So, a proper analysis of videogames and online communities in general can’t pass without touching of the media’s pretty toy since 2006: Second Life. I first tried to check the Wikipedia article, but since Wikipedia in general it prides itself on being “a neutral encyclopedia” (aka it has Political Correctness up to the ass), I decided to see what I can scrap of the Internet to form an image of it.
First, the basics:
- Was created in 2003, by Linden Lab and it’s based on Neal Stephenson Snow Crash, particulary the idea of a virtual Metaverse separated from reality.
- It’s creators have always written pompous bullshit about how isn’t just a game, is a “virtual world”, an “universe brimming with people and posibilities” (taken from their website). Ok, that was probably written for a marketing team, but they just don’t get tired of saying it.
- Is a free-to-play game, but there’s is an economy of third-party providers that can use their scripting language to create both 3d terrain and the avatar’s appereances. The third-party providers are motivated because, unlike open source providers, they can trade the linden dollar L$ (the game’s currency) for cold, hard, real life cash ($). Keep an eye on this, is a point for later.
- As a consequence of being a social online game (that meaning a place without nothing to do) and user-generated content it naturally became a 3D based adult chat room.
Ok, given the introduction, let’s lay out the goodies:
First, we’ve got the lawsuits against Linden Lab for the users that get the most benefits for it: The third-party providers. There is the Bragg vs. Linden case, a lawyer that found a bug that allowed him to get virtual land, that being overpriced server space, for a price below Linden’s one at buying it before it got published. Typical out-of-court-settlement case.
Also, there is the Eros LLC/Nomine vs Linden one, a case when the merchants aren’t protected from Linden of other’s copying their product. I wonder if the irony of most of their product being a copyright violation of, mostly, porn will dawn upon them. Nah. Natural blindness to reality and, according to them, a market of over 1$ million dollars are strong motivators. When you play MMOs for a while you see enough cries for attention lawsuits that it isn’t a big surprise. There’s also the Taser vs Linden for having Taser fetish suits, but that one is Taser pointing to something else besides their product killing people when it shouldn’t.
Girls (and a few guys) go wild in here, as it’s seen by their online prostitutes (The perfect scenery, access to free gina tingles, money and sex without STDs or the signals of used merchandise, although it’s exchanged for becoming fat skanks), polygamy and affairs (the difference is that in the first case the guy is alpha AND unrepentant AND the wife is ugly; in the second the guy hides like a puss of his wife and is caught) and stalking cases (that woman have both the lack of sexual appeal and crazy eyes, just look at them).
We got the banning of gambling and child pornography — both mostly a result of pressure of the media and the law.
And, as icing in the cake and deserving of her own piece on this article is the (in)famous Second Life resident Prokofy Neva. Real name Catherine Fitzpatrick (it’s all over the Internet, I’m just the messenger), she first got banned from the Second Life forums for being an enthusiastic critic of Linden Lab (more like a result of her status as mistress of the text wall). Owner of three blogs, none of them very interesting for her habit of denigrating and calling unimportant things outside her world (and on occasion, the Marxist rage attacks). Typical female shaming language, as shown previously.
The issue with all these people is that they are heavily emotionally and economically invested in a virtual game. For them the Internet is Serious Business. They are just ripe for trolling, and trolling happened.
Enter the Patriotic Nigras. Born of previous attacks on Habbo Hotel (the same as Second Life, just with 2D isometrics and no third-party providers), when they used their traditional Men In Black with Afro suits for blocking the pools “for AIDS” (Pool’s Closed), and at have been told that it wasn’t possible an attack on Second Life in a thread of eBaumsworld.com, they decided to do a series of attacks to all the sectors of the SL community, specifically because it had become the refuge of their favorite targets the Furries (a bunch of fetishists of animal and anthropomorfic character sex; a sad result of watching too much Disney movies).
Of course, being an Internet Celebrity, Prokofy was interviewed by the mass media.
Fuck, this is a denial-of-service attack … it’s anti-civilization … it’s wrong … it costs me hundreds of US dollars.(Emphasis mine).
On other point, the female domination of Second Life is due to, unlike, lets say World of Warcraft, when males can get status as providers of rare and powerful items, the fact that males without personality are quickly weeded out. Although to be fair, without corporal language it is easier to look alpha on the Internet. And, as a sell-fulfilling prophecy, the amount of female avatar customization is bigger. But most males aren’t interested on glorified chat rooms anyway, so who cares.
And here we have it: a 3D based adult chat-room, a path for uglier women and men to find someone for having an affair, a major business territory (this one kills my faith in humanity), and everything nicely-wrapped for egomaniac designers that believe themselves and their product superior to all other online communities. The facts speak for themselves.
