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.

Catching Some Zs

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been having some trouble with my internet connection. As soon as I log into SL, the net goes down and Kitti becomes trapped on my screen, severed from the server but held in place by the slow-to-respond viewer, able to walk around and look at things but unable to interact with them. Eventually, the viewer catches up and throws me out, and I have to spend another three hours on the phone to Virgin Media trying to get them to understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the filter and yes, I have, of course, tried turning the router on and off again. 

Managing to find a pocket of stable internet time, I logged into SL and decided that I would take a look at the list of recommended places to visit in the destination guide for something to do, since I didn't know how long my luck would last. As it turned out, it didn't last very long - however, I managed to stumble across a sim listing that caught my eye before I was booted from the virtual plane: Nexus, Embracers of Darkness.

Nexus is a zombie-killing sim that is also used by the Bloodlines Vampires for what would appear to be a sim-wide version of the game Capture the Flag. It is some kind of city, covered in red and pink obelisks which, in turn, appear to be covered with Bloodlines Clan tags, and milling around these obelisks with their arms outstretched is a horde of npc zombies. 

Can zombies read? Do they obey signs?

Now, there isn't anything particularly special about that. With my low graphics settings, the zombies are relatively unthreatening, and not much of the city itself seems to materialise on my screen. I have seen npc zombies in SL before, and whilst the concept is quite clever, their existence itself is not really worth a blog post. No - what I find interesting about the Nexus sim is the idea behind it: the intention of imposing a game onto/into Second Life.

As I have said before, I do not personally view SL as a game, but that is not to say that SL cannot be used like a game. In a safe-house across the street from the initial teleport-point, you can pick up a simple HUD that will allow you to register injury should the zombies get you. And the zombies will get you - they are scripted with some kind of tracking programme so that if you walk passed one, ten will magically appear and  waddle after you, murmuring "braaaaains" and breathing heavily. Why do zombies, virtual zombies no less, need to breathe?

The idea is that you take the HUD, and a gun and, presumably, take up a position behind a wall of sandbags (which the zombies apparently cannot get passed) and use the creepy dummies are target practice. If you're really brave, I suppose you could jump the sandbags and run around the city, shooting the zombies, and maybe even the mummies that randomly spawn, as you go. The sim is labelled as being for role-play, and there is, as I have mentioned, a rather large building labelled "Safe House" that offers a refuge for story-creating to take place. The sim is also used, or so it says, by the Bloodlines Vampire Clans (that is, actual SL users, not npcs), both for some kind of virtually-physical game as well as role-playing. 

One of them had to have some nudity going on, hmm?

It seems like an odd juxtaposition to me, zombies and vampires, and I'm not sure that any self-respecting vampire aristocrat would be caught dead (ha ha!) rubbing elbows with the rotting flesh of the Zs next door. Both seem to offer a completely different image of the body in un-death, particularly when you consider that these vampires are, in my experience, often modelled on Gary Oldman as Dracula rather than those creepy window-scatchers from "Salem's Lot". 

Oh drat! Guess I made that picnic for nothing!

But beyond that: how much of a game is this? If you consider "Call of Duty", for example, it is possible to load levels full of Nazi Zombies which you then spend the next ten or so minutes shooting. The zombies head towards you and, if you are well organised, you can control where they will materialise and take them out one by one. If you are not organised, it is possible that you will be overwhelmed with Zs and end up as mushy Z-food. Such, however, is not really possible at Nexus. If you stay behind the sandbags, the scenario becomes target practice, but even if you venture beyond, the zombies move slowly enough to allow you to take them out one at a time. They cannot hurt you unless you are wearing the HUD (which, sportingly, you should be), and it takes a while for them to gang up on you. I am not sure that the resulting scenario constitutes anything like a "game" - or, at least, a fair one.

If you are not wearing the HUD - or even sporting a gun, as I was not -, when the zombies gang up on you, all they can do is push and breathe down your neck. Being pushed around between decaying, scantily-clad meat-bags can be quite infuriating, but I couldn't help but find it funny. I did become quite stuck between them at one point - 

Zombie Sorority?

 - but as soon as I found an opening and began to walk away, they struggled to keep up, and the resulting image made me laugh even more. Between the dominantly female z-horde, and my supermodel AO, the game became something a little more playful and a lot more silly than I think the original sim-owner intended.

Z-Catwalk

Looks like a scene from some kind of music video to me...

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.