Second Life Herald

Remembering Cory

by Urizenus Sklar, from the Missing Linden Desk

Cory sipping tequila in the Herald Hospitality Suite at the Tribeca Grand Hotel

As I write this I am drinking bourbon from a paper cup, listening to country music, and waiting by the phone in the vain hopes that Cory Linden Ondrejka will call and agree to be the Herald's CTO. Such is my nostalgia that I cannot help but dip into the Herald Paparazzi Photo Archives (tm) for a trip down memory lane. I thought I would share the memories with all of you too.

Taking A Vacation From SL

Too much of a good thing?

by Lacie Babenco

About 4 weeks ago, I came to the conclusion that I needed to take a break from my time in Second Life. Why? Simply put, I was feeling my RL was run down in general and realized I needed to refocus and re-prioritize how I did things to regain my energy.

So, I did what I thought was right by telling as many of my SL friends that I was taking a break for a few weeks. A night of goodbye hugs and well wishes exchanged, made me feel sad actually but I got a glimpse that I was not alone, many told me they had seen others struggle to find balance just like I was. Some emails and a simple notecard to all those I didn’t see covered my bases with most of the rest. Most were supportive, hoping something bad hadn’t happened in SL but, as I told everyone, I was feeling pretty crispy in RL and needed some time away.

My first reality check was when I took stock in all the things that I was doing connected with SL, and found a mountain! It was deep enough that I decided to list all the things I had associated with SL. From emails to blogs to SL Exchange and some of the news sites (sorry SL Herald!), I had 12 links in all that I was a “regular” visitor of. The ease of plugging in really can be overwhelming.. I Googled “Second Life Blogs” and got nearly 245 Million results! I know it’s skewed by a general term like “blog” but still, anything with Second Life is heavy with results.

Off the Grid with Walker Spaight: Making the Virtual Market

Fed chairman Alan Greenspan ponders the Linden-dollar exchange rate

With Linden Lab still considering hiring a virtual Alan Greenspan to manage Second Life's economy (as Philip mentioned in a Town hall meeting some time ago), we got to thinking: If game companies hate the trade in virtual items and currency so much, instead of trying to co-opt the market or simply stamp it out (as most TOS's do), why not simply take a more active role in the market and trade for their own accounts, acting to a certain extent as a stabilizing influence, in much the same way as the Federal Reserve?

(The following is reprinted from Walkerings.)

First, some background. The buying and selling of virtual goods that exist only within the "reality" of an online game has become a contentious phenomenon. Many players and game companies hold that the practice gives an unfair advantage to gamers with deeper pockets. Game companies are no doubt also concerned that there's a potential revenue source they're missing out on, though they rarely if ever admit to this worry.

There's no doubt that the market is booming. "The sale of virtual goods in massively multiplayer online role-playing games has exploded," writes GameSpot's Tom Leupold in a recent article.

Leupold cites Anthony Sukow, CEO of eBay tracking company Advanced Economic Research Systems, who estimates that the top eBay seller of World of Warcraft gold took in $44,000 a month in revenue in the first two months of this year.

Leupold also cites Sony Online Entertainment spokesman Chris Kramer, who pegs the market for the sale of virtual items at $200 million.

I recently spoke with IGE's Steve Salyer, who repeated to me his estimate that the market is closer to $900 million than $200 million. As president of the leading broker for such sales, Salyer has an interest in making the market sound as big and attractive as possible. But he's also in touch with game companies and virtual merchants around the world, and probably has a better sense of what's out there than most.

SOE, it will be remembered, recently moved to take a piece of this market with its new Station Exchange service, which will let players on a small number of EverQuest II servers conduct their virtual business through Sony's interface–and give Sony a small transaction fee in the process, of course.

This service seems designed to fail. It's only being offered on what sounds like a limited number of new servers, and players who wish to switch to an exchange-enabled server will be able to do so at no cost. While this might help create a ghetto for virtual merchants, the majority of their customers are probably not interested in giving up whatever community they've built on their current servers, just for the right to give Sony a piece of their payments on the exchange-enabled ones.

(If were paranoid, I'd speculate on whether Sony's trying to lure all the virtual merchants to the new servers just so they can get a better sense of who and how many there are.)

So what about this idea? What if, instead of trying to co-opt the market or simply stamp it out (as most TOS's do), game companies simply took a more active role in the market, trading for their own accounts and acting to a certain extent as a stabilizing influence, in much the same way as the Federal Reserve?

I see a couple of advantages to this approach:

First off, game companies get to make an honest buck in the markets, just as traders do on Wall Street. With a limited universe of games and goods, getting a profitable handle on things shouldn't be very hard for companies who are sitting on far more capital than the average MMOG merchant.

Secondly, companies could engage in market-related interventions in much the same fashion as the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve. Imagine a scenario in which a flood of World of Warcraft gold hit the market, depressing prices. In order to keep gold prices at a level at which in-world items aren't ridiculously cheap, Electronic Arts might want to step into the market to support the virtual currency. As gold prices recover, players again have to turn to in-game activities to earn their swords and spells. The added advantage here is that every game account, high-level weapon or piece of gold that EA buys is one less that's contributing to the out-of-balance playing field.

For game companies, the problem with market interventions would be that they'd have to dish out cold hard cash to fund such purchases. But by tracking demand and perhaps creating a limited number of items for sale in the market, a company could either profit or mitigate their costs, and could also have an impact on what items are available for sale, thus limiting the adverse effect on the would-be level playing field.

Becoming a Fed-like market manager also has implications about transparency, but that's a subject for another post.

So where does that all leave us? It doesn't seem like game companies are going to be able to stamp out virtual commerce. Sony's Kramer estimates that up to one-quarter of players engage in some type of virtual commerce (buying or selling). To enforce a TOS that forbids it would be to turn away paying customers. What companies will have to do instead is embrace the market and either offer a robust and level playing field in terms of trading in virtual items, or else enter the existing markets by trading for their own accounts. I imagine what they'll end up doing is both.

It seems to me that if MMOGs continue to grow as they have been in recent years, or even if they top out at around the current level, something like this will eventually have to be put into place. Who knows, perhaps there's already a roomful of EA day traders somewhere Off the Grid.

Off the Grid with Walker Spaight: The Making of a Post Six Grrrl

Diamond Hope, Post Six Grrrl

When I first met Diamond Hope she was standing in Walleye sim wearing shorts, white boots and a skimpy white halter top, a pistol strapped to her right thigh. A ribbon of thong peeked out from below her shorts, inviting my imagination. My imagination, I'm not ashamed to say, took off.

I've never had an interest in cybersex. I still don't. But since I was rezzed I've always been intrigued by how a screen-bound collection of pixels that only look half life-like can stir a certain amount of RL desire.

Di and I talked for a moment and I found myself wondering, How do I compliment her on her looks? And in Second Life what does that even mean? Imagine: "You're a very good-looking girl, Di." (Translation: "My, what facility you've shown in manipulating those appearance sliders, Ms. Hope.")

I found myself facing a whole raft of questions, not just about what lay beneath those skimpy shorts, but about myself and whether it was me or my av that was feeling the faint tug of virtual attraction. Was it virtual at all? And just what was it possible to create with the delicate touch of a slider? To answer my deep philosophical queries, I decided to go straight to the source.

As faithful readers of the Herald will have noticed, this newspaper has a content-sharing agreement with Marilyn Murphy, publisher of Players, SL's in-world erotica magazine. Each week, we feature a new Post Six Grrl drawn from the pages of Players. So I IM'd Marilyn. Was she interested in meeting a fresh face? Would she consider her for a Post Six photo shoot? And, most importantly, could I watch?

Soon enough, we were wandering around the Players Shack (the Players Mansion having been torn down some time ago). After stripping Di down to her thong, Marilyn cast her weather eye over the av before her. "Did you purchase that shape," Marilyn asked, "or did you do it yourself?"

"No, it's my own," Diamond replied, looking slightly shy.

But Marilyn was pleased: "You did a good job."

Marilyn studies her subject

I wondered out loud how long it takes to get a girl ready to shoot. "Frankly, it depends on how well I get on with a girl," Marilyn said. "If she needs a major overhaul, I sometimes just make an av for her. Now I just turn girls away if they are not up to it. There's just no time, and there are a lot of nice well done avs out there now, not like the old days.

"Frankly, Diamond is pretty good just as she is."

But some study was necessary.

"Go into appearance please," Marilyn directed. "Go to torso in shape and tell me the number on your breast gravity. It's right below breast size."

Diamond Hope's breast gravity is 47.

"Good girl," Marilyn said. "Excellent. So many think perky breasts means no gravity, or very little, but the way the Lindens set it up, that is so not the case."

"Now go to legs and tell me what the muscle number is."

Diamond Hope's leg muscles are 80.

"The break at the knee is very pronounced at 80. Make that 50," Marilyn instructed. "You rock, hun, you did way good on her. Whose skin do you wear?"

"Munchflower's."

"Good, hers look good nude."

Like all good SL snappers, Marilyn runs on local lighting. In order to get a better sense of how her girls will appear in the pages of Players or the Herald, she spends an hour or more posing them against various background light sources, then logging off to look over her snapshots in a freeware photo editor. ("I don't have Photoshop," Marilyn says. "I am a computer tard.")

Marilyn's selection of backdrop light sources

Getting the light right

"Almost all the custom poses break an avatar," she tells me. "One place or another it bends the av or doubles it up. Doing nudes is harder cuz you have to hide those breaks."

While Marilyn is off, I take the opportunity to chat up Di -- in my best journalistic style, of course.

Diamond Hope: wow
Walker Spaight: the making of a Players girl!
Diamond Hope: very interesting
Diamond Hope: wow
Diamond Hope: WOW
Walker Spaight: she is pretty impressed with you
Diamond Hope: wow
Diamond Hope: it's all i can say... wow
Walker Spaight: you never thought when you joined SL that you'd be posing for a mag, did you?
Diamond Hope: no never!
Diamond Hope: thx to you!!
Walker Spaight: hehe, i didn't know i had such a good eye.
Diamond Hope: lol
Walker Spaight: what do you usually do in here?
Diamond Hope: i usually work security at da penthouse
Diamond Hope: otherwise i hang out with my sl family
Walker Spaight: Security? a little girl like you?
Diamond Hope: i like the weapons and shields... it's interesting stuff
Walker Spaight: is it a tough job? do you get much trouble?
Diamond Hope: no

When she gets back on, Marilyn puts up three billboard-sized pictures of Security Guard Diamond Hope. "Definitely the close-up is the best for eyes," she says. "To me the eyes are a big fat deal."

The many faces of Diamond Hope

Marilyn takes some more shots, logs off again. When she gets back she does a brief interview with Diamond that I'm not privvy to. "It's kinda private," Marilyn explains.

"np at all," I respond. I'm just here to watch.

The shoot itself is over almost before we realize it. "Shooting for the Herald is relatively easy, it's just a portrait and two pics," Marilyn says. "Now for the magazine we would be here for two hours," -- we've been there for more than an hour already -- "then a make-up session for anything I don't like, and then more if needed. But Players should be known for beautiful girls and good photography, so I work it hard."

The finished product(s)

Work it Marilyn does. Her magazine's tagline, "Totally made in Second Life, by players, for players," exemplifies her ethic. This is all taking place in a virtual world, or a "game" if you will, populated by residents that can be thought of as "players." The fact that Players is a 99-percent in-world production, though, doesn't answer the question of what happens after publication, when its presentation of Second Life's most alluring avatars is designed to leak over to the other side of the client-server divide.

I ask Diamond, in RL a full-time mom who lives in the Midwest, whether this is something she'd ever do outside of SL. No way, is the answer. "One fun thing in this job," Marilyn puts in, "is finding girls who would never do such a thing and getting them to pose." She has shot Jade Lily in the past, she brags, but her biggest coup was probably Nyna Slate. "Nyna is miss PG," she says, "and very well known, top ten forever." Marilyn, who has never had a Linden before, wants Robin bad. "Lindens buy Players, though," she notes.

I leave the Players Shack with more questions than I had when I arrived. Diamond is one of the hottest av's I've met in Second Life. (I get a little surprise when I click on the 1st Life tab on Diamond's profile. Still hot, but very differently so.) Despite what I've seen, I'm still not ready for a virtual relationship with anyone (unlike other members of the Herald staff). But I have to wonder what my attraction means. And I'm not the only one wondering this kind of thing.

Is it Walker Spaight I see strolling over grassy meadows arm in arm with Di (not that she was offering), or is it Walker's typist? Is it time to build a virtual bedroom in the Herald office tower? What's it like for Diamond's typist, a stay-at-home mom with two kids to take care of? Is SL a way to get away from it all, to be something she's not in real life? "SL for me is an escape from RL stresses," Di tells me later, "which can be quite overwhelming at times. But mostly it's a place I can meet my friends and online family, and just have a good time."

SL isn't exactly a game, but it's not much more than a bunch of pixels floating around between 500 or so servers out in California. Or is it more? It certainly stirs more emotions than that description would imply. There's real money floating around in there, why not real emotion, then? For many, what happens on the Grid stays on the Grid. But the connections that develop between av's and the people behind them can't be taken so lightly. There will always be moments when what we experience in the place we call Second Life will be complex enough to also affect what happens Off the Grid.

Off the Grid with Walker Spaight: A Bow to the New Games Journalism

The New Games Journalism takes a swipe at the Resistance
Image stolen from LucasArts

Of course it’s the pot that calls the virtual kettle black. Or should I say, calls it “nigger”?

In this case, it’s the small chorus of voices emerging from the blogosphere to denigrate what’s come to be known as New Games Journalism, of which the seminal example is Ian always_black Shanahan’s “Bow, Nigger,” an account of a disturbing few moments in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.

“Bow, Nigger” relates not just the gameplay details and shared culture of a brief lightsabre duel between two Jedi knights, it also gives us a glimpse into the person behind always_black’s screen name, as he is told by his opponent to “bow, nigger” -- an imperative that should give pause to gamers everywhere, regardless of their ethnicity (and Shanahan’s is unknown to me).

After giving us some of JKII’s ins and outs in the early stages of the battle (including his discomfort at the rude form of address), always_black pinpoints the moment on which the encounter turns:

We spun around each other, bouncing off the furniture of the map. My concentration was absolutely intense and never before have I tried so hard to 'be the mouse'. . . . You see what this has become? It's not just a trivial game to be played in an idle moment, this is a genuine battle of good versus evil. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or Jedi Knights or any of the fluff that surrounds the game's mechanics. . . . This is real, in the sense that there's no telling who's going to win out here. There's no script or plot to determine the eventual triumph of the good guy (that's me, five health), there's no 'natural order' of a fictional universe or any question of an apocryphal ultimate 'balance'. There's just me and him, light and dark, in a genuine contest between the two.

And we know, of course, which side wins in the end.

By giving us more than just cheats, hacks, favorite features and level secrets, “Bow, Nigger” demonstrates something that most of us already know but rarely acknowledge: that games are more than just diversion; that, like the best movies, what the best games do is not just entertain us but give us a glimpse into the nature of our selves.

Apparently, that’s too much for some people.

Though Kieron Gillen’s New Games Journalism manifesto appeared just under a year ago now, it’s only more recently, with the posting of the Guardian’s list of unmissable NGJ pieces, that dissenting voices have emerged.

Primary among these has been UK Resistance, which managed to come up with their own seven-point manifesto (though I only really count three) on New Games Journalism and “why it’s shit.” Video Game Ombudsman Kyle Orland doesn’t really agree, but hardly rises to the form’s defense. (The UK Resistance piece is pretty funny, as Orland points out.) Surprisingly, Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh (aka Second Life’s Zero Grace), of whom we at the Herald are big fans, tips his hat to the Resistance as well for “deflating self-importance” and “debunking” the NGJ “concept.”

But what’s more self-important: Handing out your opinion as pixelated gospel in the form of a blog, or crafting a well wrought narrative that leaves readers to judge for themselves? Shared experience is what connects people; blind devotion to opinion is what divides.

And let’s be clear: It’s people we’re talking about here. It’s people who play these games, after all. When always_black gets lured unsuspecting into the clutches of a Thereian seductress in his piece “Possessing Barbie” (originally published in the UK edition of PC Gamer, which has been at the forefront of actually publishing and paying for NGJ), there’s a human being on the other end of those seating hacks and naughty poses. Shanahan doesn’t miss this fact:

In the hallowed halls of my Inner Court of Morals all fucking hell broke loose. My perception cracked neatly into three separate and mutually exclusive shards. In one, I was engaged in a consensual act of intimacy with a woman I'd only just met and hardly knew. I was alone with this woman in her bedroom while she stripped for seduction. The verdict was announced with the hollow boom of a giant gavel. Guilty!

In the second, my advocate jumped to his feet bawling 'Objection!’ frantically quoting legal technicalities. "It's not real!" he yelled, "It's only a game!”

In the third, in the real world, my ears pricked straight into raw, primitive survival mode, straining for the ominous tread of my girlfriend’s foot on the stairs.

Playing a game like There or Second Life is more than just learning the right combination of mouse moves and keyboard clicks. The same goes for games like Counter-Strike or JKII. We wouldn’t play them if that’s all they were. Sure, you may look like a muscle-bound stud cruising the clubs in Second Life, but at home in front of your keyboard, you’re a person -- even if you are a muscle-bound stud -- subject to all the whims and insecurities and over-confident moments and instances of true brilliance the rest of us experience, and you’re affected by what you get up to in these virtual places. Though you may prefer to think otherwise, what you do in the corridors of Halo 2 -- even the fact that you’re there at all -- is part of who you are.

This is not a piece about whether violence and prejudice in games begets violence and prejudice in RL. It’s a piece about what it’s like to be a gamer or even just to play a game, and about those who write about what that’s like. There’s nothing wrong with a little entertaining diversion. But a game is more than just the sum of its software; there’s a human being on the other end. At their best, computer games are a form of experiential art, and like the best of other forms of art -- movies, novels, paintings, even television shows -- they can touch our souls. They do this rarely, it’s true. But when they do, I, for one, want to hear about it.

I want to hear about it as much as I can. I want everyone to hear about it, because I want to see the feedback loop happen that could help boost more games toward the level of soul-touching art. Sure, there are the 15,000-word thumb-suckers that not even I would dare to touch. But that comes with the terroritory of any new form. If all we’re writing about is the relative merits of bells and whistles, well then, bells and whistles is all we’re ever gonna get.

But if we’re also writing about the way even JKII can get into your head, well, that’s a different story. The New Games Journalism can help drive games to do what the best books and movies and “art” already do: stimulate our thinking about ourselves and who we are. So don’t knock the NGJ. Read it. Think about it. Practice it yourself. And in so doing, help connect what’s on and Off the Grid.

Off the Grid with Walker Spaight: Showdown in Street City

The Second Life Herald is pleased to announce the debut of a new column by Herald Editorial Director and Raving Correspondent Walker Spaight: Off the Grid will appear on a strictly irregular basis, featuring news, thoughts and varied offerings culled from Walker’s wanderings. Enjoy.

To slap an eye on Louise, who has stolen my heart, one might at first judge her a lonely, unexciting sim. A Tringo parlor crouches next door in Abitibi, of course, but from the looks of things, one doesn’t expect to find drama brewing in a combat zone not far from my tier-heavy home. All I had to do to find it was fly south.

There at the edge of the Grid we are a mostly residential bunch. Far from the nearest telehub, many of the builds in places like Louise, Nipigon, Simcoe, Seneca are low-slung and occasionally interesting: a garden house, one of plube Zadoq’s stained-glass mini-mansions. A misty cemetery outside a vampire club. It seems a homestead land, the kind of checkerboard Prokofy hates. One-fourth of an acre and a couple of prims gets you a starter home and a forum post wondering what you’re supposed to do next. Don’t worry, inspiration will descend.

But then there pops up Walleye -- nice name for a sim -- where a red heart suddenly appears at the top of my screen. On the battlefield, a confederate flag does its best to flutter above a watchtower of rough-hewn 19th-century logs. My hopes are high. Perhaps I’ve stumbled across a virtual Civil War reenactment society. But no, there’s a WWII-era bomber parked nearby and a high-tech weapons vendor on the tarmac (and, more disturbing, a German iron cross flag furled around a flagpole). I’ve never died in Second Life. I don’t think I’d mind. But alas, there aren’t any shooters in sight. Only angry neighbors eager to complain to your Walkering correspondent that they’ve been getting bounced from their builds by stray shots from the combat zone. Or maybe not so stray.

Street City

A newspaper serves a civic function, so I promise to investigate. There are green dots nearby, after all, though they seem to be far above us. In fact, they’re close to 300 meters up, just over flying range. But no good virtual reporter travels without at least a Cubey WARP attachment, and I am soon hovering level with a platform bustling with the collective energy one hopes to find in a virtual world. It’s the energy of soldiers and commanders, though, of blue mech suits and gleaming auto-turrets. It’s the Invaders of SL, and they’re about to get their war on.

A selection from the Invaders’ arsenal

Or soon, anyway. The turret needs work before it will automatically fire at any stranger with an attachment in his (or her) hand. But Commander Vade Darkholme assures me that once it does, the Invaders’ conquest of Street City -- the 23,040-acre combat zone in Walleye -- will begin.

Vade and second-in-command Osmic Edo have thus far assembled an army a dozen strong. Their recruitment technique is the traditional one: they seek cooperation freely given -- in return for peace and protection, that is. Terroritorial advance is made similarly: “Kill some people and rez our stuff,” Vade explains. And after that? “Once it’s ours we will find more land.”

Vade Darkholme (right) and second-in-command Osmic Edo

“One moment,” Vade says. “We may have trouble.”

The mech attachments are put away, the double-barreled tank de-rezzed, and suddenly Vade and his crew are vaulting over the rail, descending the 300 meters to the small airstrip, where a soldier has a visitor in his sights. But no shots will be fired tonight. Instead, a deal is struck. It seems the Invaders’ trespasser is a builder with a gripe. Another SL resident has been reselling a plane he built, jacking up the price and slurrying his reputation.

Vade is a commander who thinks on his feet. After a moment’s consideration he makes his play. “I would like you to help us,” he tells the visitor. Vade is in need of a scripter. The visitor is in need of an army’s services. Linden Lab is in need of a way to retroactively deal with the permissions bug and its attendant hacks. By the time the evening’s over, two of the parties will be on their way to satisfied. The rest of us will have to wait for 1.6 (and cross our fingers once we get there).

And so the drama, presumably, begins. One wonders whether Vade and the Invaders have it in them, technically or otherwise, to police their supplicant’s situation. But in a lawless land ruled by whimsical gods, such may be the only recourse. The homestead analogy is appropriate. The social structures of SL resemble nothing so much as the Wild West, where highwaymen and cattle barons relied on 19th-century griefing techniques to get what they wanted, where the limited sway of the U.S. marshal service was routinely enhanced by private firepower.

Where is our Shane, though? Where is our Duke? Street City’s neighbors, wanting nothing but to enjoy their frontier homes, cast about for the man on the white horse, but no one rides in to save the day before the credits roll. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to wonder whether here, out on the edge of the Grid, they might find their hero. But it’s places like this where heroes are made.

There will always be drama. But how much more compelling would the drama be were a new kind of gunslinger to suddenly appear from Off the Grid?