A Bit Wobbly

I'm going to give it to you straight here: this isn't really a post about Second Life. It's not not-a-post-about-Second-Life, but you aren't going to learn anything new about the virtual world from me today (as if you do ordinarily!). 

I'm feeling a bit wobbly today. Somebody give me some stablisers (remember when you used to need those on your bike? Doesn't that make you feel old? Ugh)! I awoke early this morning, turned on my laptop, loaded my undergraduate dissertation file, and wonder how the Hell I was going to get through the rest of the day. Three hours later, on a word count of three hundred and eighty-two, of which only eighty-one words are new, I am wondering if my target of one thousand words today is even remotely realistic. It's not even the only thing I have to do today. Damn university.

It isn't that I don't find my dissertation topic interesting - I do. I picked it because I was most interested in it. But 'most interested in it' doesn't quite translate into 'easiest or most accessible to write about', and that's where I am floundering. And, with just under two months to go before the final hand-in date, I'm wondering if I shouldn't be writing about something else. Something else such as...oh, I don't know...maybe a little something I've been keeping a blog about for almost a year now?!

The idea is redundant, of course; I can't change topics now. And it is highly possible that I would be getting frustrated right now with any topic I had chosen to write about, blog or no blog. But I am tired and fed-up, and it is oh-so-easy to wander over here and start writing about...well. Whatever I want to write about in relation to Second Life.

I even have an alterior motive for writing this. Okay, 'alterior motive' is the wrong phrase. I sat down to write this little whinge, and realised I could make myself feel better by relating it to something I have been meaning to making a little post about for a few days now. I think that the two go hand-in-hand rather nicely.

Ordinarily, Kitti Wytchwood is useless at hugs. For whatever reason, whenever Sian Pearl offers to give her a hug (I have to click 'yes' to allow it to animate Kitti), Kitti just kind of stands there like a dummy and does nothing. Or she waves her arms around in a manner reminiscent of a Dalek. Or her legs start to move but she doesn't go aware - spontaneous treadmill? 

But the other day, it worked! Kitti gave Sian a hug back. Sort of. 

Hurray!

I could use a hug right now.

Also - I think it was the same day as the Successful Hug - this happened. I'm not really sure what 'this' is, beyond that it most definitely happened:

What is going on, SL?!

Apparently, nobody could see it but me. On everybody else's screens, Kitti was doing just fine. Sigh. It did make me laugh, though.

Happy Rez-Day!

Wednesday just gone saw the happy occasion of the anniversary of Sian Pearl's rez day. A rez day is basically a virtual birthday; the day you were born (or reborn?), if you will, into the virtual world of Second Life. My own rez-day passed me by without me noticing, mostly because it is pretty close to my birthday and I was at home celebrating sans laptop, but it is not uncommon, it would appear, for people to arrange parties and get-togethers to mark the occasion. 

I received the invitation via notecard the night before, and then spend much of the following morning wondering what to expect. What is the etiquette for this kind of occasion? Do we, for example, have to turn up with presents? Is there a dress code? If any of you have followed the link to Sian's blog, you will see that she is quite   an avant-garde-ist when it comes to fashion, and it seemed almost rude to suggest turning up to her party having not made an effort to dress up. I would not, after all, turn up at a birthday party in the real world without putting on something vaguely nice and throwing a bit of war paint at my face. 

I actually saw Sian on the morning before the party, putting her outfit together, and suddenly the worrying I was doing over the bareness of Kitti's legs seemed quite ridiculous. I also felt hideously under-dressed. The question of why I cared so much about virtual nudity is not one I will even begin to try and answer with in this blog post. (For some reason, I cannot embed Sian's screenie of the two of us together within my post, so, if you wish to see it, click here).

The party itself was a little late to start - but that's the nature of online get-togethers, I suppose. Computer problems, time zone differences, and children refusing to go to bed can put the kibosh on even the best laid of plans. It was also a little slow to begin with; I got the impression that I was not the only one present who had not been to a rez-day party before. We were gathered at Sian's house, and the only music available for the party was whatever the sim owner happened to be streaming which, I am sure I heard Laertes mention, was some kind of violin concerto. Not, perhaps, the kind of music one normally associates with a party.

Sian Pearl greeting Laertes Modan (now known as Jaegen Fenris)

The ever-charming Gibson Kamachi

Sian Pearl and the slightly elusive Columbine Lavender...and Jaegen on the sidelines there...

After a while, however, more people turned up, and the conversation began to flow, and we were having a good time. Everybody looked great, and pretty soon Sian had us all dancing - even without the music.

SL dancing is a bit of a peculiar phenomena. The best way to explain it is that it works by animation override, but, as was the case for us, the AO belonged to Sian, and she made an offer, as it were, to each of us to invite us to join in. By saying "yes", the AO took over our avatars and we began to dance in unison. The effect was quite hilarious, particularly since many of the dance AOs Sian owns would appear to be female orientated, contorting poor Jaegen into the kinds of shapes the YMCA would have been jealous of.

You strut your stuff, Captain Fenris!

Go Jaegen! Not sure what Kitti is doing here...lol

He was a great sport.

As Sian was having computer troubles and was, really, lucky to be in SL at all, I became the designated photographer. Unfortunately, my SL photography skills are not that great, though I did my best. I tend to find with most party photos - in real life -, the images you think you are capturing are always much, much better than images you seem to find on your camera the day after. This...was pretty much the case for my SL  party photos, too, as you may have noticed. 

What can I say? I tried. 

We had a good laugh, and I got to meet a couple of new people who seem lovely, and I think, all-in-all, we did a pretty good job of celebrating the virtual birth of a person without whom our second lives would be rather dull. 

Maybe I should try and throw a rez-day party for myself next year. But who would turn up?!

More photos can be found on my flickr stream. 

Role-Playing: Part Four - What the Dragon Said

Okay, so, this truly is going to be the last in my running series of posts dedicated to RP. That does not mean, unfortunately for you, that I am going to stop talking about it altogether, however. Sorry. And I have decided that I shall write about the aforementioned "Restrained Love Viewer" as something completely separate. Let's just say that when I do, you will understand why. 

So, I made a new friend this week. No, she is not imaginary. Her name is Salix, and she is often involved in role-playing of a more fantasy based nature, which is handy for me because I am a huge fantasy buff, but have had absolutely no luck finding decent fantasy RP sims within SL. From what I have learned, most fantasy sims only accept role-play about happy Tolkien-esque elves or forced sexual slavery, and I must confess that neither of those themes particularly appeals to me. Salix seemed to know some good ones, however, and I had a great time writing with her. 

Did I mention that Salix spends much of her time as a dragon?

If I didn't have a height complex before...I do now...

Whilst we were writing, Salix's computer crashed and my new purple acquaintance vanished from the sim. Left alone and feeling somewhat vulnerable in unfamiliar territory, I was soon accosted by a much smaller dragon who introduced himself, told me that he had seen Salix vanish, and asked if we had been writing together. I replied that yes, we had, and we got talking generally about RP. He suggested to me that I wouldn't be such an amateur writer if I went further up the hill and engaged with the people who usually role-played there.

What was so special about the hill-people? Well, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea because they weren't logged into SL at the time. From what I could gather, however, they write in paragraphs. Great long paragraphs of text, heavy with speech and detailed actions - which isn't something uncommon in SL. I have seen it taking place at Necronom, and a little at Botany Bay. What surprised me was that this man quite brazenly suggested that this style of writing RP was the "right" or "best", or even the "elite" style. He had, as far as I am aware, not seen Salix and I writing together, and thus had no idea what my writing style was like. It took quite a lot of my resolve not to turn around and tell him that, actually, I was a published poet...but that small success was a long time ago, and the only person that really cares about it is my mother (Hi Mum!), so I held my tongue. 

I also held my tongue because I appreciate that he was trying to be helpful, and he said that he compared himself to them and had thus decided that he was a bad writer. I am quite sure that that is not true! And it made me wonder how many other people are wandering around role-playing sims avoiding active players because they think they can't hold their own. That makes me sad.

As I have suggested...this kind of posting of text-walls is, in my opinion, simply another approach to role-playing. It is not any higher or lower than any other form. For some people, this works, and that's fine - but it is not the style for me. What I like about SL is the capacity it has for a kind of quick-fire, quick-response; the story can move at pace, if you allow it to, and there is the capacity for a good rapport to build. I personally don't necessarily need or want to know that your character took a puff of a cigarette in text when I can see them doing it live on my screen, unless that particular puff is significant to the plotline - but that is entirely my preference.

There's a kind of formula that a lot of my role-playing responses generally follow, though, of course, if every line I wrote was like this, it would become very dull very quickly. I like to give myself an expression, put an emotion on my face."Kitti Wytchwood looks distraught". Then, I add in an action, even if it's only a small one. "She sighs heavily and rubs her eyes" (before you jump on my back, I don't have an animation for that gesture, so shush) . Finally, she should say something, "..."I'm so sick of all this fuss!"..." or make some kind of action or movement that does the talking for her. "She moves towards the door as if to leave". And that's about as lengthy as I get.

One of the major flaws with SL RP demonstrates itself right there, however; not all participants are massively active. Often, writers will be doing other things whilst writing, and so the gaps between responses can be quite lengthy and, for me, it thus loses its punch. If I wanted to wait half an hour for a response, I'd be opening my old role-playing forums again, not dancing around forests and sci-fi bars in SL. It can be very frustrating, but you can hardly blame someone for having a life, and as you wait for someone to type back, you often find that your mouse, having a mind of its own, is moving across the screen to the "Mozilla Firefox" button....

Less "dancing", and more "standing around looking surly", but you get the point.

There is also an often large gap between what is written in the text, and the visuals. This is something that I feel has been running through all of my posts about role-playing - the kind of ineffectuality of it all. If I slap you, via text, my avatar will not raise her hand to slap yours. I have no doubt that animations exist that allow you to make this kind of thing happen, but they are not something I possess, nor something I would look to possess, and they make for a kind of disjointed chronology. 

The most obvious disruption of this nature actually demonstrated itself this morning in role-play with Sian. I wrote that "Kitti Wytchwood slipped through the door", but I had not, in fact, slipped through the door. I was standing on the other side of a closed door, which, once I clicked it, slid wide open. I then walked through the door, clicked on it again and watched it slid back into place with a clunk. There was nothing "slippy" about it. I then said that Kitti was hovering nervously near it, when in actual fact her AO was making her wander all around the small room, waving her arms around.

So this, right there, is my big conclusion. The one I have taken four posts to get to :P. SL does not aid RP, come to take a pleasure in realising a character's physical appearance line by line. It provides a medium with a pretty backdrop, and no doubt makes Linden Labs a whole lot of money as we all scrabble to make sure that we are dressed correctly.

And, for the record, I'm not dressed correctly in that screenshot.  There is no way that those boots are fantasy regulation. Don't tell the elves.

Is it going to stop me role-playing? No it is not.

Role-Playing: Part Three - Denizen, Deviant

Almost an ideal world? (I jest)

I'm imagining that this is going to be the second to last post specifically dedicated to role-playing. Hurray! It could probably be the last, but I have a feeling that I'm going to have an awful lot to say about the Restrained Love Viewer that I promised to write about in part one, and I'm also concerned that I am far too wordy, and won't be able to get my oh-so-enlightening conclusion into this post, either. We shall see how it goes.

The most confusing thing about SL RP, in my opinion, is that the medium itself seems to require a level of role-playing, anyway. When I joined SL, I made it quite clear to those who answered my questions that I was a student, carrying out a kind of enthnography for my Performing Online class. Not long after I joined Laertes' crew, I met a lady who said she was a Sociology lecturer who was investigating the virtual world, too. I excitedly told one of my university housemates this and he replied "Or so she says". I felt a little put-out. What motive did this woman have to lie? Where was her verification that I had not lied to her? It doesn't sound all that likely, really, does it? What business has Theatre and Performance Studies in/with Second Life? But at the same time...in a world where the only limits are your imagination (and maybe your bank account), what tethered her to the truth?

You've got to admit, though; Sociology sounds a lot more plausible than Theatre.

From what I have observed of SL, there seems to be a particularly large community of RPers who surround themselves in vampire lore - and I don't think it would be wrong to say that it is lore heavily inspired by Len Wiseman's "Underworld" films. Many of the vampire sims I have explored are very dark and blood-laden and, as much as I am totally in love with "Underworld", I wish I would come across something a little more inspired by Anne Rice and her beloved Vampire Lestat. But that's beside the point.

"Behold, the Queen of the Damned"

There is a system in place within SL that allows for avatars-turned-vampires to "scan" other avatars and see which ones are fresh, and which are blood dolls - that is, which have never been fed on by a vampire, and which are routinely fed on. Not being a vampire, I have no idea what this looks like, or what form the information takes, but I have friends in dark places, and they tell me it is so. 

If they wish to feed on you, they have to send through an attack request. A little message pops up on the bottom of the screen, announcing that "Dracula would like to attack you. Do you accept?". If you do accept, a whole system of animations are set into motion: the vampire will pounce onto your avatar and bite your throat. You as the victim will struggle a little, before collapsing onto the ground. I presume that, after a short while, you can get up and act like nothing happened. There is certainly no lasting damage to the victim. No lasting physical damage, anyway.

Disturbing as it may seem, I actually think that the system is really clever. Though the requests remove any kind of surprise or danger from the attack, the animations give it a slight tangibility that, say, the slavers text-shoving a grenade in my mouth did not have. It does not rely solely upon the text to make it happen, and I think there's a brownie point for SL in that.

It is more complex than that, however. As a vampire, you have a blood level of five litres that you must keep replenished. If it hits zero, you will be sent to a kind of limbo, where you have to pay an arm and a leg (not literally, I don't think) to get out again. What that basically means is that you have to find a willing victim and feed each night - or at least fairly regularly. I have no real clue how fast the blood level drops. But still: that seems like a lot of work, particularly if you weren't planning to do some vampire RP that night...

When I was told about this, I was concerned that my vampire friend was stuck in this system forever. She did assure me that there is a way out of the needing-blood system...she just doesn't know what it is. I'm slightly worried that one day I shall log in and she will have vanished from the face of SL because she forgot to get all deviant.

In the spirit of RP and sims with a dress-code, I tried to make myself over in vampire-style. I was not particularly successful. Perhaps I should stress that I spent zero money on this, lol...it made me laugh, at least:

The screenshot at the top of this post, "in character, no guns, no kids", is a sign from an RP sim that I confess, I cannot remember the name of. Those were the main rules for the sim, along with the suggestion that I pick a role type to play as:

"Lurker, Innocent, Deviant, Denizen". None of them sound particularly appealing, huh? And once you picked one, it send me a ream of information via a notecard, and asked that I submit my application to take on that role to this, that and ome other person. I checked the radar, saw that nobody else was around, and walked straight passed.

In their notes, however, it was suggested that this was a dark sim, where dark things can happen, and that we should dress according, so...

I put my dirt layer on:

Alarming poses in the background, huh? What was supposed to take place on this sim again?

You knew I was going to mention the dirt again.

Make-Over

There seems to be a common meme, if that is the right word, amongst blogspot blogs to have "Silent Whatever-Day-It-Happens-To-Be" posts occasionally that only feature photos. I clearly love the sound of my own voice too much to do that, but I do have some photos (and by photos, I mean screenshots) to put up here.

My avatar had a bit of a make-over. She is now a less-cartoony brunette who only walks a smidgen like a supermodel, though she is apparently still sexy as pixels go. I'm very pleased with her, but she doesn't really look like my old avatar, so I figured that I ought to introduce you before I start posting new screenshots and you think I've stolen someone else's. Apparently, she looks quite a bit like me. Somehow, I think she manages to look super-English, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

The Second Life viewer has been updated, too, so that now the interface does not appear on screenshots. Before this update, as you have seen, the basic framing of the viewer was visible on screenies, though any open windows or tabs, say, to my inventory, or any chat boxes, were not visible (to create those screenies of the chat panel that I used a couple of posts ago, I had to hit the print screen button and paste them into Paint Shop Pro to save them as jpegs, which was incredibly tiresome).

Either way...they will now supposedly look more like realistic photos of a (more) realistic person. I shall let you be the judge.

Say hallo to the new and improved Kitti:

Kitti 3.0

Because screwing my face up and sticking my tongue out is one of my favourite things to do.

I shall return with a less show-y post pretty soon, I'm envisioning. Maybe something about lag, or the gender politics of my new AO. Or maybe role-playing. Stick around?

Sexy Doesn't Run

I have a feeling that this might be a long post. I apologise in advance, and will do my best to break it up into digestible chunks. Stay with me here? I promise it's relevant...

SL offers three modes/method of propelling oneself into motion - walking, running, or flying. Most of the tutorial is meant to show you how to swap between the three (though swapping between them is the simple part), and then you are thrown into the SL realm and expected to not bump into things.

You cannot avoid bumping into things.

Walking

When I first began using SL, I felt a bit like I was beginning to walk again. It goes back to that idea in "The Matrix" when Neo turns to Morpheus and asks why his eyes hurt. He's never used them before, and now he's getting electric-light glare from the hacker's shiny head. You have unplugged your brain from one body and fastened it into another, only this time, you're not only relying upon your brain signals and your body muscles to make your legs move. You also have to factor in the middle man of computer keyboard, and Linden Lab's scripting skills. And Linden Lab's scripting skills mean that you waddle around like a duck, or like you've lost your horse, and you look as if you could topple over at any minute - and just when you've got the hang of it and believe that you've got the mouse-controlled camera and legs-controlled arrow keys working in symbiosis, a wall will appear where there wasn't one a minute ago and you'll be stuck like a spider in a bathtub.  

Once you've learned to walk again, running is pretty easy. All you have to do is turn the "run" function on. I find it harder not to bump into things when I'm moving more quickly, so...maybe it isn't so easy...but what I mean to say is that you don't have to learn a complete new set of controls to operate it. 

 Flying

Now that leaves the one everyone gets excited about - flight. Humans are obsessed with flight. We're always looking up at the sky, our deities are in the sky, and the ambitious Americans took the eagle, a king of the skies, as their national mascot. The English flag is predicated on the cross of a man who conquered a dragon (though if the dragon could fly, I don't know why it didn't just fly away from George the tin-can). Maybe I'm getting away from the point. We have all longed to be able to join Peter Pan in the sky, and now here is a programme offering us a new body with the ability to fly - no impractical wings, no jet engines, no magic!

Hovering in mid-air...not sure why I need to keep my arms out like that.

My laptop cannot cope with flying and high graphics, hence the grey-blue shapes. Sorry.

In most sims (platforms/places), flying is not allowed. The screenshots above were taken in a sandbox, which is a place meant for building and such, so I had a pretty free reign with what I did there. But in structured sims such as cities, towns, amusement and leisure parks, it departs from a norm, a reality, that is trying desperately to instill itself in that virtual world. It isn't just that other avatars hit "/frown" if you swoop down on their picnic in the park or divebomb them on their walk down the Champs Elysee, either - the owners of the sims can choose to physically "turn off" the flight mode on their platform, and then no matter how many times you hit the "page up" key, your avatar will not take flight. Mankind has long dreamed of this power and, once given it, has banned it for unconventionality. 

A round of applause for hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen! Another for cutting your nose off to spite your face! And another, finally, for the fact that it isn't only the British who oppress themselves into muted formality. Once again, it would seem that the virtually limitless realm of the virtual is too limitless for us land-bound folks to be comfortable.

 Running

I've not seen many avatars running around SL either, and - as a small dig at the nature of gender in SL that will be referenced later in a dedicated blog post, if I remember to include it -, in my experience, you are far more lightly to see men run than women. I'm going to take a premature stab at the reason for this and say that it is to do with Animation Overrides.

Animation Overrides

The only way to get rid of the default duck-waddle walk is to buy and put on a little device called an Animation Override, or AO for short. You cannot see them in my screenshots (because I use the in-game screenie function which automatically hides such), but down the sides of my SL interface there are two sets of buttons that allow me to turn on the override for individual functions, as well as choose from about five different styles of movement. That is because my avatar is actually "wearing" (they are not visible on my body, they are just attached to it, if that makes sense) four different AO systems. You don't need four, but I kind of had them heaped on me by friends, and thus I cannot work out which one is overriding which animation exactly and I cannot seem to work it out by mixing and matching them. The only reason I know that they are doing anything is because I have been transformed from a unseated cowboy to a supermodel. I did not choose to walk like a supermodel - all five of the options were variations of supermodel, and whilst it is funny to walk like that, it is a generally accepted norm that I should. Thus, the SL realm has become my permanent catwalk. 

I suppose the other testament to their overriding success is that when I am standing still, my avatar will put her hands on her arse (meant to be her hips, I think, but it's not exactly well-scripted), or shift her weight to one leg and put her hand on her collarbone or fan her face or whatever it is she is doing. She also messes with her hair in a way I would personally never do.

Is this meant to be a flirtatious and girly pose? Fetch me a bucket.

What none of my four AOs seem to do, however, is override my run animation, so I run exactly like I did when I joined SL, and that just does not fit into the canon of sexy that the override is meant to imbue. In the AOs I have seen on male avatars, the emphasis is more on manliness and strength, and so they run like they are going to save someone's life in "Baywatch" - and apparently that is just fine.

I don't suppose people run around that much in the real world, though...and that's why we're all in a flap about obesity and Global Warming...