Second Life’s missing Canadian content

It’s sad news when a high-profile Second Life destination closes down, and it seems to be happening with alarming frequency. Today I heard that the “Visit Mexico” sim will be shutting down, and it made me wonder why there’s no “Visit Canada” sim. Maybe someone should build it. Hey, maybe I should build it!

Just picture it: An entire sim dedicated to nothing but Canadiana. But no! One sim is too small to contain the vastness that is Canada. I would need at least a dozen to capture the full glory of each province and territory.

Visitors would be required to wear the appropriate avatars of famous Canadians (Justin Beiber, William Shatner, and Céline Dion) or Canadians that the CBC execs think are famous (Ben Mulroney, Rita MacNiel, and a guy who used to play bass with The Northern Pikes). On arrival, red-coated RCMP will check and approve your avatar, search your inventory for copyright violations, and give you a good tasering. After that, you’re free to explore!

My virtual Canada would be blanketed by snow all year, of course, except the west coast, which would be under dark clouds. In virtual BC, the rain doesn’t matter. You can spend every day holding contests to see who can clear-cut the most trees, or take part in my favourite game, Fishfarmville. Can you expand your fish farm faster than your competitors? Tip: The key to winning is to rename your fish prims “Wild Sockeye”.

In the sim next door, you can explore natural beauty of Alberta’s foothills, endless wheat fields, and expansive oilsands. You can get Linden dollars for each duck you can pull out of the tailing ponds, and you can cash them in for tickets to the hockey game. But this isn’t any ordinary hockey game: you get to choose either an Oilers or Flames jersey and actually try to kill the other team. Great fun, but you have to put up with Shania Twain piped into the rink’s media stream 24/7.

The Saskatchewan sim would be the easiest to build, as it doesn’t even need terraforming. Or any actual content.

When you fly into the Manitoba sim, I suggest you go to the south end of it, because fully three quarters of the sim is actually completely empty, apart from angry swarms of prim flies and mosquitos that harrass your avatar until you teleport away. Don’t bother trying to delete them either: there’s a perma-rezzer in the lakes that will just replace them instantly. If you happen to be wearing the Beiber avatar, stay away from the mayor of the Winnipeg parcel. His only job is to go around kicking child avatars in the face.

To represent Ontario and Quebec, I’ll need at least four sims each. One for northern Ontario, in which the richest residents each have their own lake-front cottage with banlines set up to eject anyone but invited guests, and three for Toronto, due not to its importance to Canada but to accurately represent the sheer size of its inflated ego. In the Toronto sims, you can set up virtual businesses and trade your Lindens on an open market. Residents here have the added benefit of being able to dictate what’s in the media streams of every parcel in every sim in virtual Canada.

A perpetual problem for residents in these sims is a terrible infestation of torus-shaped prims. Tim Horton’s counters are fitted with with self-replicating torii. And they can’t be deleted — they can only be bought for L$1 each. Avatars take time out of every day to buy up dozens of them at a time just to help clear the mess away.

Another issue is that, due to a technical problem with sim borders, neighbouring regions aren’t rendered in your viewer — standing in Toronto, the other regions are completely invisible.

Next door in the four Quebec sims, you can visit Montréal, and park your avatar in one of the countless dance clubs. Win free Linden dollars for smoking, drinking, and eating poutine. But please remember to change your group tag to French, or at least display the French translation on a prim above your head that’s 150 percent larger than the English. From time to time, residents petition Linden Lab to move their sims out into the ocean. Anywhere other than next to Ontario, basically. I think the Lindens will recognize the petition, but only if fifty-one of the one hundred residents want it.

In the Atlantic sims, you captain your own fishing boat and earn Linden dollars for each prim cod you bring into the harbour. Technical difficulties like hard prim limits mean that there’s only so many cod that can be rezzed at one time, and as the more prims go to building waterfront prefabs, there will be fewer cod to go around. The trick to that particular game is to earn just enough Linden dollars to buy a parcel in the Alberta sim. Unfortunately, your boat is “no-transfer” and can’t be sold. Visitors, if you find yourself in the Atlantic sims with nothing to do, shake your stuff at the most popular nightspot, Club Baby Seals.

Microphone users take note: the voice chat servers are usually glitched, particularly in the Newfoundland parcels, so when you speak, nobody else can understand a word your saying.

In the Nunavut sims, ride the bacon-eating narwhals, or don a polar bear avatar to hunt penguins. Yes, I know: penguins are native to the southern hemisphere, but that’s real life. This is the metaverse, and penguin-hunting is awesome.

In the remaining arctic sims, you can become a fighter pilot and repel Russian bombers. Nothing actually happens if you don’t, but it’s still great fun, provided you have the L$16,000,000,000 it takes to buy the aircraft.

And that’s what I would do if I built a “Visit Canada” attraction in Second Life. Is there a government grant that would cover this, or is it still short of Canadian content?