Turned

Vampires love knitted jumpers. Didn't you know?

sian pearl teleported to my skybox yesterday and found me on the roof, taking photos of Kitti posed with crystal tears and pointed white teeth. She said, 'Kitti has been a Creature of the Night a lot lately. Has she been Turned?' 'No,' I replied. 'Kitti is everything and nothing.' 

And then I giggled to myself (as I do) because I felt a little bit like Kohta Hirano's Warrant Officer Schroedinger, who likes to state often, courtesy of his maker's sense of humour, that he is 'everywhere and nowhere'.

I couldn't find any 'about' links that didn't lead to massive Hellsing spoilers, so I'm settling for this picture of him. Google his name at your own risk.

It's that line again, though, isn't it? - the making and breaking of Second Life, the reason to sign up and the reason never to sign in ever again. An avatar has the capacity to be everything and anything, but also to be absolutely nothing. Not everybody sees nothingness as a positive, nor as an opportunity. Freedom isn't necessarily the absence of all rules, regulations and obligations, but instead the ability to have decisions to make, and to make them for yourself. In nothingness, decisions have questionable use and importance, and if we cannot find a use or importance within ourselves, we flounder. I have said this a thousand times here, although I think that might be the most succinctly I have ever written it out.

It was kind of funny that sian made this observation, however, since all I think Kitti has consistently been lately is half-naked, and a little bit, well...of a fairy. This is new for me, as a lover of fantasy, because fairies have never been a creature I was especially interested in. And let's be fair here, Kitti doesn't look like the sort of fairy who is going to go around sprinkling magical dust or making flowers bloom, or collecting teeth - unless she'd knocked them out in the first place.

Mean Mischief

The naked-and-fey thing is courtesy of Monica Outlander and her BlackLabel collection. I haven't stopped wearing it for any real length of time since the Golden Thread show two weeks ago. It isn't that Kitti doesn't have other beautiful clothes - because she does - but I just keep switching back to the Miamai outfits. I'm addicted. And Monica Outlander is not a fan of t-shirts. We'll have the self-confidence conversation later.

I like the opportunity to play with Kitti's appearance, to dress her up sometimes as a vampire or a mean-looking fairy or anything else I can imagine. There are a few basic elements that I like to keep the same - her face and body shape, her hair colour (between two shades), her eye colour, etc - but everything else is up for grabs. And I enjoy that I can do it with such ease, and that the consequences of each change can be as significant or insignificant as I allow them to be. I am a whimsical shaper of nothingness. Let's go and play.

And on the subject of playing, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that the new year brings you what you need to (or to continue to) be happy. I will see you on the other side of the sea of wrapping paper.

Stuck in Yesterday

Tiny irony: I took this screenshot last night...so technically, I took it yesterday. That is the level I'm at here.

Plurk has been buzzing lately with conversations about the changes Linden Labs have been trying to make to the Terms of Services and, freshly, news about the Australian annulment of same-sex marriage. I know very, very little about the former issue, but I saw the second on the BBC, and right in the middle of the television screen was a placard held by who-knows-who dismissing gay marriage because it isn't accepted in the Bible.

How are these two issues connected? They both represent our attempts to make new rules and regulations for today's people, and we aren't finding it very easy. If anything the media says is to be believed, there are many other ways in which our law system is becoming out of date. The very foundations of our societies are formed by treaties and agreements signed over fifty years ago by people who thought we'd all be flying around on jetpacks now if they could imagine this time at all. 

Those treaties and agreements are intensely important, and whilst they do the job generally, they don't take into account the way we have changed. They don't take into account the Internet, nor the collaborative way in which it allows people to work and to share ownership. In an age of CCTV and Obama reading our emails, we need to redefine 'privacy' and what we are entitled to. In an age of school shootings and children on Prozac, we need to have a conversation about mental health and gun ownership. I could go on.

That people think they are exempt from the law, even when that law has been revisited recently, is obvious: Mark Duggan, slavery in Bristol, even the crisis in Syria are examples of that. These issues should, technically, have been covered by the Geneva Convention, as well as anti-racism initiatives and on-going investigations into police brutality and what it does to your brain to hold a gun in your hand. It's a huge job but we have to keep going back, to look at these problems, to look at the laws and the attitudes that govern them. We need to make sure that they are applicable and relevant to the people they are governing, and we need initiatives in place to spread awareness, understanding, and acceptance of responsibility. 

I am not so naive as to think that there will never be people who commit crimes, and I know that there are a million mitigating factors that come into play, but I don't see how we can be ready to deal with those maturely and sensitively if we are not sure of what, exactly, we have allowed and not allowed in the first place.

I admit, I am not a religious person, but I have grown up in a country whose laws come from the Bible, and I have respect for the Bible as an important and sacred-to-some text. The Bible encourages us to be responsible and to be conscientious - to think of others as well as ourselves, and to look at each other with love. When in doubt, I understand that it is one of many places people go to look for an answer, but I think it is very, very important to remember that those words were committed to paper centuries ago. They weren't given to us; they were given to the people that lived centuries and centuries ago. They were given to people that couldn't imagine the world being anything like the way it is in 2013. They couldn't imagine a jetpack to even begin to envision us flying around with them right now.

The rules we make have got to take into account the way we have changed as well as the ways that we haven't. Go back to Geneva, make our current leaders sign the treaties they weren't even alive to agree to the signing of in the fifties after we have updated them to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the Internet and the liminal space of an airport. 

This will take time, and I am sure that we will face teething problems. The trick, I think, is to be patient but determined. Keep going, keep pushing, keep being sympathetic to everyone, not just those that share your cause. Keep going keep going keep going.

We are not the same people we were twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. And we all deserve happiness, safety, honesty and love.

Below the Belt

Only in SL can I show off any ballet poise, and my pants

This subject was not my idea. I was on a bus in the city centre when the text came through, and when I read the proposal, I burst out laughing. The person I was with at the time looked at me, perplexed, and when I showed him the text, he shook his head and sighed. If Red thinks it's a silly/difficult/strange idea, then I'm all for it. But let me get this straight from the off: this isn't funny.

As a general rule, Second Life avatars do not have pubic hair. There is no pubic hair on any of the skins I have in my inventory, and to be perfectly honest with you, I'm not really sure if it even possible to come by a layer, tattoo or otherwise, for any of those skins that would allow me to (dare I say it?) naturalise Kitti. I know that it is possible to get them with some skins in SL, but, with some, you have to pay extra, on top of the cost of the skin, for what is essentially a natural body state. It is really strange that "waxed to complete and utter perfection" is the standard, not "I was born human and I'm pretty sure waxing hurts". 

Why is that the case - why this inversion? And why are both not equally available, in the same packet? - because I am not suggesting, either, that if you wish to alter the state of your body, you should have to pay an arm and a leg for it. Skin designers, I'm looking at you.

The issue of shaving (anything) is a difficult one, with some accounts that suggest it began in the time of the Ancient Babylonians. There were notes made by Julius Caesar about the hair of the Britons, though I believe that was more in awe of their lacking Roman-soldier buzz cuts than any real comment on their shaving habits.

I was under the assumption, though I cannot place why, that it really took off as a social norm in the 1920/30s, with women being encouraged to shave...well...everything. Maybe the Wall Street Crash was so bad, they had to rely on sales of razors..?

I have no doubt that the image of the sexually and emotionally mature woman, made seem pre-pubescent, innocent - Hell, even manageable! - is one that was created by a gender-unequal, patriarchical society, and I am aware of the trope of the hairless porn-star. I don't know which clever person came up with the idea of placing on women, and men, the time-consuming dayly chore of drastically altering the surface of their skin, but I would personally like to shake their hand.

No, really, I would. With an electric buzzer taped to my hand. Repeatedly. I have a lot of patience when I am being vengeful and vindictive.

It's crazy. The idea is crazy. The money involved is crazy. The time involved in crazy. The time spent wondering if I did a good enough job shaving my legs today to be able to wear my P.E. shorts/this dress/this skirt. The time spent wondering if I did a good enough job shaving my underarms to be able to wear this vest top today. And will I regret wearing it this evening? Despite my better reasoning, my better logic, I have bought into this culture wholesale, been brought up into it, and once you're in, it's really, really difficult to get out again. 

And I'm going to go out on a limb here - I think that women get it worse than men! I know that there are men who also seek to remove their bodily hair, but in my experiences, such is not an widespread expectation. Women are expected, generally speaking, to be hairless from the nose down. If not by the common man, then by the common lingerie designer - and the common SL lingerie designer. 

Another elegant pose as I stomp merrily through this topic

Or, worst of all, by other women, who gawp and stare in changing rooms and mutter behind their hands. In my first year at university, I was waiting for a friend of mine who was late for a rehearsal, and when she turned up, the first thing she did was not apologise and get ready to work, but launch into a tirade about how she'd seen a middle-aged woman in the showers in the gym who had not 'had the decency' to 'trim up a little, like this woman had committed treason for daring to have pubic hair. 

To return to the lingerie: as I am sure you have noticed, but were oh-so-politely refraining from saying, Kitti's smalls are just that. Small. There is no room there for anything at all. If I decided to go full-out and hunt down the most full pubic-hair tattoo anybody has ever seen (never mind that all pubic hair that appeared in a quick marketplace search has been tweezered in some way), there is no way it would fit under that tiny piece of cloth - and that isn't because I picked out the smallest bit of fabric I could find to make a point. This is a standard underwear size/shape for SL. This raises another question: if you have pubic hair, why should you hide it? If we expect it to be there, why should it be kept hidden?

Good question, perfectly valid. But I've got you. The thing about equality, and having the agency to make your own decisions about your body, is that it is my choice whether or not I want to hide it, and  I would like some control over that. Personally, if I wanted you to see, I'd take my damn underwear off. And whether I was showing you me as a comfortable and natural, or me as a potential model for the 'Venus' adverts should also be entirely my decision. And I wouldn't take my underwear off for you if I thought you were going to make a judgement about it either way, so there!

I find myself coming back to that old idea of mine - that we could/should/sometimes do use SL to recreate, ad infinitum, the best of the 'first' world. In that 'second' world, Kitti does not have to worry about shaving or waxing or trimming or plucking anything, because the SL gods have decided to do the job for her, permanently. The weight has been lifted, but for all the wrong reasons. Kitti shouldn't have to worry, because hair removal shouldn't be an issue in the first place.

I think Kitti feels a little exposed...

 If we cannot accept pubic hair when it is a two-dimensional drawing in a virtual world where it has absolutely no physical reprecussions whatsoever, how are we ever meant to reconcile ourselves with our natural bodies (and by 'reconcile', I mean 'accept', which is not necessarily the same as 'refuse to shave') in the real world?

There is so much more that I could say, but I have written a lot. I suppose the bottom line is this: keep your assumptions and your opinions out of my underwear unless I invite you in.

Choose Freedom?

A few posts ago, I decided not to attempt to write about slavery in SL, as a friend of mine had done a better job on the subject than I could hope to. Well, whilst I still hold this belief, I have decided that I do want to say something about the matter. 

I apologise for lacking screenshots in this post - I did not want to implicate any sims or sim owners in this subject, as it is not meant to be an attack on such, but the start of a discussion of. 

It would appear that the terms "sci-fi" and "human slavery" are synonymous in SL, and I suppose that the notion arises out of the anxiety over controlling something as unfathomable as space. There are plenty of areas on our own planet that we have difficulty in policing, and it is easy to imagine how such a problem might multiply as humans stretch out onto other planets.    Many of the most popular sci fi sims appear to be through-points - space hotels, markets or truck-stops, designed to cater to the (temporary) needs of those passing through. As such, they can be read as liminal spaces, the nature of which is defined by whatever community happens to be gathered there at a time - soldiers, slavers, salvagers, clones, exiles, whatever. Taking into account the size of such sims, it is possible that the nature of the sim will be constantly in flux as new avatars teleport in, and resident avatars hop out. Given how easy it is for an SL user to change their avatar's clothes, it is possible that I could be the captain of a ship one minute, and a space hitch-hiker the next (I always have a towel ready in my inventory for such a purpose). 

That these sims locate themselves on "the outer rim" - on the edge of the known, mappable universe, as it were,  suggests a desire to be liberated from police-able systems. In terms of role-play, that is understandable, as it destabilises previously accepted social norms and makes possible a wider range of simulated activities. If the fear of punishment - albeit a questionable fear - is removed, how do humans behave? What governs them - and how strong is that governance? I think it is fair (if a little general) to say that, as a race, we are fascinated with the breakdown of society. We want to see what happens if we take on board the philosophies of, say, those in "Trainspotting", or "Fight Club", and SL offers a space in which we can do this without fear of permanent death.

Slavery works to challenge notions of equality, and represents for us, I think, the ultimate image of a person devoid of agency. Perhaps it is the closest we can come to the idea of "Hell on Earth", and I don't think it would be beyond reason to suggest that we (as society) view slaves as the lowest of the low. Are there any rungs left on the ladder to slide any further down at this point?

To return to "Trainspotting" and "Fight Club": it seems to me that many of the rules these films present to be done away with by their characters are rules concerning social responsibility. In becoming a slave, your actions become devoid of responsibility because you are no longer the one controlling them. When you place that situation into a world such as SL, it opens up a space of freedom that might begin to look attractive to inhabitants of a real world in which we are encouraged to constantly be aware of the consequences of every action we take.  

Slavery is a fact of life in most parts of the Rim and Deep black, and arguably in most parts of the ‘verse.  Slaves in the Rim and Deep black are acquired by many means. Slaves have a legal status, as property but with limited rights to care for their health and welfare. - "Slavery in the Outer Rim and Deep Black ver b-02" (a notecard available in SL)

However, when human trafficking and slavery is a fact of the real world, and we hear on the news stories of hundreds of victims the world over being forcibly removed from their home country and forced to work in another as labourers or prostitutes, where does that leave us? Suddenly, the social responsibility denied to a real slave becomes doubly encoded upon the virtual - and I am talking here, of course, of those who consent to allow their avatars to work as slaves, however temporarily, in SL. Bringing the word "freedom" into the discussion, on the side of the slavers, seems morally repugnant. Does the virtual world or, indeed, any world, have the right to take such an atrocity and turn it into a form of entertainment?

I am not suggesting, by any stretch of the imagination, that slavery as recreated in SL is anything akin to the kinds of slavery that go on in the real world, and nor am I saying that SL must become a site of protest for every ill that transpires in the realms of the palpable. But do we have an ethical responsibility, if we are to engage with slavery in SL, to stage some kind of political statement? Do we have a moral duty to denounce such practices and those that get direct enjoyment out of them - to de-eroticise what has arguably become a fetish? 

The subject becomes difficult when you take into considerable the consensual nature of SL. Nothing can be done to your avatar without your consent, and so the "plight" taken on by those in the virtual world is one that, for whatever reason, they have chosen to take on. It is not slavery, and not even a representation of slavery. It is the aesthetic, perhaps, of slavery - it looks like slavery but, actually, most of the agency lies with the slave. Ultimately, even if you feel as if you have been forced into slavery in SL, you can press the "escape" tab and the whole virtual world will vanish from your view. Your avatar will be wrenched out of that life instantly. 

Now, I do not engage in slavery, in SL or anywhere else. I have never dressed or cast Kitti as a slave, nor a slaver, and I do not frequent slave markets. I did try to free a slave character in a role-play scenario once, the subject of which became interesting when the slave had been conditioned such that she didn't quite want to be free, and Kitti had to begin imposing her own will upon the poor woman. It was an interesting situation, and one that, true to my maxims of role-play, was very difficult to write; but in agreeing to participate in this story, was I condoning slavery? 

In visiting sims, sci-fi or not, that contain slave markets and holding cells and which encourage human traffickers to pass through, are we condoning the mimicry, the attitude, and, in a wider sense, the cause?  I am not even talking, here, about sims designed purely for that purpose, and in several of the sci-fi sims I have in mind, the slave markets and quarters are hidden beneath the floor or down lengthy tunnels that is difficult to get to. It is not, necessarily, out and open, on display. But is that, in hiding the truth, as it were, making the situation worse?

Should we boycott them, all?

It is food for thought, and I'm not one hundred percent sure how I feel about this one.

Kitti Collared

Happy New Year! 

As the holidays draw to a close, so the return to university looms - and the return of my status as being in a long-distance relationship. My boyfriend and I spend term time a four-hour train journey apart, and sometimes that can be tough. Due to a pretty poor internet connection and download allowance at his end, we've spent the past few months relying upon phone calls - but now all that has (potentially) changed. We can now use Skype and, as I suggested a while ago, Second Life, to communicate and spend a little virtual time together. Icarian's induction into SL is a subject for another post, and will be appearing shortly, but today I want to address another issue that has been bothering me for a while, but which has been brought up again by him. 

Icarian and I spent the best part of an afternoon kitting him out for SL - new shape, skin, hair, normal clothing, and then a fantasy outfit and a sci-fi outfit, so he can join in the various little role-playing scenarios I have been involved with, or set out on his own, should he choose. I have been harbouring items for him in my inventory whenever I have seen them, so promptly logged into my account to send them over to his. Whilst doing so, I showed him a couple of my outfits, and we talked about the nature of the sci-fi sims I was also sending him landmarks for. As the discussion continued, he asked me "So, is the collar Kitti wears a slave collar?"

"a real collar", or so it claims, found at marketplace.secondlife.com

Well, I had to laugh. Like I said, this is an issue I have been considering talking about before, and have kind of shied away from because...well. It's a difficult topic, and I could probably write about it forever. As Sian Pearl has written very recently over at her blog, "Parthenoid", slavery forms a whole sub-culture within SL - so much so that a viewer has been designed and built to allow for the deprivation of certain virtual senses  and operation of animation overrides (the infamous "Restrained Love" Viewer, which I believe was previously known as the "Restrained Life" Viewer). What Sian also brings up is how everything within SL slavery is consentual, though she writes about it far better than I could, so I'll leave it up to her. 

There are several different ways in which the topic of slavery pops up in SL, and you may recall my anecdote about my first day in SL, when slavers tried to pick me up in the Necronom VI bar. I have also written a role-playing in which Kitti was being persuaded to sign herself over to what was essentially a sex-slave agency. I have met several avatars on sci-fi sims that claim to have a history as a slave, and they have invariably risen up, killed their masters, and are now amongst the dregs of the sci-fi world. In my understanding of sci-fi, however, unless you are a Jedi, everyone is amongst the space dregs. 

But I have never thought of Kitti's collar as a slave collar. Kitti certainly does not behave as a slave in SL, and I personally find the idea of belonging to someone in such a fashion, in the real world, never mind the virtual, absolutely abhorrent. It is not, one might say, my cup of tea. Kitti's role-play back story does not involve any slavery, and when the rather seductive agency worker tried to recruit her, she did not jump to take the position, if you will excuse that rather hideous pun. 

So why does Kitti wear a collar? Or, rather, why do I dress Kitti in a collar? 

To start with, Kitti's collars are absolutely nothing like the one in the picture above. They are not scripted to do anything but glow sometimes, and even then, I have complete control over that glow. They do not feature  hooks for the attachment of chains or ropes or anything like that. They are purely aesthetic - radical necklaces, if you like,

Kitti Collared

or a choker, only without the rubies or diamonds or pearls or whatever else women wrap around their throats. Is it the lack of jewels that thus makes them obscene? 

I am aware that such is a rather dull answer, but it is the truth - and it makes me wonder. Do other people in SL see Kitti in these collars and think that she is a slave? Do they think she wants to be enslaved? A quick conversation with me would kill any ideas of that nature, and in role-play scenarios, Kitti has a little bit of a reputation for being somewhat unruly and taking the piss out of her superior officers when they show arrogance or chauvinism. She is not a collared pussycat. - But I cannot pounce on everyone I walk passed and announce my intentions. I would appear to be protesting "too much", and that wouldn't go down so well, either.

But awareness of this view has imposed limits on what I am comfortable with Kitti wearing. Whilst the collars above fall into my comfort zone (just about), this one I have more trouble with:

Meeow

It is the socket at the back that bothers me. It is the post-"The Matrix" version of a hook, and I guess I don't like the idea of being fastened to anything. I also don't want to be a cyborg.. Kitti does own a couple of plug-suits, but I shy away from dressing her in them, unless I can cover the plug sockets up as I have done above (see those two white stripes in the middle of her back?). You ain't uploading any data into me, thank you very much! I don't want to be a slave, to a human or a computer.

Is it possible for the collar to be a symbol of freedom, as well as of oppression? Kitti can wear a collar because she is free to do so, should she choose. She is not bound to wear one. She can take it off (or rather, I can take it off her) whenever she pleases. And yet my own hesitation suggests that somehow, the symbol doesn't quite fit. The freedom isn't quite there. The symbol isn't recognised.

And is it ethical for Kitti to wear a collar? When there is so much of this culture, within the real world, is it right for me to casually slap on what is, at least originally, a representation of ownership, suffering, and deprived free-will?

Will I continue to wear my collars, and not succumb to slavery? You ought to know me well enough by now to know the answer to that. But I cannot say that I will not continue to feel a bit awkward about it. 

Though, I have no doubt that my mother (hi mum!) will make some comment here about other things in these outfits that I ought to feel awkward about :P

'Tis the Season...

Looking a little flat there, Father. Get this man a mince pie!

As the big day approaches, I decided to investigate the destination guide for places I could go and maybe catch a glimpse of a virtual Santa Clause. I knew somebody must have built him a grotto, and, sure enough, I found one. Or two. Or several. Or more than I could count. The SL community are clearly invested in the holiday season...and why not? If Second Life offers an opportunity, a space, to replicate the things that we most love about the real world and our first lives, why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas? In fact - why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas every day? The answer, I imagine, is economical. And sure, Christmas is fun, and snow is fun. Your cousin's new karaoke set is...relatively...fun. But there are so many times you can listen to her sing "Santa Baby" before you wish you're wanting to hang, draw and quarter whomever built the infernal contraption, and the cold snow becomes a nuisance when you start remembering how fun last Summer's BBQ picnic was, and how good you felt with that Summer tan (I have never, ever, had a Summer tan. Ever). Remember the days when your feet and the bottom of your trousers didn't get trenched just going outside to call the cat back in? It all becomes just a little bit duller, a little less fun, as the days go on.  We like the Christmas season, so long as it stays right there - within its own little allocated section of the year. We need variety. We need change. 

Theoretically, however, we have the power within SL to return, at least in part, to the sense and atmosphere of that season - of whichever season, really - that we miss, even if it has long-passed. Now, having not searched for them before, I cannot say whether these Christmas sims stay up and running all year, or whether they only appear as the December days creep by. Perhaps the sims are used for different purposes throughout the rest of the year. I cannot say. But that isn't wholly want to I want to talk about.

What I find the most interesting - and the most bizarre - about SL is not that it follows the seasons in terms of important holidays, but that fashion follows those seasons, too. You might recall that a couple of months back, I mentioned an Autumn Hunt (or, at least, I believe I did) that I went on, finding small pumpkins in shops which held Autumn-related gifts and clothing. I have been getting notecards from shops for a while now, announcing their new Winter lines and Christmas sales. Better wrap our avatars up against the virtual cold...but what cold is that? 

Now, I am guilty of it, too. As you may or may not have noticed, I am wearing a new woolly jumper in that screenie up there, which in new, for Winter, by Leezu. And I am not naive: I appreciate that shops have seasons to convince us that our previous wardrobe of clothes is completely inadequate to protect us from the unique trials of this new season. Perhaps in other countries, this is the case, but here in England...I think we have five truly hot days, and five truly cold days, a year - and the rest of the time it's kind of grey and rainy. 

The virtual world has no temperature. Sure, some sims might be covered in snow, and I understand the logic of wanting your avatar to look the part, but, essentially, that is all it is - aesthetics. Kitti is not going to be cold wandering around the Antarctic, because she doesn't have any kind of skin and temperature system to be able to register that cold, any more than the virtual world has any way of physically creating that cold. The only way we can read the temperature of a sim is to look for markers, such as snow, or palm trees, or maybe an ice cream van parked on the road (though I have seen ice cream vans through the fuzzy fur of my rl winter coat's hood before now...seriously, guys?!). Whether or not you choose to recognise and adhere to the advice of those markers, however, is entirely up to your discretion. 

And so, of course, I went against everything the polite Englishman within me stands for, and I decided to rebel against the system - just to highlight, in case it needed underscoring, the complete arbitrary nature of virtual seasons. Enjoy; doing these cheered me up immensely...for a short while. 

Hmm, where to start?

Tangled in the light box...or so the pose ball said...

A present for me? Aww, you shouldn't have!

Fancy a skate?

Aaaaand just to flip it on its head - because I don't know about you, but this cold greyness is really getting me down - 

Yes, this is a Winter coat...yes, I got it from Leezu...go away!

Hmm...why isn't Kitti tanning?! She's been sunbathing all day!

Well, maybe you would need to wrap up like this to go and sit on Brighton Beach...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Don't let the snowy season get you down. If you are feeling a little down, maybe this (click here) will cheer you up, and this (click here) will warm your heart :)

All Work and No Play

There are many sources I could call upon to back-up and probably better explain what I want to write about today, but I am not going to use them. They are easy enough to find online if you are really, really interested.

Also, if you are interested: a cut-down version of the role-play scenario I mentioned in my post, "Make It Hurt",  has been uploaded by Sian Pearl to her blog, parthenoid - which you can read by clicking here.

I have been doing some reading related to my final year research topic today, and I came across several essays on the idea of "play". It's a pretty central concept in theatre, obviously, and something that I have been urged to look over in many a class. We perhaps use it a little heavy-handedly, and I personally have been known to daub many a rehearsal session or dramatised play-reading with the frame of "we're just playing". To watch, it can't seem much like playing. The most successful rehearsals I have been involved in have often ended with hot, sweaty, exhausted tears - but what we were doing is little more complicated than what happens when you place two children together in front of some building blocks. 

You know you needed to see it again.

 Often in my oh-so-few blog posts, I have suggested that the flaw, if that is the right word, with SL in the eyes of the general populace is its freedom - the unlimited space and resources it offers for people to play. Confronted with the possibility to do absolutely anything, we seem to cling to recreating and playing with ideas from real life, just like those children with the building blocks do. With those building blocks, you could build anything, things you could only dream of seeing out and about in the streets, but what do you build? Houses and towers and cars and police stations and, need I remind you, washing machines and toilets.

 When considering play, it is almost impossible to avoid the idea of games.

There appears to be quite a controversy surrounding the labelling of Second Life as a game. Some SL users don't seem to care, but others get very hot under the collar when the g-word is mentioned. When my brother has walked into my bedroom and found me logged into SL, it has not been uncommon for him to enquire "What game is that?", and I haven't quite had the patience to sit down with him yet and explain why called SL a game is a pretty bad idea. He's still quite new to the Internet, and he doesn't understand how dangerous being considered wrong upon it can be yet.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Now, obviously there is no way I can really argue the issue one way or another, cohesively and taking into account all of the material on the subject, in one blog post. I'm not intending to write a tomb, and if you want to discuss it with me, or voice your opinions, there is a comment button below this post and I encourage you to use it, as always. 

In my opinion, SL is not a game. If you take a look at other popular games on the market right now, such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or even the new Deus Ex, they have very little in common with Second Life beyond the fact that they both use virtual plains and are made up of pixels. In each of the aforementioned games, bar SL, there are relatively clearly defined objectives which the player tries to hit. The success of such is measured in experience points, gaining bases, upgrading armour, unlocking cut scenes, and staying alive until you have reached the goal and it is game over. Admittedly, with World of Warcraft, there is no such "game over", but there is an "end" in terms of having worked through the storyline, the side quests, and earning the highest grade of armour in the game. I have no doubt that Blizzard-ActiVision will continue to invent new levels, new side quests, new patches, etc etc, but I have no interest in arguing that WoW is not a game today :P Games are full of work, disguised as play - a disguise made all the more convincing if you enjoy that work. But it has none of the freedom and need of imagination of play.

SL has none of these objectives. There is no real end goal, no game-over. You exist within the virtual world, and you do as you please, and your success, unless you enter into the commercial side of things, is marked only by your own understandings and desires of the world. The only work is the work you set yourself - designing, building, creating - and it is possible to get a job within SL, as a bouncer or a dancer or a model or whatever else you can imagine. But for people like me, even using the building tools to create something in-world is about play. I have no real idea how it works, no real idea how to make something look like anything, so I play - I press buttons, I double-click everything, and eventually my laptop has enough and the viewer crashes. 

I spent most of my time in SL playing. If I am not pretending to be somebody else in a role-play, I am exploring sims, pressing buttons, trying to sit on everything, and taking screenshots of things that intrigue or amuse me. Right now, I am logged into SL, and I am sitting on a bench on a sim called Alpha Point. The bench has several seating animations within it and, naturally, I have tried all of them.

Inherent to playing, however, is the idea of fun, and I cannot say that I always find my experiences within SL fun. If there are people to talk to and things to do, then yes, I suppose I could say that I find it fun. I have described in previous posts the kind of effort (and work?) involved in role-playing, and I'm not sure that I used the word "fun" there, though it is certainly enjoyable. But there is also a strange phenomena that takes place wherein you log out of SL after five hours and you find yourself thinking...where has my day gone? What have I done? Because the answer is nothing and that you didn't have fun at all - but you stayed logged in, anyway. That, I cannot explain, but I'm pretty sure other SL users have experienced that effect, too.

So...we reach my conclusion - and it's a weird one, isn't it? Second Life isn't a game because it is about playing, not working, unless you want it to, and since the work that can be taken up often involves real money, it's less of a game and more of a serious gamble...How am I meant to explain that to my brother?

And, just to make the whole thing more worthwhile, I am going to point out that I personally don't particularly care whether SL is considered a game or not. I will continue to play, and to sit on things, and to log out when it makes me unhappy.

Trying on hats....

...clicking "get murdered" pose balls on romantic sims...

and flying by dandelion seed.

All work and no play makes Kitti a very unhappy avatar.

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.

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...

Nonsense and...More Nonsense...

"If I had my own way, this blog would probably be all backwards". When I loaded blogspot today, I was thinking that that would be the opening line of today's entry. Then I realised that I do have my own way and that, if I wanted, I could write this whole thing backwards. Nobody might be able to understand what I was going on about, but I cannot exactly be ejected from the Internet for lack of cohesion. I cannot be ejected from the Internet! - unless Mum pulls the plug on me, but then her internet would go down and she wouldn't be able to write her own blog so that would be like cutting her head off to spite her face (never mind her nose). Also, she's out fishing with my oldest little brother right now, so...nahahahahahaha?! 

Back to the land of sanity, well, sort of: what I'm trying to get at is that there would appear to be no real logical order to the way in which I discuss things here, and it would take me some impossibly long entries to be able to cover each topic in any real amount of detail. The only way around this that I can see is to post what I want when I want, and make sure that I have tagged it properly so all of the posts on, say, sexuality in Second Life can be found together under the tag "sexuality" which should be available for clicking on the right-hand side. You probably already knew that anyway.

In light of my lacking eloquence today, I've decided that I am going to jump into the deep end and make a post that possibly shouldn't be written yet.

In my essay, I wrote:

Second Life requires that the mind be transferred to a digital body – which is an idea I will come back to – and this digital body is completely without organs. The bodily needs and functions one must attend to in the Real World are simply not shared by the pixel-representation on the screen. 

That makes sense, right? If there is something "wrong" with the human race as a whole, it is our squishiness, and our dependence upon produce, items, whatever, beyond ourselves to survive. When recreating the world, if it can be said that Second Life is such (which I think it can, but that's a whole other blog post), these are the first things we'd get rid of, and nobody could blame us for that. 

I also wrote in my essay - just to clarify the context a little more, here:

All of the things you see in Second Life have been created by the residents themselves......It [Second Life] is marketed as a place to ‘be different, be yourself, free yourself'. If there is something we loved about our first life, we could repeat it ad nauseam. Also, because of the user-created set-up of Second Life, only the spaces and objects people want to build are materialised within the virtual.

 Got all that? Linden Lab host only the servers, and the basic items for the Second Life user which includes the original base avatar, a handful of skins and clothing items, and obviously the software that allows you to "view" the SL realm. Everything within SL is conceived, built and used by the SL users.

And there is no limit to what you can build but your own imagination. It is possible to purchase templates for things, and, if a user allows, to edit them and custom items/clothing to your own needs, but each SL user also has access to sandboxes and the software to built and script items of your own creation. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, but there are plenty of tutorials available online, and there is even a museum is one of the main sandboxes that gives you a kind of step-by-step guide on how to begin building. To me, it seems like a cross between Paint and that horrible 3D design software they tried to make me use to build a mobile phone in Graphics in year nine.

So, with all that in mind, answer me this question: why did someone build these?

Do dirt and ketchup stains exist in SL? Persil haven't researched this market!

I took this to go into my essay. Looked a bit weird, me walking in and screenshot-ing the toilet. What was more weird? The dark smudge on the left-hand side is the arm of some guy who followed me in.

The weirdest thing - or, perhaps the most sane - is that neither of these items function. The washing machine didn't open, and you cannot sit on the toilet or flush it. Someone did go to the extent to build the toilet-roll holder, too, which I imagine came with the toilet itself. I should perhaps further explain that I found both of these on spaceships which are used for sci-fi role-playing. I have been involved in a couple of these sci-fi rps on these spaceships, and I have never seen anyone say "Ah, I just need to pop for a wee" or "Ooo, I got blood on my jumpsuit, better put it on a spin cycle...". Surely these rps are meant to inject excitement, give you a chance to exist beyond the mundane, do things  you couldn't otherwise do...but apparently, doing your laundry is exciting enough for someone to want to make such an experience possible online. Does Second Life offer too much freedom for us to comprehend or be comfortable within? Do we just cling to what we know?

There is another theory. I was told by the owner of both of these spaceships (who I shall no doubt mention later, he has been a fantastic help to me in SL) that the toilets aren't used for...well...disposing of waste. There is no delicate way to phrase this, so I shall just refer you to this page here and offer this page here as a back-up, and hope that you can either put two and two together for yourselves, or remain blessfully unaware.