Cue Matriarchy

Queen Kitti

I went back to the Arcade this morning, just for a post-mayhem poke around. For those of you who read my blog but don't use SL (hi mum!), the Arcade is a quarterly event that generates the same kind of hype as...I don't know...the Football World Cup, or the midnight release of a Harry Potter book. It is an old-school Arcade made of glass, perched on the end of a pier, and inside is an array of gacha machines offering everything from skins and hair to furniture, music boxes, and pet fish. I half expected it to look like a Primark store an hour after opening, but it seems to have finally quietened down and, in the way of SL, it was clean and quiet. It wasn't even dusty.

Although the Arcade brings out an online catalog that lets you have a look at what you can win before you even get there, part of the joy of SL, I think, is exploring places - especially those with as nicely made buildings as the Arcade. There's something nice about hopping over to the Arcade and just having a wander, even though you've probably got more than you could possibly ever want from those machines. I suppose it's like window shopping.

As I was wandering around, I started thinking about how good events like the Arcade can be. I know I've whinged about gachas before, but to a new SL user, gacha machines are a potentially great way to get good items from good designers super cheap. Rarely do gacha machines charge more than one hundred Linden dollars (SL currency) a turn, and to put that into perspective, the skin Kitti usually wears cost just under one thousand Linden dollars. The same company that makes that skin filled a machine with similar skins at the Arcade this time around and, sure enough, the price on them was one hundred Linden dollars. It's smart shopping. 

Queen Norah isn't new to SL, but she's a smart cookie.

Except if you take a look at the Arcade's catalog, you'll see most of the skin, hair and clothing items there are designed for women. Not all of them - and many of the shops who make things for the Arcade make things for male avatars in their shops - but a large percentage. If a friend told me they wanted to get into SL and they had a female avatar, I'd have no issue taking them to the Arcade to flesh themselves out, but if it had a male avatar, I would have no idea where to begin.

This would be the point in the post where I reveal an armful of statistics, but I don't have any. I wouldn't like to lie to you and pretend that I do. 

I would be surprised to learn that Second Life has a higher population of male avatars then female avatars, but I would be unsurprised to find more male users than female. And the wider truth is that we still, as a collective society,  see shopping as something women do whilst their husbands are out earning money for them to fritter away. Despite the coming of the metrosexual, we still place emphasis on the care a woman should take with her appearance and her home, and tell men that they shouldn't care how they look just as long as they have mowed the lawn. We're getting better at it, for sure, but we've still a way to go. 

We could talk here, too, about who makes the ads, and who makes the clothes and the skins and the everything else. We could question who buys them, and for whom, with what intention. We're not going to right now. 

Right now, we're going to deviate - oh, come on, you knew it was coming - : as I was thinking about this, an image sprang into my mind of a virtual world of women and, naturally, my brain connected the idea to the Anne Rice novel, The Queen of the Damned. In the novel, the mother and queen of all vampires Akasha rises from a two thousand year slumber to rid the world of evil as she sees it - of men. During her slumber, she had been placed before numerous radios and television sets, and she had come to see that the source of all strife and war was men, and so off she goes on a killing spree, leaving behind one man for every twenty or so women, if I remember, that they might repopulate. Of course, any sons born would be brought up to respect the new matriarchy and adopt the traits Akasha praises so highly in women. 

If Norah and I ever gain any real positions of power, you should run. We're coming for you.

The Arcade, along with several other similar gacha machine events open at the moment, are helping to dress a virtual nation of fearsome queens. We've got flowing hair and flowing gowns coming out of our ears, and I now have so many crowns and diadems in my inventory that I am considering creating an alt just to hold them for me. The dresses Norah and I are wearing in the pictures here are from gacha events, and so are our crowns and our jewellery and our skins. Our hair isn't, though, because we cheated - but we have several hairstyles from gachas we could have chosen to wear instead. We're dressed to go and do some serious violence in the name of peace. We're ready to fuck for our virginity.

We won't make the same mistakes that Akasha did, though. Virtual worlds, beware.

Gotcha

Most (but not all) of the items in this picture were won through gacha machines. I have more, but I couldn't pile them all onto Kitti because she's only got so much virtual skin to plaster them to.

A new round of the Arcade opened, and half of Second Life is now - if they weren't before - addicted to gacha machines. If you are blissfully unaware (and probably, thusly, not bankrupt), a gacha is one of those machines you mainly see in the supermarkets these days into which you put about 50p/£1 and get out a random prize. The last place I saw one IRL was at a garden centre, with a big bubble-dome on top of the machine full of an assortment of semi-precious stones. In SL, you can put just about anything into a gacha machine including toys, hair, skins, plants...whatever you can think of. 

The gacha machine seems to be a big hit in SL at the moment, and all of the fairs are following in the Arcade's example and adopting this method of selling. When you play a gacha, you are always guaranteed a prize (unlike the merciless yet-to-make-it-big-in-SL claw/crane game), but it might not be the one you want. Some items have 'rare' status, being scripted to drop through the prize system at a very limited rate.

What is so remarkable about this? You ask. That's very nice, but why is this interesting?

The gacha machine is interesting because it makes people go NUTS. At the previously blogged-about FutureWave event, I got to listen to some of the store-owners talking about how well their items were selling, and they were reporting that individuals were spending massive amounts of virtual money at their stores. As I am writing this, I put out an ask in the Arcade group chat requesting that people IM me with rough estimates of how much they have spent on gacha machines there and one person reported having spent L$40,000 (which amounts to about £100 IRL). They might be exaggerating, but listening to people talk about these events in general, it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that they are telling the honest truth. Most people are reporting around L$2,000 - L$5,000 which is, obviously, considerably less but it is still tens of pounds in the real world. To put that into perspective, most gacha machines charge around L$25 - L$100 a go. 

In the FutureWave group, sian (who had a store set up there) told me that she found many of the bloggers who had already received the items in her gacha for free playing her gacha machine anyway. They already had the items, but wanted to get more - just to play. 

We are addicted to playing the luck game, and - I can speak from experience - there is something about being in that atmosphere, surrounded by people who are also gaming and winning and losing, that makes you consider playing machines for items you know full well you are never going to use ever again. I now have an inventory stuff of cuddly kitten toys that I am probably just going to place on a shelf in my skybox. I played the Glam Affair gacha for a skin in a tone Kitti doesn't usually wear. And I consider myself to be a very restrained gacha player, setting my number-of-goes limit before I even arrive and being sure to stick to it. Many gacha machines give out one item in different colours, and when that is the case I rarely play more than once, deciding to work with whatever colour I get. Sometimes the gacha machines are about collecting everything to complete a set, but I'm not much of a collector and tend to avoid those machines.

It's highly likely that you'll receive doubles of items if you play the gacha enough, and/or that ten minutes later, you'll be wondering why you bought the items anyway. Alongside the Arcade is a massive trading system of people swapping items to get what they want and complete their sets, and there are always hundreds of yard sales popping up all over the place of people trying to sell on their items. The items are laid out on tables and customers can simple go and buy the ones they want, rather than leave it to luck. In the past, I've found it useful to go and shop at these instead - and I think plenty of people do that - but the way we shop at yard sales is so totally different than the way we shop through a gacha machine. Impulse buying goes way down. It is, quite seriously, the gacha that makes us go mad.

Somewhere, the Gacha God is rubbing his hands together, looking down on the multitudes of people at the Arcade (which is so full, nobody else can get in - quite literally), and saying 'Gotcha'.