through a sieve. We’re just playing Second Life.

We all know who “needs” voice. The Lindens do, first of all. They need it because they want to be like There, WoW, X-Box, and whatever else is out there that either has voice right in the client or uses voice services more routinely than Second Life. They also want to sound like they are really Business-Ready and Business-Savvy and nothing says “Business” like “A Conference Call”. But when Second Life turns out to be nothing more than a conference call, will it be as cool?

And we all know how doesn’t need voice — the deaf, the transgendered, the shy, the insecure, the old, the foreign. That is, all the people who have Second Lives unlike their first lives — and we’re about to find out just how many of us there are like that.

But there will be a lot more conundrums and inconveniences coming along with this voice thing that we haven’t all worked through.

Let’s take the live music. The beauty of a Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nino concert, of course, is that they talk live to you while playing live music. You’re on the keyboard, and Jaycatt’s on the keyboard, but they’re different keyboards.

You can’t interrupt their singing and playing with your own ridiculous voicing inappropriately while they are trying to play. Or…you can, of course, because they may opt to turn ambient world noise off and just play, but then the rest of the venue’s patrons are stuck with you if you voice, just as they are stuck with your clattering keys because you didn’t use the /Harvard Hush backslash, or stuck with your “Ohhh yaaaeah” dumbass noiseclips.

Just like it can be kind of a jarring and unsettling experience flying over the world and listening to 101 god-awful mass-taste horrid radio stations and blasting music of all sorts, so the cacophany of voices may be such a din that you’ll turn it off.

We might see the emergence of type-only sims or communities or events. “She’s a typist,” may come to be a disparagement in some circles, impugning her RL female gender status, or it may become the hallmark of refinement and intelligence — we shall see!

And the big wildcard is performance, lag, visibility or audibility (is that a word?). The Lindens hint at possible trouble by saying you might notice a bit of reduction in speed. That’s their way of admitting that adding voice may be as big a show-stopper for some people’s systems as adding audio and video for movies and music has been. If even they admit there might be trouble — look out! We’ll see. Let’s hope they’ll be truthful about this.

I, for one, am personally unhappy about the move to voice, for obvious reasons. When I came to Second Life, as when I came to the Sims Online, I opted to chose an avatar of the opposite gender because I can. That’s all the reason you need. “The community” as the slathering jackals on various vicious forums describe themselves, have opted to hack and slash at this, first unlawfully outing my RL gender on the official forums, with the Lindens belatedly awarding only mild wrist-slaps, then continually pilloring me and harassing me endlessly for this choice, trying to use it as a lever to prevent my dissent or humiliate me in some way. It’s an astounding double standard, as male-to-female transgendered like Torley get nothing like that sort of harassment. However, it’s a choice I continue to defend, and refuse to yield on, though everything that Second Life has been about for me, whether forums or SLCC or packs of griefing asstards, has tried to erode this. Being forced to use a voice in a virtual world, something not of my choice, against my will — because people in business will all be forced to do this — feels like the ultimate blow. It won’t be — but you do get tired of this crap after awhile.

It’s a sad day when a virtual world, which is supposed to be special, which is supposed to have a magic circle even if it isn’t a game, which is supposed to be about freedom and creativity, makes you do something against your will. There will be many, many others more anonymous than me who will keep typing and therefore endlessly invite suspicion and speculation.

Most of all, what I dislike about this is that it is not truly Vox Populi, the voice of the people. Nobody clamoured for it. It’s a Linden thing. It’s not *necessary*. There are 1000 issues that should be solved before this — like not taking inworld accounts history out of the viewer, like improving FPS and grey squares and being able to teleport. Are they counting on voice to tide them over the worsening performance issues, so that we will be talking to each other because the teleporter won’t be working much of the time?!

Check out the Features Voting Tool and it tells the story about “Voice” in Second Life.

There are five proposals having to do with the word “voice”.

o Prop 2839 has a mere 80 votes from a tiny number of 27 people supporting voice chat in Second Life.
o Prop 2616 calls for voice adjustment meaning the distance at which your typing is “heard” in the existing SL system.
o Prop 2604 talks about people who “have no voice” who are against propositions becuse there is no “no” vote (I have a proposition on this subject, too, as a half dozen others do — one of the deep flaws of the voter system)
o Prop 2186 also has 74 for voice chat from a mere 25 voters because they wish to know “who is an adult and who is a kid”. Hey, watch the grid empty out? And the ageplayers evaporate? That would be nice.
o Prop 2135 is a repeat asking for “hearing back” on a voice proposition, with 15 votes.
o Prop 2111 is a proposal again referring to the lack of voice meaning the lack of a “no” vote, this time with 18 votes from 13 voters.

Telling, eh? And in predictable fashion, the Lindens are defaulting the whole mainland to voice, with an opt-out, just like they defaulted to push, though in fact we may find that the voiced may be a distinct minority. In any event, only 52 people happened to vote for this as far as we know — the rest clearly have other priorities — as the fact that three out of the six “voice” proposals illustrate. They didn’t have to do with RL voice audibility, but having the real voice we need to have in Second Life — a real say in what features are developed and put in the client.

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by Onder Skall, courtesy of Second Life Games

To all Second Life designers and developers looking for a chance at breaking into the gaming industry - this is it. David Perry (Earthworm Jim, Enter the Matrix) has teamed up with Acclaim for a one-of-a-kind project. They are building a new MMO with a full development team and are looking for contributions for design, ideas, art, animation, and audio. In return you will get a major MMO credit on your resume, experience, and a chance at the big prize.

What is the big prize, you ask? One lucky gamer will be selected to be the new Director of this major, fully-funded MMO, and David Perry will be their Executive Producer. Sign ups at the website http://topsecret.acclaim.com/index.htm will only be available for the next short while, and then the entire project will move into secrecy until completion. They call it “Project: Top Secret”.

A contest like this is especially appealing to Second Life residents who have been creating content for years without major public recognition. Now the opportunity has come to show their genius, and many will leap at the chance. I have no doubt that the winner of this competition will not come from WoW or Everquest, where creativity is tightly controlled, but from the glorious wilds of SL.

Those registering today receive a message saying to expect an email within two weeks, and are then directed towards Acclaim’s other games to play “for free”. You have to hand it to them: if nothing else it’s a pretty effective marketing ploy. Still, one has to wonder what form this “American Idol for gamers” will take.

I’ll be keeping my eye out for details.

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by Ebenezer Pixel

It happens only once a season and 26 February kicks off the Winter Pixel Sumo Grand Basho. The event is actually 3 separate events: matches East, Central, and West. A winner will be declared at each event and at the end of the 3 events a grand champion will be chosen.

Over L$ 500 is up for grabs as well as 12 points in Pixel Sumo. First event is Monday, 26 Feb at 6 am at Pixel Sumo Dohyo. The second event is Thursday 1 Mar at 3 pm at Artificial Isle and the third event is at 7 pm at Pixel Sumo Dohyo.

All are welcome to come and compete and take a chance at becoming the next Pixel Sumo star. For complete rules on the event, go to the rules link at Pixel Sumo Banzuke.

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DarkLife creator robbed of $400 USD - fingers griefers as suspects

by Ouchquack Stern, spastic bastard

“ZING!”

The sound DarkLife players yearn for is reminiscent of the muted strum of a harp in the key of “C”. The meta-game players — both the Mages with their wands, robes and pointy magic hats, and the Fighters with swords, armor and shields — spend hours to slay monsters so they can go up a level and hear that sound. But that heavenly chord was twisted to evil purposes, and used against the intrepid players Saturday evening, as a dozen seasoned players gathered around the Shrine in the center of Navora to whisper about the hackers who have made their beloved game unsafe.

a gathering of people at the Shrine in Navora

DarkLife is basically the Second Life version of the old table-dice-pencil-and-paper role playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” in that it is ‘turn’ based, players ‘level’ to advance and there’s a lot of hack-and-slash fighting with some magic tossed in. DarkLife’s kind of role play is the old fashioned kind — “I kill the dragon. Arrrrr!” Not the modern take on ‘role play’ which is practically synonymous with fetishistic sex-play.

DarkLife developers Mark Busch and his pal Pirate Cotton have been running the game-within-a-game for nearly three years now, and over the years they’ve attracted thousands of Second Life citizens — all of whom have paid nearly L$500 to don the backpack that stores their experience, gold, mana, health and level for their combat-based advancement. And with every level advancement players get more ‘level up’ points to apply to their abilities so they can use more powerful weapons and magic items and inflict greater damage on the many monsters in the Navora sim. Each new weapon costs $L50 and a fist full of DarkLife game gold, the Linden dollars going into the pockets of the game developers in a constant stream of ‘KA-CHING! KA-CHING! KA-CHING!’ That is, until a couple days ago when it all went distressingly wrong — and a felony was committed in Second Life.

Mark Busch, DarkLife co-founder

“We’ve been robbed for about $400 USD (United States Dollars),” said DarkLife creator Mark Busch in an instant message to Pirate Cotton, as relayed by Cotton to the Second Life Forums. Mark Busch and Pirate Cotton confirmed the post in extensive interviews by the Herald. “On the 17th my account got robbed by some dude named ‘CheckOutThis Hax’ and ‘Data Lindman.’”

Busch speculates that CheckOutThis and Data are one in the same, and they are also alts of one Cleint Hax who hacked into DarkLife a few weeks before with a hack that raised Dark Life player victims level after level in a matter of seconds - ‘ZING, ZING, ZING, ZING!!!’

This reporter visited Navora on Saturday night to ask some locals about the felony burglary, when griefers OpenSource Hax sat on the head of Dark Life player Sammy Grigges while one StealingCashFromDarkLife Allen started hacking Dark Life player packs and boosting levels at a prodigious rate — ‘ZING,ZING, ZING!!’

Trevor Langden, DarkLife security

Long time DarkLife players Ethan Pow and Trevor Langdon, both members of the DarkLife Security Force, quickly booted everyone from Navora and closed the sim, in response to the griefers. Within minutes Pow created a temporary group and invited legitimate members into the sim so they could safely continue their play. That made the sim safe from griefing, but slowed commerce down to a crawl.

“When I fixed the bug the other night this hacker came back (Saturday) and when he noticed he couldn’t steal any more cash he went on messing up people’s (game stat storing) backpack,” Mark Busch told the Herald. “Its typical behavior for a teenage hacker: using prank names, messing things up, talking big” and generally throwing tantrums when things don’t work the way he wants.

Busch says the griefer pulled the level-up prank a few weeks ago, and Pirate Cotton reported the activity to Linden Lab through an abuse report and direct contact. Then a few days ago the griefer tapped into the DarkLife vendor refund account and took $400 USD worth of Linden dollars. They insist that both pranks, and the ability to talk in group chat without being in any DarkLife group, are hacks requiring knowledge of the channel number the game developers use for privileged communication — like money transfer. But how did Hax know the channel number?
According to Mark Busch there are three possibilities:

• A recent Second Life bug relegated every bought item to ‘copy-mod’ — even scripts
• Hax found a new bug in Second Life
• Hax used a scanner to find the channel *

*Unlikely: there are a reputed 4 billion channels - at 100 scans a second it would take two years to test all the channels.

The fourth possibility, one that Mark Busch doesn’t want to address, is the possibility that the hack was an inside job. When pressed he admits that he and Pirate have extended access to that kind of information to two employees — and they could have shared info with their relationship partners. Possible, but unlikely as all have been long time paid employees and the hackers have just recently cropped up. Not so coincidentally - according to Busch - right after Second Life went ‘open source.’

“Before (SL went open source) there were some minor hacks, but I was able to track them down to bugs in DarkLife itself,” Busch told the Herald. After the theft “I was able to track down what this hacker did but it’s not a bug in DarkLife. How did he get the channel number? The most obvious answer is the HUGE buy-mod bug a month of two ago. The other is that he used the open source (of Second Life) to find a new bug that allows access to scripts.”

Busch says he reported Client Hax weeks ago, and IM’d Spike Linden about the activity in Navora Saturday night, but was told to file an abuse report and the Lindens will do what they can. Essentially the same thing one is told when a noob runs around nekked in a Welcome Area — not the kind of investigation and customer support one would expect for one of the most successful content creators in Second Life who is faced with a breach in security that is crippling his business. (Spike Linden did not reply to a request for comment).

As of Sunday afternoon Dark Life was still restricted to group members. Business - usually brisk on the weekend - was crawling at a snails pace.

“Maybe if they freeze his accounts I could still get the L$ back before he sells it,” Busch said. “He is still online, and able to talk on the DarkLife Players group even though he is not IN the group.” What are the odds that Linden Lab will step in and help in time? “It seems unlikely,” said Busch. Meanwhile, the ‘KA-CHING! KA-CHING! KA-CHING!” sound of L$ falling into DarkLife coffers has fallen all but silent in Navora.

Cin Squeegee, fighting hottie

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By Prokofy Neva, Missing Lindens Desk.

The Governor is gone….

: (

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Photo by Brian.

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Planets, Worlds, Universes, Multiverses, and A Metaverse Just One Stop Away

When Jerry Paffendorf, futurist of the Electric Sheep, put out the word about a Metaverse Meet-Up and said it was in Brooklyn, I checked my immunization records, got out my passport, and put on some extra leggings, because I’m one of those Manhattanites that tries never to go more than a 20-block radius out of their village.

But it turns out the Metaverse is only one stop away on the L, a train I had come to fear as a young person when I once boarded it and found a man tarred and feathered and ranting and hurtling toward 8th Avenue. Yes, tarred and feathered.

But it turns out that where Jerry lives is sufficiently populated at all hours not to feel as if you might get mugged making your way along the cold, windswept mean streets with dilapidated storefronts and tacky low-rises toward a boarded-up construction site which is the address Jerry gave in the email. I figured this was a Vernor Vinges situation where I had to put on a wearable, rez, image, imagine, um…do something…like figure out that he meant another address down the block.

What can I tell you about the Metaverse? The Metaverse, like all things human, is mainly in men’s minds. And I do mean men — the room was almost entirely male, geeky, 20-30-40 somethings, a few with girlfriends that seemed a bit overawed or bored, with a few important exceptions, like our hero Urizenus, whose companion easily proved that Uri hit the one out of ten jackpot in Ann Arbor, and with whom I had a credible critical discussion of Chomsky that I’m not sure Uri would have approved of.

What else can I tell you about the Metaverse?

Well, in the Metaverse, I was able to convince Adam Reuters to buy me a drink by asking inworld about 3 times, plugging him in real about 2 times, and finally putting my arm around his shoulder and saying we had to have a talk “man to man” about all these great tips I was giving him that weren’t, well, paying off in any monetarize-my-time-online sort of way. He readily conceded to get the brew, and patiently sat through one of my really dull RL work stories with a faux-interested expression before he rounded me up to go back into the room where all these kids were filming us.

Kids today film like this: they stick a camera right in your face. And I mean, if you are eating a vegetarian Thai spring roll, the zoom in on the springroll and pan up from there, without a word. They don’t talk. They don’t ask questions. Even when they interview with a formal stand-up, the most they do is tell you to keep your heads closer to the person you are arguing with and hardly ask a question. They don’t frame. No editorializing or concept. Just film the Maintenant. This is the Maintenant school of film work. I just made that up, yeah, that’s fake. But it works. I mean, you don’t have to be French and have ever seen one clip of Truffaut to make up a fake French school of film in Brooklyn — who’s to know?

So there we are, filming the Maintenant, which is for something called “Nerd of the Week” made by these people making a film about Nerds. My vote was for Eric Rice/Spin Martin who was also on hand, looking nearly alike to his avatar (as I do) and allowing me with a bemused irritation to cadge clove cigarettes. Spin Martin now has playing cards. Collect ‘em all! They’re actually from my neighbours in Alston, the Neo-Realms Fishing people, who for some reason, made trading cards of people. I love this idea. I want stats though. I want like “12098791234710298479047 blog words published to date” or something.

The other thing I could tell you about the Metaverse is that in the Metaverse, the owners of the Thai restaurant start flickering the light on and off to get you to leave because you aren’t buying anything more and they want to move in new customers. So off you go out in to those cold Metaversal brutal streets again, past the place that supplies nearly all the calories and sustenance for the Metaversal workers, the Something Pizza place.

The Metaverse’s apartment is…how should I put it? Not one of those places with shall we say “a woman’s touch”. There are a bunch of grubby batchelors coming to and fro and making stuff and just pinning junk up on the wall. It was funny to me to see the very newspaper where I was featured, the New York Times, pinned up on the wall, I’d thrown it away ages ago. “A Virtual World, But Real Money”. Of course there’s the noir narf-narf sensibility indicated by a screensaver blown up from somebody’s laptop on the wall that shows a scene from an old Herald story about bloodied, hacked-up snuffed out furry whores courtesy of W-hat. The picture hovered over the scene with a red glare making the congealed, cold pizza from like…not today…even more…what it was.

In fact, when Jerry asked us to put up ideas on white paper all over the room, among the ideas I put was: get the guys down at the pizza joint to take Lindens. Virtualize them. Make them a little store. Put a vendor in it and keep paying it and stuff, and teach them how to enter SL and then cash out their Lindens later. In fact, in the process of Metaversizing the area, I’d definitely start with that place. In fact, to vary the palate, I’d get the grumpy Thai people to set up an account with maybe a little cheaper for bulk monthly orders and get them on board.

Yes, Henry Jenkins‘ book about culture is on the top of all the books next to the toilet in the johns. These boys are not Hustler readers. Also, lots of boxes of ecchinea! They stay healthy! Well, I did put this in the gossip category.

Well, let’s see, did we discuss ideas? That’s why I came. And yes we did. It was a bit hard because Jerry’s sim is a bit overloaded with 40 people and I am not sure the tempers were hugely improved by him running out of the better brew and offering….Bud. Yes. Bud. In the Metaverse. I mean. We need a new Metaverse here.

OK, on to the ideas. You’d like to think this congregation is something like the Left Bank or Jack Kerouac and his gang or something like that — and it is, kinda, except, well…There’s something basically at work in the Metaverse that isn’t very much appreciated, but is a miracle in its own way.

That is, that people who don’t like each other very much — or even people who can’t stand each other, are not in each other’s little niche, or long tail, or group, or clique — still have a medium or a matrix to exchange ideas. These ideas may take the form of insults. Or they may take the form of curt hellos in RL. Yet somehow, while muted, the person may be on your radar and you might cautiously pay attention to them. I had a few people come up to me fearfully and not reveal their names but said they read my blog and then scurry away. Jerry introduced me to some new young guy trying to get a job and said, “Here’s Prok who will criticize you” lol.

And I guess that’s part of what doesn’t quite work for me, the feeling that the Metaverse, as it is now, isn’t about ideas or art so much as it is finding jobs for a lot of IT guys. And that’s ok. They may create ideas on the way to zealously hunting down their next jobs. It tends to give the place a feeling of cynicism and not of wonder, however.

I mean, to me, as much as I try not to be naive and gullible and dewey-eyed, it still comes as something as a shock to sit and hear someone talk about making Metaversal sims, events, happenings, etc. all day every day in Second Life, There, and other online worlds, and to take a kind of blase, even sort of derisive take on it. I guess they get that way, fiddling with the little pieces of it in finicky programs all day. It was funny to me to see how Walker and Glitchy had the most fun all evening playing old T-Rex songs from a laptop and trying to name them.

I mean, the one really, really shocking thing to me about the Metaverse here at its inner core, so to speak, is that the computers and the hook-up are from hunger.

I mean, my aunt has better high-speed internet access than this, and she’s 75. It’s not only the speed, it’s this effect of crappy little Macs and discount PC laptops scattered around and not even *on*. You would think, in a RL from SL kinda place, they would be Always On. But nobody could care less. I’m probably the only person who logged on to SL from there for 7 hours lol. I think part of their attitude to the world-ness of SL in fact is explained by this simple fact: they have a lousy connection and a lousy set-up.

Oh, I don’t think that’s the case for Eric/Spin — he is one of those guys that has so many gadgets and knows how they all fit together and such that he probably has a ne plus ultra hook up. But…

OK, what did Walker say? I’ll leave Walker and others to parse this better than me, but there were a couple of things that struck me.

First, Walker is now obsessed with something called “twitter,” that evidently involves just posting little tidbits and finding others posting tidbits like birds on a wire. Not sure I need another game addiction, but there it is. Walker is fascinated to think of the three-dee vision of the blogosphere, with posts from all nations materializing, humming, hiving, thriving, and soon probably able to be searchable and aggregatable and stuff…

So my question is, but why do you want pictures of people’s cats? And Walker, puzzled, said, well you don’t, but you do want to see the cat of that person you know. As if the thing is really more of little device to keep friends and family even more in touch than email, cell phones, pagers, and IMs can already keep them in touch just about every minute of the 24/7. Ever get in an elevator and have some twit say, “Yes, I’m in the elevator now. I’ll be upstairs in a minute. Yeah. Well if I break up, it’s because I’m in the elevator.”

The other thing he talked about, which got some feathers ruffled in the room, was that the Metaverse that we all know and love in fact was going to be designed and made and inhabited by people who are 12 years old now. They will make it all different than we planned because they’ve been immersed in media and user content since they were weaned. One old guy raised his hand and said that he still thinks you can learn more about people’s cognition and whatnot by what they do with building blocks, you don’t need to get too fancy. Being an old guy myself, I raised my hand and asked why we couldn’t play, too.

Well, again, to me, the Miracle of the Metaverse is that the people making the Herald don’t have to particularly plan anything, or even like each other, or not even enjoy spending time with each other (I happen to like hearing them talk but I suspect its not mutual : ). They can just come on in this shared soup and just mix and stir.

I know everybody wants the Metaverse to be a Better World. I think we could be happy enough if it is just Not a Worse World. That is, if it even makes a matrix through which, using the features of anonymity, as well as bans and mutes, and the sort of wierd head space you get into, which is sort of like hour 7 of a LSD trip or like being up all night even having taken Nyquil, and use that as a kind of tool to make people at least hear the twittering on the line.

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by Fiend Ludwig

According to Nick Yee, of Stanford University, and his colleagues, Second Life, and by extension other virtual environments, is an ideal place to test paradigms of real-life human social interaction. In the paper The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments, Yee asserts that:

Overall, our findings support our overall hypothesis that our social interactions in online virtual environments, such as Second Life, are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world. This finding has significant implications for using virtual worlds to study human social interaction. If people behave according to the same social rules in both physical and virtual worlds even though the mode of movement and navigation is entirely different (i.e., using keyboard and mouse as opposed to bodies and legs), then this means it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world.

Although it sounds plausible on the surface, Yee’s conclusions are based on a raft erroneous assumptions. Of the five variables that Yee observed during avatar interaction - gender, interpersonal distance, mutual gaze, talking, and location - only interpersonal distance and location can be accurately measured by simply observing avatars while they communicate.

For all of the others, Yee has missed the boat entirely. Observations were made in-world by research associates who used a script to collect data. He reports, “When triggered by a designated key press, the script would collect the name, Cartesian coordinates (x, y), and yaw of the 16 avatars closest to the user within a 200 virtual meter radius. The script would also track whether the avatars were talking at that given moment. The script would then store the information as a text file.” This text file is called a ’snapshot’ in the study. The snapshots were then analyzed to isolate dyads (pairs) of avatars who were talking to one another. No indication is given whether the snap-shotted avatars were asked whether or not they wanted to participate in this study.

After the snapshot was recored, Yee’s assistants determined avatar gender. He notes “In many cases, however, the gender of avatars was unable to be determined, as users chose to be androgynous or non-human. Each dyad was then coded as male-male, female-female, or mixed.” Although it is generally possible to determine the gender of the avatar by examining their appearance in SL, it is impossible to know the gender of the real person controlling that avatar. Therefore, Yee’s conclusions based on avatar gender and their relationship to real world observations are invalid. An observed female-female SL dyad could easily be the result of two male real life Second Life participants - there is a least one well known relationship where two real-life men have female avatars who are ‘partnered’ in SL.

Yee’s mutual gaze measurements are also problematic, as the user behind the avatar must accomplish a sequence of deliberate keystrokes to direct his/her avatar to look at the avatar with whom he/she is speaking. It is a personal observation that there is very little importance ascribed to maintaining eye contact during chat, as user attention is usually directed to the UI chat window anyway. And since avatars don’t automatically emote (although emote animations can be triggered by the user) there is no body language feedback to be gained from maintaining eye contact during SL chat. Circumstance is more likely to create a mutual gaze - simply walking toward another avatar can cause spontaneous eye contact, as an avatar’s eyes automatically look in the direction of travel.

Additionally, Yee states, “If users were in this ‘is typing’ mode, they were coded as ‘talking.’” Although it is true that the default state of an avatar is to show the ‘typing’ animation when chatting, there are numerous animation overrides that are commonly used by experienced SL residents that suppress the typing animation, overriding it with a different, customized action. Therefore, two avatars who are standing adjacent to one another, but are not showing the typing animation, may indeed be chatting. Yee also excluded dyads that were observed as being more than 3.7m apart, as this was shown in real world studies to be the distance further than which social interaction does not occur. Again, however, this assumption is false in SL, where chat can be ‘heard’ for 30m and use of the ctrl-alt keys allow the avatar’s camera (the view the avatar’s user sees on his/her computer screen) to zoom in on the chat partner without physically moving, allowing for effective chatting outside of the 3.7m range. Yee’s observations also ignore the use of SL instant messaging, which is commonly used by avatars to chat privately, and is invisible to any external observation or scripted eavesdropping.

There may be patterns of social interaction observable in Second Life, these patterns may give the observer some insight into the behavior of avatars, and this insight may lead to generalization about the social norms of virtual online environments as a whole. But, without detailed information about the people who are driving these virtual interactions, drawing parallels between real world norms and observed ‘virtual norms’ seems both erroneous and premature.

[picture: Thisbe, a painting by John William Waterhouse, 1909]

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