Second Thoughts

Morphing

Some people ask me why I have three SL accounts when you can change your avatar so flexibly in SL...and the answer is not only "because I can," as it was in TSO, but because you can't change you name, and each avatar is supposed to signify a range of possibilities but still within an ur-character range...like my original Varian...

I get antsy every time I log on and see there still isn't something right about Prok's face...

...then it's off to making and re-making him or her a thousand times, saving some of the versions...

...with Prok appearing as a latter-day prophet in cyan-marble robes...

...with Prok appearing as a latter-day prophet in cyan-marble robes...

then Varian going red and donning a violet flower-girl dress...

...to languish on the chaise-longe made by Toast...

...then frustrated with none of them turning out right, going to the green spandex horror...

Africa

I got tired of trying to fix my avatar's hair, a maddening experience in SL especially with lag and graphic card problems plaguing you and despaired even of making a new avatar to fit my new store-bought wigs. So I decided to go to Africa...

and hence Narian was born out of my stock Varian Neutra...

...just using a swatch of cloth and the in-game template-for-dummies (I decided I couldn't master PSP today)...

Of course, I wanted to be a Nubean princess...

...although a real Nubean princess would have looked something like this...

...and wouldn't wear a diamond Cartier bracelet...

but something like this depicting the Goddess Hathor...

...well this is one of those issues Urizenus Sklar calls "high vs. low fidelity" LOL.

When I arrived at Cornification to show off my African dress and bangles, I discovered that Barnes and Toast were already *in* Africa. Toast (AKA Curbside) had devised a striped zebra as an avatar...

The zebras frolicked around...

...bumping heads...

...lying down...

...until they began to tire of deepest Africa (ne khodite deti v Afriku!) and began to shed their striped attachments, revealing that underlying zebra base of zpindly legs...

Trick Gardens

One of Barnes' sunny California suburban houses had a trick garden and secret subterranean passages. You'll look for them in vain among the fish...

...the wheelchair impresario has cleverly hidden them...

...In fact, you have to know the right flower petal to push, and the password to push on the menu, and then you could be instantly transported to an exotic place...

like um...a cloud...or a secret chamber...

which reminds me of the Jester Gardens of Peterhof, Petrodvorets, a short hydrofoil ride up the Neva from St. Petersburg to Peter's Summer Palace.

There is you step on a stone the wrong way, you will be treated to a trick shower out of nowhere. There are benches you sit on that also trigger the showers, and among the water-engineering feats is a shower curtain that surrounds you.

When Barnes isn't busy devising flower-passwords, he's trying to work up a bar scenario...

...if only to dance on it himself...

...and leaving me holding the glasses, whose scripts won't stop working...

....by now you're wondering what DOES go on in that secret chamber, but as you can see from this rare shot, it's an utter blank...

..unless a recent shopping trip for some...um...exercise equipment was it?...provides a clue...

Game-Within-A-Game

At his recent town meeting, Philip Linden talked about Second Life becoming the WWW or the MSN of MMORPGs. I took this to mean that SL might turn into a giant mall, where you would wander from store to store, seeing what sort of internal games people had devised using the tools of SL.

A group of developers within SL called Simcast evidently purchased land as a group and have been busy creating a game-within-the-game, which they describe as something like a D&D PVP type entertainment. Urizenus Sklar, the notorious gonzo journo of Alphaville Herald (now Second Life Herald tho it still reports on AV), is among the group. The game is on a sim (i.e. a plot of land in SL-speak) called Bedford.

The first time I flew over there, I banged my head on one of those no-go red fences people erect to keep others off their lot. Oh, a gated community, thought I, but after a little chat, I got Uri to give me a magic tag to wear that gained me admission to his game area, still in the beta phase. I crashed around endlessly, falling down stairs and getting trapped in dungeons until Uri finally led me out to a monastery.

"Have you visited the monastery at Petra?" he asks, as if everybody has been a tourist to Jordan. He and his confreres have made a striking liklihood of this awesome structure evidently known as the Kaznah, which actually wasn't a temple or a monastery, but a treasury. (We're reminded here that the Russian word for treasury is also "kaznya" but that they also use this root for "punishment" and "execution" as in "kaznit'").

I had thought he might be referring to Simonpetra, the monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, as in "Thou are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build My Church." No, this Petra is from ancient Bedouin belief.

Uri said the game had been modeled after Beowulf -- dragons and sacrifice and pre-Christian anticipatory symbolism and all. There was a certain amount of bone and crunching consonant sounds to be had...and even a mountain sacrificial area -- which Uri assured me was for goats only...

but I couldn't help thinking that the game was mixing up time eras. If it was medieval, why were there abandoned mines? Did they smelt ore in the medieval period? I guess they did, but the abandoned mine had a decided Wild West flavor to it.

The cemetary was taken out of every horror flick you've ever seen where the bony hand reaches up to grab you...there were Viking ships and various ghouls rising up out of the earth like the ghosts in a Harry Potter movie -- actually quite effective.

Then there was the hanged man on the bridge --

and I figured Uri must have been in the same 6th grade class in the 1960s as me, where we had to watch the 1962 Cannes Palme D'Or prizewinner, "Occurrence at Owl Creek" about the civil-war soldier who seemingly escapes a hanging on a bridge.

Remember how you thought you would live your life in fast-forward, as if the noose was around your neck and you were hurtling down to the creek? Now there's a new version of Owl Creek out...

I checked out the mead hall, but it was rather dull...possibly because all the exotic wenches with plunging necklines so beloved by SLH haven't been imported yet. Meanwhile, people decked up in sort of LOTR garb are busy making stuff. Well, it's not the milkshakes they're going to have TSO, but something appropriate to the era...erm 1377 different things you can make out of silk thread? Uri confessed that he might have cribbed some notions from A Tale in the Desert.

Finally, I asked Uri what they will call their game. Simcast, he said lamely. Surely they'll think up something better? I had a suggestion: how about Dragon's Cove? Har har. I asked him if the lowlands of Dianistan were near the dragon's cave I stumbled on while touring the sim....

For more screenshots, check out my photo album.

Dropping In

I can't say I miss the isometric world of TSO and its limiting lots but I was unprepared for how disorienting the uphills and downhills on my screen in TSO would feel after crashing around SL with its endless ribbon of horizon, boundless see, and 3-D translucent world. I still can't fly straight or land or sit down properly, and I'm told by other TSO refugees it might take me a month.

Dropped into DC and found some red dots blinking and surprisingly, XANADU still holding strong on the map.

But the ONLY house online was First Charisma. I found Chief Fred yapping in front of the mirror, AFK. I began to get seasick in his narrow hall of mirrors, sloping up and down my screen. A girl who was greening up, the only other visitor, said the reason why it appeared no one was around was because the 30th day had passed, and many people had recreated and moved to other houses or hoods....

To overcome the isometric slant, the best TSO designers worked with corners and furniture placed to fool the eye into thinking there is 3-D. Here's a bed nook at Xanadu Landing, designed by Guard of Traxx. Whatever the capabilities of SL, I find it hard to let go of the familiarity and ease of movement of TSO, though the ice is on the deck...

Style Wars

The first thing you notice about SL is the problem of neighbors and land, not unlike RL, especially neighbors who might build or do something that you might find unaesthetic or undesirable, and the problem of land that is perceived as "public" as well as private land being altered in ways people disagree about. The forums don't seem overly filled with the problem of aestheticism, but one poster made an impassioned plea about "a chain reaction in the area of people just horribly mutilating the landscape" over his decision to build a cannabis-themed park.

There's no question but that Second Life is flooding with droves of people who weren't beta testers, didn't get in on the ground floor, and are generally clueless about the norms and customs of SL, especially the canons of architecture and the laws of building. We know, because we're among them! With so many huge, looming and drop-dead beautiful buildings in SL, we wonder if the game peaked before we got there. Clearly a lot of people are junking up the landscape -- or so it might seem. One man's junk is another man's castle. I imagine some of TSO's top architects who have drifted over to SL will make their mark soon enough...

Here Traxx draws his sword as he makes his way along the coastline, wary of people who might be building to block the panoramic oceanfront view. I was straining the norms of stylistic decency myself, having donned a home-made jacket textured out of galvanized steel.

But before you could say "vampyre fan club," a little creature appeared suddenly from the sky, asking if we were looking for property. She was so hideous she was beautiful -- the time and skill that had gone into her av were impressive.

I'd have to leave it to Barnes to recreate, drag and drop into SL one of the most hideous artifacts of TSO, that dreadful furry chair. He says it's "fugly". Next on the menu: the cherubic fountain...

Losing the Tails

Style Wars can become rather heated at times. While designing a new seaside home, with a Harry-Potter like flourish of magic animation, Barnesworth Anubis changed into a cutaway morning coat with tails reminiscent of the illustratious Cornelius Vanderbilt of Alphaville. Sensing reiterative style issues imminent on the horizon, Traxx Hathor drew his AK-47 (or is it a Kalashnikov?).

CV lost the tails tout-suite. No one took responsibility for hair-ruffling issues in the stiff tropiocal winds of SL:

Faces

Just like the offline Sims game, you can upload textures into Second Life. In the old offline Sims, I used to make wallpaper "hanging rugs" from Tibet or art deco tin floors from jpegs off the Internet. You had to use the utilities Maxis provided -- and I'm not aware they have them now for Sims2. The advantage is that amateurs could feel as if they were artistic creators.

The difference is you can put the swatches on your sim in Second Life -- that is, you avatar. (Pretty soon you get used to the "translators' false friends" in the language of SL if you transpose it from the language of TSO. "Sim"=lot or piece of land in SL; "AV"= avatar, not Alphaville. Be warned.)

To be successful, the fabrics used in SL have to have a tiny enough weave or tight enough graphics that they look good when uploaded into the game and layered on the avatar. Of course, there are people who have gotten really skilled and drawing outfits in PSP or other programs, something like the skinmakers in TSO. Still, even with just a gold texture and a brass texture, I was able to make my avatar Varian Neutra fairly exotic -- and there is much more experimentation that could be done.

A Sense of the Past

"Orientalism" is the study of the Near and Far East by Westerners, and has come to be a negative term for critics like the late Edward Said and others who characterized this Western point of view as imperialist. How would we characterize the viewpoint of Second Life devs who create the setting for our avatars to fly around in? Onlinist?

Jean-Leon Gerome was a 19th century French painter who traveled extensively and depicted exotic scenes in places like Egypt or Arabia. Like some denizens of TSO and SL, slave auctions was one of his favorite scenes. He was a vehement opponent of Impressionism, saying Manet had chosen to be the apostle of decadent fashion, the art of the fragment.

A collection of reproductions of Gerome's best known works in one place can be found here. Roerich was a 19th century painter and mystic who also traveled through Central Asia depicting the exotic.

If a Eurasian studies the Orient, can you fairly call him an Orientalist?

A setting like SL, but did you ever see avatars like these?

Prayer on the Housetops by J-L Gerome

Pyramids by J-L Gerome

Roaming around SL to the Pyramid mall...

Oriental themes abound in SL, some possibly made by actual Asians...

Nightfall in SL, gazing at a bonsai created from scratch by Barnesworth Anubis, in a house he scrapped soon afterwards, like many other fractious kids building in SL...

As yet unspoiled view from a friend's new property... until I dyed my AV's hair with brass texture...

Said has held sway in universities for the last two decades but now himself is undergoing criticism. Are revisionists of revisionists of Orientalism to be called Occidentalists like Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, authors of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies?

Moveable Sunsets

You can build a house in Second Life, save it, then move it when you move to another property. Here Barnesworth Anubis levers up his creation to a new spot. If night falls, you can toggle back to your own personal sunlight to build by. Roerich might have moved the sun in Monhegan, Maine, as I don't ever remember it pasting on the mountains quite like that... The similarity in lighting choices between 21st century devs in online games and 19th century/early 20th century paintings is uncanny.