Metaplace, the platform for virtual worlds in a browser invented by famous game-god and play theorist Raph Koster as something different than the heavier downloadable 3D Second Life, is too new and too young to have a proper FIC -- yet. But as with all beta-test love-fest tekkie thingies, it is slowly but surely getting together a collection of those who get more attention and more love (mainly self-generated) than others -- it's inevitable in any human enterprise. Generally, Metaplace seems to be free of that awful snarky cynical IRC 4chan sort of behaviour that so plagued SL from the beginning and plagues many other games and worlds, but that's because Raph himself is just a nice guy -- and famous even for being a kind of Magna-Carta-restrained game-god in principle by being the first to draw up an Avatar Bill of Rights -- and because -- like I said, the world is new.
Not surprisingly, Pixeleen Mistral (likely Mark McCahill in real life, Croquet dev and inventer of gophers and stuff in the glorious past) has shown up to Metaplace, where this time, he gets to be in the beta that he never got to be in SL (as far as we know). I've come to understand the paramount role of beta status among geeks -- primarily by being accused constantly myself of being some sort of beta-manque in SL. I was a beta tester in TSO and got the rare "simmy" -- I am a sort of no-show beta-tester in Metaplace as well. However, I was only an early adapter of sorts in SL. I have absolutely no beta-manque issues, though, because I'm not a beta-tester; I'm not a geek. If I stumble on some bug or feature issue, I report it, but it doesn't define my essense as it does for Mark and the other goons who have collected over there from Woodbury.
One of the first things I had to do in Metaplace some months ago was get the devs to explain to me how to ban the stalking and harassing Tizzers Foxchase, Pixeleen Mistral and other goons from my parcel. And among the reasons I've been reticent to become involved in Metaplace is because of the persistent presence of these goons every time I go there, and their continued heckling of me (there isn't a way to mute them yet apparently, or at least not one I found by clicking on every single thing i could click on and pull down). They follow me, trailing to my worlds, landing in them, making comment,sending DMs, and using the comments features broadcst to the whole world to write things like "you can do better than this" on some test world on a beta that I shouldn't have to kit out like the Taj Mahal to be left alone from asshole crap like that.
I'm not a believer in the "ignore" or "don't feed the trolls" school of dealing with griefing in this regard, which many counsel because they want to avoid griefing themselves. I don't concede the notion that "they are just pushing your buttons so don't react". I'm not a cynical nihilist like Julian Dibbles who thinks there is a "lesson for all of us to learn" from griefers, namely that "we must not take ourselves seriously." No. Uh-uh. I think griefers are as destructive in their way as RL terrorists -- while recognizing the total absence of moral equivalence -- and I think they need to be exposed, reported on, and confronted, and that no one should be caving to their bullying and blackmail. The moral of the story to learn from griefers is not to take yourself less seriously and concede that they get to unilaterally impose the immoral diktat -- but to continue to keep exposing what they do and shame them -- ultimately, it will serve at least to deter others from celebrating them and that is key to civilization -- when people stop thinking its cool to harm others.
It's very clear to me why Metaplace hasn't been griefed yet: Pixeleen has not given the signal to do so yet. He could do so at any minute. That's why it's like the mafia blackmailing you and making you get protection -- although of course there isn't any protection money being paid and it is far more subtle than that -- it's not conscious and I don't mean to suggest that it is. But it's an interplay that has consequences -- and one of the consequences of being in a relationship with Pixeleen, who is giving you saturation coverage and *positive* coverage against a backdrop of snarky bullshit contrasting everything else to your wonderfulness, is that you might become less than willing to move against him and his little pals when they grief. You will forgive them. Again and again. And pretend it will go away.
It won't.
So far, Pixeleen himself has bought himself freedom from harassment from the Woodbury goons by giving them saturation coverage in the Herald, egging them on, and even accompanying them on griefing missions -- essentially beating them not only by joining them, but inventing them. And Raph, while not consciously doing anything to prevent Herald/Woodbury griefing decided to pretend at some level that the Herald is just a newspaper, and Woodbury is just a university "to get along". He could also claim being ignorant of the trail of destruction these people have caused in SL, but there's always Google.
The essence of the Woodbury griefing expedition, which began some years ago, is to constantly claim in mounting tones of indignation and outrage that they are misunderstood, that they are just students who may have gotten a little carried away, that they mean no harm.
That they are organized, structured, franchised, and seamlessly interorganized with the Patriotic Nigras racist griefing operation then goes ignored, because they keep acting as if these PNs or b/tards or W-hat or whatever other more prominent and organized historically-known griefing group are just people who came on their sandbox because they didn't control it better. They'll be good now, honest *cough*.
I have witnessed time after time when we hold the Sutherland Dam meetings every Friday that these assholes show up to blow particles, replicate objects, try to poke sticks into the land from other parcels, and gang up on the Linden "safe area" surrounding the land where they are banned -- like juvenile deliquents. My guests are astounded that Mark McCahill, a supposedly respected expert at Duke University with a prestigious position, or Tizzers, who is supposed to be "a university student in the digital arts department of Woodbury University" etc. would waste their time on this idiocy, time and again, just to see if they can get another rise from me and others trying to hold a meeting, to get more coverage, cause more misery, and more disruption of events they don't approve of.
Recently I held a meeting on another sim about Iran and Twitter, and all the Woodburies showed up, with one of them rezzing thousands of self-replicating prims to force us all to leave and the sim to crash. Pixeleen, Tizzers, and the gang all arrived at event to describe my 3-D science fiction story en masse to heckle, pester, and finally get caught griefing and banned by the mods, who refused to pre-ban them because they said they were "innocent until proven guilty". My ass. How many millions of times does it take?!
These people are raging fucktards and assholes, and Raph Koster doesn't see this either because a) they are people who are in a culture and a class that he is in, so it's more opaque to him b) he hasn't really coped with the ramifications of all the things they've done in SL, it's too much drama for him to follow and he can't take the time b) he knows, but doesn't care c) he sees it and cares, but figures it isn't relevant to his grand schemes.
Raph made the decision to let the Herald be his main outlet in the virtual world blog scene -- or perhaps, it was something he didn't stop once it began, by trying to court others. Fortunately, MP will not live or die due to the Herald, and he can ignore them and diversify his feting at any time, because good work will be covered and recognized by tech as well as mainstream media.
The most duplicitious aspect of all this, however is that Pixeleen, in covering Metaplace, makes it seem like there is something different about the architecture or policies of Metaplace that make it more griefproof. Huh? There isn't anything of the sort; as I've just explained, the tools for quickly ejecting and banning and muting aren't self-evident or fully developed. Because the technology isn't of the type where you make prims and rez them on servers, perhaps they are less crashable, but wait -- we're supposed to now understand that the reason the goons have griefed the SL technology all these years is that it bore too close analogy to world-like atoms in its prims, and too much approximation to RL with its geographical simulation? Is that the sin of the Metaverse that the Puritans are trying to purge?
We've all long noted that griefers in fact, in their ideology, are like Puritans. They don't believe people should take virtual worlds seriously, become immersed in them, work in them, or socialize in them -- they are hysterically purist on this. They are determined to use violence, like RL jihadists, until you accept this premise. With the dull banality of evil, they hammer and hammer this message over and over again: don't try to make anything but a sandbox out of virtual worlds, or we will kill you. The cynical and nihilist message of Plastic Duck to Anshe Chung and CNET holding a conference about the value of virtual worlds was this: fuck you, here's a million prim phalluses, I will fuck you til you die. You do not get to do anything serious business -- because I will make serious business a cynical and much replicated and snickered about insolent Internet meme. And so on. Pure thuggery.
Thus, this event in Metaplace that got good coverage for Raph from CBS inevitably took a negative turn because the author invoked the SL phalluses -- an attack by Plastic Duck who as a griefing hero, was celebrated, feted, incited, and memorialized by the SL Herald. Raph has to realize that. These dots have to get connected.
Pixeleen has always had a burning hatred of Linden Lab beyond the reasonable hatred any of us might have for all the nasty things they've done and lies they've told because it is a personal sense of loss for him. SL, being a much-loathed "walled garden" with architecture that "couldn't scale" in fact filled up with millions of people and scaled to some 40,000 simulators in 3 years, during which time Croquet never got beyond a rabit putting an object on a grid and pointing a window with a portal in it. No other world got up and running as quickly, as well, and with profit for all concerned. And that chafes Pixeleen's butt very hard. It's a personal insult to him and a loss of manhood.
He also found himself totally engaged with the role of "muckraking" journalist in another man's world as a good form of addiction and co-dependency that could disguise his failures in his own world -- and his lack of ongoing glory after the old days of gopher. That's how I read it. You find another reason if you like why Pixeleen has remained obsessed with being ultra-nasty to the Lindens, who, after all, lay out this world and keep it running and never expel Pixeleen for anything, least of all his savage incitement of griefers and celebration of destruction.
The reason I quit the Herald is because Pixeleen would not do a thing to stop this thuggery constantly savaging me there in comments when I covered griefers' antics accurately as the property-losing and community-decimating acts they were. When I persisted in exposing his antics, he turned to joining and even leading their griefing posses inworld. He sided with the thugs even when they began demonstrating and calling for my dismissal due to my critical coverage --discussed and approved by Pixeleen! -- of someone who was, it turned out, rightfully subject to content removal by the Lindens, and who, as it turned out, was not some innocent artist unable to discern what was appropriate, but a cynical porn dealer with a highly-trafficked mall. Pixeleen decided to take the side of this "victim" and cave to her threats of libel suits -- even no libel was involved in the accurate portrayal of her antics inworld. Pixeleen is a thug himself for inciting and abetting other thugs -- that's been long clear.
Perhaps even Pixeleen tires of the sameness of the banality of evil -- travelling to my sims every week to grief me by egging on the alt posses that storm my sims, writing snarky pieces about me, etc. -- and the banality of constantly being the gawker.com of SL -- writing one more piece about the Lindens' perfidy or one more contrived and strained item on Zindra and adult verification and Gor and furries -- under alts, or through a stable of authors willing to submit to his BDSM control of pieces.
That may explain why Pixeleen, in a total 180 degree turn, decided to be "positive" about Metaplace and report this still-buggy newbie 2.5 world enthusiastically, gushing as if it were the Singularity on 2 legs. Pixeleen even hired a designer and made an office that looked like...the Sims Online. (I notice that the best artists in MP are those who have completely dropped the Sims references and buildings as places you inhabit and walk through like a stumbling Pac Man, and turned buildings into mere vestigal backdrops with other more interesting interactive options in the commons in the foreground, or on paths through the space.)
Pixeleen also takes part in all the MP thinky salons, such as with Bartles and Cory Linden and recently, even with Obama, which occasioned him to write:
but Metaplace does not have the strong tradition of event disruption enjoyed by Second Life, and seems to have been designed to largely avoid those sorts of issues.
What a LOAD OF CRAP.
As I noted, Raph Koster is merely one Pixeleen whistle away from a griefing. All that has to happen is that he cross Pixeleen, or not instigate something Pixeleen thinks "has" to happen fast enough (gender leg crossing, anyone?!) or do something that seems business-oriented and not "cool," and Pixeleen will signal to the hordes that it's ok to grief MP. That's all. We all know that, and we know how it works. Thugs, all of them. Furthermore, Pixeleen, as we've seen time and again, is not able to control the griefers he thinks he has on a leash. They get out from under control even after he has given them maxim weepy saturation coverage of their "recanting" and "rehabilitation" -- and he looks the other way when they grief again -- a kind of latter-day Norman Mailer sort of story.
And...wait a minute because I'm a dummie here but....Metaplace designed largely to avoid these sorts of issues? Again, huh? How?! Servers in SL hold 40-100 people. In Metaplace, they hold less, the stock number is 10, you can buy 20 but for special events you need to ask the game devs to crank up extra space -- something they seem to have a good idea about as a kind of extra pack that you buy as needed, rather than tiering all that space endlessly you can't use (a good solution for corporations that ended up with silos and tumbleweeds in SL). So the spaces are more closely controlled now by devs, the doors more closely controlled due to numeric limitations and that means it is not technology, but people screening the list.
But...the goons unable to grief? Of course they can grief. These people are masters at griefing, which they generally accomplish not by some scripted object but just by showing up as a team to heckle, and often heckle by pretending to be innocent guests so that no one feels they can pre-ban them (this played out in SLB6 once again). *They grief me in MP*.
Perhaps without prims, Metaplace is "less griefable" but it will only be a matter of time before people use on MP the sorts of things they use everywhere else -- chat spam, sound clips, wearables on their avatar, blocking of passageways, etc. etc. The ONLY reason they haven't done this so far is because Raph is "cool" and for them this space is "cool" -- and because maybe, they too, want to roll a new life and are sick of their evil ways.
But...it won't be cool for me -- and by extention a lot of people who have come to loathe the thuggishness and banality of the Herald and its constant incitement and celebration of the worst griefers of SL -- unless it is possible to eliminate these people from parcels, world chat, DMs, IMs, etc. and not *react* to griefing but *prevent it*.
Recently I did a test event -- and I had to endure Tizzers visiting. I logged off. No thanks. I couldn't find the instructions for banning on the parcel, had just made a new world, and there were the goons again. Fuck that shit, it is not ready for prime time. Just when I was getting enthusiastic about building more easily in Metaplace and adding behaviours to objects.
Here's what Pixeleen cherry-picked out of Obama's speech in Ghana:
"No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end. In the 21st century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success _ strong parliaments and honest police forces; independent judges and journalists; a vibrant private sector and civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in peoples’ lives."
Was the Linden Lab governance team listening?"
Huh? What does the Linden Lab governance team need to do except to cease permitting these goons back again on almost identical names -- like Tizzy Teardrop.
The real person who needs to listen to Obama's stirring worlds is Pixeleen and his Woodburies. They are the ones constantly undermining the rule of law and indulging in the brutality of griefing and the bribery of giving positive press coverage -- as long as you hang out with them, never criticize what they do, act as if they are a blank slate with no history of disruption. It's all contingent.
For example, right now, what the Woodbury goons have done is added my name as a keyword to their sandbox lots, which gets traffic of 3000-4000 with all their script-kiddies, and therefore ensure that any tenant of mine, or person trying to find my events, finds these grief parcels first, and even risks going to them and getting harassed, before they will find me. It means that it objectively harms my business by associating me with griefing escapades and stupid meme 4chan sandboxes, and also vexes my customers, and just causes havoc and disruption. It's the sort of thing that the laissez-fair Lindens will likely never do anything about, it's likely nothing short of a RL lawsuit could fix.
Key-word hijacking and griefing and harassment by a fake use of a keyword like this is something Raph will have to grapple with, too, eventually, however. Perhaps he'll grapple with it more sensibly and practically than the Lindens, perhaps not.
I'm going to be watching closely. Raph and Cuppycake made a strategic error in judgement by hooking up with the SL Herald -- and by extention Woodbury thugs.
This happened because Raph called on people to become evangelists during the closed beta. I turned down that call, because I want to be a blogger and a reporter, not an evangelist of somebody's technology. He needed evangelists then, like the Lindens needed Hamlet. It's a common recipe for how things are done in Silicon Valley.
So apparently Pixeleen or another Herald reporter signed up to be an evangelist under the terms of the beta -- you had to sign an agreement. Then Urizenus and others felt that they wouldn't be under the stigma of being fanboy evangelist, and would still keep clear their reps as unbiased reporters, by not physically being the individual signing up with Raph's beta, but being in the publication associated with that person. Typical griefing sophistry.
The beta is now open now, and the critical reporting began some weeks ago (although not from Pixeleen). Pixeleen, as he gets older in years, sees the benefit to himself perhaps for now of turning off the snark -- but he can't resist covering every single event with a blast against Second Life, like a sullen teenager with an authority figure complex. Coverage of Obama in Ghana in Metaplace had to be accompanied by the well-worn banal blast against SL as having white blurs (a common problem on laggy overfull sims where people opt not to try to log on again or move and leave avatars just for the sake of continuing to watch the stream) -- and somehow problems with governance.
If anything, the SL problems with governance continue to be in a default excessively literalist and hippie interpretation of "innocent until proven guilty" even when the permabanned Tizzers Foxchase, and the Linden-deleted islands (a rare thing) called "Woodbury" resurface in SL again as "Tizzy Teardrop" and "Woodburyland". How dumb is that?!
Ultimately, the case for banning Woodbury and deleting their islands wasn't made only by me and my numerous abuse reports. The lib Lindens may well have shrugged at them. The case was made when everybody else began reporting abuses, too, and when even the lib Lindens began to ask why these sims were crashing so much. And Raph, too, will eventually come around to "getting it" about Pixeleen and the Woodburies. I'm here to help him get it sooner rather than later.
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