Category: virtualreality

How long have I been a part of Second Life? Almost 17 months now? Sometimes I read derisive posts about unfair advantages enjoyed by older players and the imaginary close-knit clique that a certain SLer calles the “feted inner core”. It saddens me that someone would have such hostility towards fellow SLers — that someone would actually believe that all older players are a certain way. According to this person, all older players know each other, and:

• Hate new players
• Actively collaborate to repress new players
• Are greedy
• Get everything for free
• “Party” with the Lindens
• Are “techno-geeks”

So is it true? How about this… I’ll write about my own experiences in Second Life, where I started, and how I got to where I am, and you tell me if I hate anyone or got a free ride.

The biggest misconception is that before version 1.2, everyone got everything for free, without land tiers, with tons of public land, and massive stipends. Certainly, most of the oppresively restrictive rules we live by now weren’t in effect then. Instead, we lived under an entirely different set of oppressively restrictive rules.

The cost of playing? Fifteen dollars per month. Land was payed for in weekly Linden-dollar taxes, which meant that most players could afford very little land. When I started, I grabbed a small patch of land inside a swath of public land in Perry. It was probably about 512 sqare meters, which cost me L$1/sq meter to claim — most of my savings. I quickly realized that, even though public land abounded, I couldn’t claim more because the taxes would outstrip my weekly stipend. I had to stay small, without hope of growing.

For the first couple of months, I mostly hung out at events and fiddled around with building things, which I did very badly. I didn’t arrive in the game understanding building or scripting — I’m a writer, not a programmer — so my first attempts were typical “n00b” builds.

I built a couple of horrendously ugly airplane models, but without any scripting skills, I found myself begging for a script. I had no contacts, except Lola Bombay, who started at the same time as me, and a couple of others who I met in the sandbox while building. Eventually, someone relented and gave me a flight script. Remember, this was before SL had vehicle physics. With this primitive script, I could make my plane move, but not like a plane or any other vehicle as we think of them now. It was kind of jerky and odd.

I moved around a bit, but always had to stay small because of oppressive weekly taxes: tax on land, tax on tall builds, tax on any rezzed prim, and even tax on light. And then there were the other expenses: uploading fees (which we still have), cost of claiming land, and L$10 per-prim rezzing cost. While a small number of players had a steady income and could afford large amounts of land, most couldn’t afford more than a patch of land.

What did I do with my land? It must have been wonderful to not have any prim limit on our land parcels, right? Wrong. Without parcel prim limits, the only limit was determined by the server: 10,000 prims per sim. The poor avatar who tried to rez the ten-thousand-and-first prim was out of luck, because his neighbours had already rezzed hundreds (sometimes thousands) of prims just to “reserve” them for their own future use. This was a time of “prim hoarding”, when neighbours would greedily eye each other’s builds to see if they were hogging the server resources.

So with fees, taxes, and prim hoarding, SL was a pretty miserable place to be if you liked to rez things. All the same, I stuck with it because there was always the sandbox in Olive, and I enjoyed building.

I moved around a bit, still not knowing many other players, and not really having an income. I released my Perry land, and set up a shop in Minna, where I sold one or two poorly-made planes (apologies to whoever bought those). After a while, I got bored with Minna and put up a theatre in Clyde, where I earned a bit of cash by hosting “bad poetry improv” events.

My real breakthrough came when Beryl Greenacre kindly offered me shelf space in her shop (thank you, Beryl!). I didn’t even really know her, but she had a few shelves reserved for me. By this time, LL brought in vehicle physics, and I snagged the hoverboard script. I could now stock the shelves at Beryl’s with a half-dozen “hoverpods”, and opened my own shop in Mocha, on the hillside next to the Olive sandbox. Slowly, but surely, and with endless hours of designing and learning LSL, I was increasing my income to the point where I could buy a larger chunk of land.

I then grabbed a bit of public land in Natoma, built a new theatre and continued to host my “bad poetry” events to eke out a virtual living. I still owned a very small amount of land, even by today’s standards, but I was well and truly addicted to SL and worked hard at it.

Eventually, though, I got tired of the theatre in Natoma, wiped it out, and released the land there and in Mocha. Although a few people tried to earn money by selling land, ironically, very few felt that it could ever be profitable. As the population grew, public land grew more scarce, but still L$1/sq meter land was available. When the big casino vanished from Zoe, I flew over to see who was moving in. I ran into a newbie who had snagged several squares of land in the middle of a swath of fresh public land, and was in the middle of building a runway. I asked him — Apotheus — if he’d mind if I put up a hangar next to his runway. Two months later, we had a booming airfield, and I was cranking out new planes weekly.

Then the changes hit. Suddenly, we had to pay real money to hold land in something called a “land tier”. Some of the more successful players, who I knew only vaguely, suddenly faced a choice: pay hundreds of US dollars to keep the land or release it and scale back drastically. IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD!!!

Well, of course it wasn’t the end of the world, but after every major rule change in SL, people spew “end is nigh” messages into the forum, ad nauseum. For Apotheus and me, we chose to cut back. I took the plunge and bought one of the very last of the lifetime accounts, not knowing if SL would even last long enough for it to pay off. It was a real gamble. To those who say that with a lifetime account, you get free land, I disagree. Sure, it was an amazing one-time deal! But it wasn’t free — I paid a hefty chunk of money for the privilege and the risk.

By the time Apotheus and I moved the airport to Abbotts in January 2004, I suppose my incessant marketing was paying off. Other players seemed to recognize my name, and I was selling vehicles regularly, but not without endless work: marketing, designing, and scripting. I don’t “party” with oldbies (nor with the Lindens either) — I tend to stay in Abbotts and do what I enjoy the most, which is to build things. I don’t seem to get any special deals, other than continuing to get the lifetime account that I bought. As a vehicle designer, my corner of SL is here for newbies and non-techy players — after all, many oldbies could go ahead and build their own flying toys. The best reward for me, still, is the thrill of seeing someone else enjoying something that I made. That keeps me coming back day after day.

Just like real life, success in Second Life comes from finding something that other people need — services, clubs, objects, clothing — anything at all. If Second Life is a game, then like a game, you can “level up” by offering something in exchange for money. If it’s not a game, but a new medium of communication, as some people say, then the rules of real life apply — you have to offer something in exchange for money. Either way, the rules of Second Life are the same, with one advantage: in Second Life, yo
u can easily enjoy the game without earning anything other than your weekly stipend. At the same time, you can’t get everything handed to you for free — TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).

Am I part of some “feted inner elite core”? Is there a cartel of greedy, snobbish players who try to crush other players for their own self-aggrandizement, as a certain individual claims? If I ever see any players like that, I’ll let you know. I wouldn’t approve of such a group. So far, I haven’t seen any sign of that, other than paranoid rantings in the forum.

My point, which I’ll finally get to after this endless drivel, is that after seventeen months of working hard to create things that other people will enjoy, the worst thing is to be accused of trying to damage the very community that I’ve worked to contribute to, and accused of getting everything for free.