New Article: "SL's loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections"

[Kathlen Onyx]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I ran across someone the other day who was still using one of those!

Kiera Linden uses it. I saw it in the last governance meeting.  Anywho....I don't use it but I do think it's cute.  I would probably get something on the MP though instead.

[Roxy Couturier]

5 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Thank GOD we never hear anyone complaining about the lack of things to do in SL here on the forums or in-world!!!

Or about the increasingly glitchy and aging code base, how TPs are borked, group chat doesn't work, etc.!

Whew!

😏

To be fair, there are dozens of MMOs that have these same complaints.

"World chat is borked.. again." "There's nothing to do after <level cap>" "Man the graphics are old" "You can teleport where ever?? I have to slog across 2 continents to get to my next quest!"

WoW is going on 20 years old, for example. Why aren't they doing studies of the heteronormitive toxicity of other MMO spaces in general?

The only shared world that I personally know of that is welcoming of queer voices (while it still has outliers of toxic behavior) is City of Heroes. Likely the only MMO I'll ever bother with due to it's inclusive culture.

I've been in SL pretty consistently for over 15 years and I still haven't 'run out of things to do'.

[SorachaNicEoghain]

For those interested, .3% of 70,000,000 is 210,000

[InnerCity Elf]

13 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Photos of various community-builders throughout the years litter the walls. "

I'd been wondering if "litter" was just casually rude, or supposed to be clever.

[ValKalAstra]

58 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This is by far the best and most relevant critique of the argument the article makes that I've seen yet. It's also one that I'm not very qualified to make myself, because I simply don't have enough experience of other MMOs.

The whole piece is premised on the idea that SL's imperfections and glitchiness make it "special" because it frees users from the constraints of design in a way that is not possible of other, better-designed games. If you're correct -- and I have absolutely no reason to doubt you -- then the subversive elements that it sees at play in SL culture are common to MMOs in general, even if not necessarily to the same extent.

A small bit of added context, I can't vouch for every MMO because frankly, I haven't played that many either but I do know a bit about gaming in general. Not all MMOG have got an element of player housing that allows placing items. However, I think the section you've bolded really gets down to the gist of it:

58 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Maybe the real point is that all users are always to some degree engaged in what I suppose one might dramatically call "resistance" to the machine, working to find "cheats" and adapting the best laid plans of games designers to their own nefarious purposes.

I think that's really it. As long as people interact with these systems, they will probably look for ways to resist and bend the rules. For example, there's a niche within gaming that is all about beating a game as fast as possible. They're the speedrunners and they do frankly... ludicrous things to games to eek out another 2 seconds on that run.

If you're curious, here's a speedrun for a mostly singleplayer Eldenring (clarification: not a MMOG :D):

You really don't need to understand anything about the game to know that it is not supposed to do that but players have taken the act of breaking the game in unintended, yet player controlled ways to such an art form that they beat a 70 hour long game in 4 minutes. I think there's a certain curiosity in humans to sometimes see how far you can break a system and that is especially visible in a virtual environment where one side is about as rigid in the enforcement as can be but the players go "and I did it anyways".

Another example that makes this point even more salient has got to be someone creating a simulated computer entirely from within Minecraft that is powerful enough to play Tetris. That's really not what the game Minecraft was ever intended to do. It's a kid's game about building houses, castles and exploring strange worlds.

And same with the routing around problems within a game. I'm a lunatic. I play Star Citizen, a game that is widely decried as a scam selling jpeg starships (nicknamed Scam Citizen). It's not that but it isn't without it's flaws, including a ten year long development cycle and no finishing line in sight.

It's got bugs. Bugs galore and yet people play it and have fun with it, because they've naturally learned to route around the bugs. To give some examples. To eat and drink, there's currently a bug that prevents doing that from your inventory, thus to eat and drink, you need to drop the food on the floor, then pick it up into your hand and consume directly. Yeah, talk about hygiene.

Or, the Drake Corsair has got a bug where it spawns with it's foldable wings desynced. Meaning, to the server they're folded out (and thus spawn within the hangars, instantly colliding). To the player they're retracted and in landing position. If you try to take off, the ship is bouncing around on the pad but not going anywhere, until you tell the game to... unfold the wings, thus glitching out of the hangar and then retracting them again, landing, repairing and then you're good to go. It's ludicrous. Yet people learned to route around that and come up with the weirdest solutions to issues.

So yah. People (probably not everyone but a lot) take to a natural kind of resistance to the systems present and there is a beautiful creativity in breaking them and making them your own, be it online, cooperatively or on your own.

Edited May 14 by ValKalAstra

[Kathlen Onyx]

7 minutes ago, SorachaNicEoghain said:

For those interested, .3% of 70,000,000 is 210,000

Gotcha! See I am terrible at math. LOL

 

[ValKalAstra]

7 minutes ago, InnerCity Elf said:

I'd been wondering if "litter" was just casually rude, or supposed to be clever.

Could be a non native english writer. Some odd grammar and some of the typos and mistakes would lend credence to that. To me, as a swiss dumb dumb, litter has got no negative connotation. It just means there's lots of something that's close to each other - but yah, not a native speaker.

[InnerCity Elf]

1 minute ago, ValKalAstra said:

It just means there's lots of something that's close to each other - but yah, not a native speaker.

To me, it sounds more like "too much of" than just "lots of" - like I'd say, "your walls look littered" to my dad, if I were less polite, I don't say it, it's his taste, and if he likes it, it's just fine (while he actually does say, "your walls look bare/ascetic/...", and definitely means it in a negative way. But I was wondering if they wanted to make a clever reference to "a litter of" (cats, 🦁s,... ;)), as they already declared SL a game of furries. Or maybe even that plus an even more obtuse reference to "cat litter", which im turn , might make people think of diapers, in case they dove deeper into SL culture than furries and slumlords, after all (but they probably didn't, and I just saw that potential "clever" remark in there, because I've been reading too many "new ToS!" threads recently ;).

I'm not a native speaker either, though. We might speak, roughly, the same language if yours happens to be Schwiizerdütsch; hello RL "neighbour", in any case! 👋 

[SorachaNicEoghain]

20 minutes ago, Kathlen Onyx said:

Gotcha! See I am terrible at math. LOL

 

I'm so sorry 😅. I really couldn't help myself when there was a math problem....teasing me...beckoning me. 🤣🤣🤣

[InnerCity Elf]

2 minutes ago, SorachaNicEoghain said:

I'm so sorry 😅. I really couldn't help myself when there was a math problem....teasing me...beckoning me. 🤣🤣🤣

I'm sure there's no need to be sorry, I left a "Like", too. While I know how to solve that problem... with a little help from my phone calculator app..., it's always nice, when someone saves one (and very potentially many ones) the trouble !

[Kathlen Onyx]

14 minutes ago, SorachaNicEoghain said:

I'm so sorry 😅. I really couldn't help myself when there was a math problem....teasing me...beckoning me. 🤣🤣🤣

oh don't be sorry, lol 

Though I still question the validity of 210,000 daily users.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, InnerCity Elf said:

14 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Photos of various community-builders throughout the years litter the walls. "

I'd been wondering if "litter" was just casually rude, or supposed to be clever.

Just a descriptive term, "litter" being one of those weird multi-use words!

Here used in the meaning (my internal dictionary) of "strewn about".

[Love Zhaoying]

One thing I have not noticed (or missed) in our responses:  There is an emphasis on the article on "not a game", "anti-fun"..BUT..

But, since in Second Life the content IS user-created, there IS "fun"/ it IS "fun", and there ARE countless "games" within Second Life.

There is even Linden Lab-created "fun" content, and Linden Lab-created "games" within Second Life.

So, whether the author "missed it", or was "exaggerating" to emphasize their gamification theses, it seems they missed a pretty big point.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, ValKalAstra said:

It just means there's lots of something that's close to each other

Like a bunch of kittens!

[Paul Hexem]

8 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This is correct, more or less. Heteronormativity is a term from the early 90s that derived from a particular field of academic work -- Queer Theory -- with very definite ideological "leanings," if you like. It values diversity of all kinds, and argues strenuously that Western culture has worked hard, for literary centuries, to suppress alternative values, identities, and lifestyles.

The rest of your post is frankly ill-informed, simplistic nonsense.

Heteronormativity isn't a "cuss word" or an insult created to be thrown about on social media. It is, again, a term with an academic origin that relates to cultural systems, not to individuals. It has a very complicated and rich field of meanings associated with it, and figures prominently in certain kinds of academic writing.

If someone "accuses" you of being heteronormative, they aren't "accusing" you of being heterosexual.

They are accusing you of being, knowingly or not, a homophobic bigot, and someone who supports a culture and ideological system that works very hard to suppress alternative voices and perspectives.

Literally no one cares whom you sleep with, Paul, or what turns your crank. They just don't.

They do care if you're complicit with a repressive political and cultural system.

You're defending something with way too many mistakes and misconceptions way too hard.

Also, I laugh at you if you think LL or the use of SL is somehow fighting against a repressive political and cultural system and not simply existing to fleece us out of way overpriced server space.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

You're defending something with way too many mistakes and misconceptions way too hard.

I get the impression that @Scylla Rhiadrais defending more the use of certain terms and the writing style.  Not as much the overall thesis as we perceive it.  At least I hope that's the case!

But on that point, just because it's nicely written and would get an "A-" (or maybe a "B+"), doesn't mean the overall idea is somewhat wrong (or in the very least, a one-sided or unbalanced viewpoint).

I "do" think it is good enough that someone could cite it in a high school debate, but at the same time, another student could cite equally biased information on the other side. That's how school debates work (unfortunately, like real-life debates).  It's more about presenting "points" than "truth".  YMMV as always.

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

7 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

While the nature of jank or imperfect systems leads to new forms of community, communication and socialisation, that is not in itself special to Second Life. Every game I've ever played has had jank

YES! Thank you! I 100% agree with your entire post.

If indeed the entire point of the article is about SL's jank (I completely missed that as I was so put off by some of the toxic language in there, I stopped reading rather quickly), Val's point is spot on. Every single game in existence has its own variety of that, and as a result, a shared community bonding experience (often including memes) that tends to rise from it. Now that we're getting multi-year alphas, open betas, and Early Access with so, so many big (and small) releases, this is even more of a thing these days because many games are released unfinished with VERY broken code (which allows for some fun glitches).

 

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This is by far the best and most relevant critique of the argument the article makes that I've seen yet. It's also one that I'm not very qualified to make myself, because I simply don't have enough experience of other MMOs.

 

5 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

A small bit of added context, I can't vouch for every MMO because frankly, I haven't played that many either but I do know a bit about gaming in general.

I've played a lot of MMOs over the years - EQ2, WoW, Rift, Aion, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Wurm Online, Saga of Ryzom, Guild Wars 1 and 2, WildStar, ArcheAge, Age of Conan, Elder Scrolls Online, Project Gorgon, Black Desert Online, Everquest: Landmark, TERA, and dipped my toes into Final Fantasy XIV, Horizons/Istaria, Blade & Soul, Silkroad Online, and Anarchy Online. Whew, probably missed some but anyway, the point is I've played some ish, and I'm very familiar with the rather creative and innovative methods players use to find ways to break things to their advantage. Just like how we see this in single-player games (you mentioned speedruns and innovative builds in Minecraft - those are big - I remember seeing someone created a working cell phone in Minecraft many years ago), players love finding shortcuts and doing the impossible, and entire communities are built around shenanigans like that.

The simplest example I can think of - raiding. Everybody stand here, the boss will then do this because he can't reach us, stack yourselves against this wall, don't step over this line, move here, fire this spell off, buff us with this, wait 3 seconds and then twerk. A raid leader who wants to save time and spend 45 seconds less on a boss WILL find a way. These types of leaders are often respected and highly sought out by players who prioritize efficiency, usually due to having time restrictions (a lot of MMO players are older these days and have full-time jobs and family obligations, so a 6-hour leisurely raid isn't in the cards).

Other examples - getting into endgame places you're too early in the game to be at your level, soloing dungeons and raids that normally take multiple people so you can farm your own gear, skipping bosses in dungeons entirely and not pulling the whole dungeon onto you in the process, glitching certain mobs so they don't attack, the swimming hack low-level Night Elves use to get from Menethil Harbor to Westfall unscathed on Hardcore (permadeath) servers to avoid running through level 20+ zones, etc.

Intentionally breaking and glitching stuff in games is so normal and routine, we've got devs like Larian helping us do it on purpose. In BG3, they even made their cutscenes to allow for whatever wild shenanigans the player gets up to. I own another game (not multiplayer) with its own in-game programming language you can actually hack to change the game itself and everything in it (called "Else Heart.Break()" if interested). From a game review: "Tired? Don't bother going to bed. Buy a cup of coffee, dive into its code, tweak the variables, and increase the caffeine content by 200 percent. Now you're wide awake." You can hack just about anything in that game - doors, banks, all kinds of objects, change time even. Lastly, I also remember some of the wild stuff players built in Tears of the Kingdom. 👀

One last big example - modding. So many tight-knit modding communities spring up and a good chunk of what they make is designed to fix things that are broken or just don't work due to game limitations and restrictions. Biggest example I can think of at the moment - that red shelf hack mod to fix floating clutter and decorating limitations in The Sims 4. That thing was essential.

I find the way things work in SL to be much the same. People here find very creative ways to work beyond the platform's limitations and occasionally use its jank to their advantage. Kind of standard, really.

Edited May 14 by Ayashe Ninetails
Grammaring

[CaerolleClaudel]

11 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And (emphatically, in a very insistent shouty voice) NOT ME!!!!

I dunno, Scylla, now that you bring my attention to it, the style in which that article is written is exactly like the serious, intellectual messages you have sent me!!

(J-O-K-I-N-G ofc lololol…it’s pretty much the opposite of the clarity and coherency of you writing)

[CaerolleClaudel]

18 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If you read the article but never tried Second Life, would it pique your interest enough try it?

After this has been marinating in the back of my mind for a bit, yes, if I knew nothing about SL and read this article, I would have to go check out SL. I am relentlessly curious, and I dig into something or another  I see just to see what this thing is, or because it sounds intriguing. 

I seem to be pretty much the only person here who liked the article, or thinks the writer made SL sound interesting, but a lot of the things they said sound pretty even though I am not into the edgy side of things. 

[CaerolleClaudel]

11 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Trust me. I'd have done a better job of it.

Or perhaps this is how you actually write in your professional life, and you just mask really well here? 😉🤣🤣

[CaerolleClaudel]

9 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Interesting analogy! (As a professional programmer, if I'm a "coder", I suppose that makes you a "scribe", to use words which carry similar levels of respect!)

As a professional, sometimes I am handed someone's undocumented, poorly organized code to "fix", or "support".  For this to be possible, over the years I've developed a skill to figure out the other programmer's "intent".

Sure, I can recognize patterns, but often when something is poorly written, the challenge becomes understanding at both a macro- and micro-level, what the "point" was; what they were trying to accomplish. The worse the writing (or "coding" as a non-programmer may say), the greater a challenge - and the more important it can be - to determine that intent.

The article is a great example of this! Sure, you can read all the words. Yes, you can follow the narrative. But why, oh why, would someone do this?

Sometimes with a "questionably written program", the answer is, "because nobody told them not to, they don't care what anyone else thinks, and so are empowered to do it however they please." I literally deal with this scenario, which is why I can explain it with very little effort.

I hope by analogy, my earlier points are more clear, not less.

Thanks!

I agree with most of what you say other than your criticism of the style. Howver, while the article can seem to go out of its way to kludge clear communication, I like the style;  I find it interesting and different. Then again, I enjoy close reading and trying to get meaning from texts. I have other higher interests right now or I would probably look into many of the things the writer mentions. 

OTOH, if I just wanted to the gist quickly I would be annoyed and go WTF?? 

One other thing, I would reiterate what Scylla has said multiple times: this is a specialist piece of writing targeted at a specific audience. Scylla also frowns on the way it is written (including support of its thesis, if I understand her correctly), so maybe this article would be considered bad writing even in the specific context for which it was written, but either way the article was not written for non-specialists like us. 

FWIW

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

OTOH, if I just wanted to the gist quickly I would be annoyed and go WTF?? 

This is kind of where I am coming from.  Sure, beautifully written articles are fun, and enjoyable to read.

If a prosaic article requires close-reading to grok, AND you detect a lot of bad / biased information, then it stops being fun to read.   My reaction to the style choice becomes something like, "Oh, they made a style choice and either did not focus on content, or were not aware that the 'quality' of their content choices (facts, etc.) do not match the 'quality' of their style choice (enjoyable writing style)".  

I suppose if one were to see the same article in different types of publications, then the reaction could be totally different depending on the focus of those publications.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

I seem to be pretty much the only person here who liked the article, or thinks the writer made SL sound interesting, but a lot of the things they said sound pretty even though I am not into the edgy side of things. 

I liked it too!  While the article was a little vague in places it didn't seem like it was intentionally misrepresenting SL in order to support its premise.

I think it did a good job of illustrating one of the primary reasons that SL has endured for all these years, i.e. the unparalleled freedom to create and shape not only our virtual selves but also the world we inhabit, and the way in which its users have utilized those creative tools not only to express themselves but also to overcome the inherent bugs and shortcomings of the platform.

The article may not provide any revelations about SL for existing users, but I think that it does paint an intriguing and relatively unbiased picture of SL as a platform for those who aren't as familiar and are looking for somewhere to express themselves outside the confines of "traditional mainstream games".

I also thought it provided an interesting perspective on certain aspects of SL culture and the way in which we, as residents, have collectively built our virtual world.

Edited May 14 by Fluffy Sharkfin
typo

[CaerolleClaudel]

9 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

Alright, Nina reporting for duty. I've finally had my sleep. Four hours is enough, thank you very much. So while eating breakfast, I did read through the article and yah, I can see what happened. It's written in the kind of authorative voice you get in academic papers but with none of the scientific rigor to earn that with.

It gets so much fundamentally wrong that it casts doubt on the things it gets right, leading to knee-jerk reactions by people that feel misrepresented. However, I'll echo the sentiment that it does seem to convey a positive message overall and is very much sincere in its intent. So, diving into it. I'll put down a basic rebutal or perhaps a nerdy "actually...".

While the nature of jank or imperfect systems leads to new forms of community, communication and socialisation, that is not in itself special to Second Life. Every game I've ever played has had jank and uh...

<--- Take it from me. I know. Whenever there's interaction between players, they will find ways to communicate and to build communities around that. For example, I've been playing Rabbit & Steel with a friend. A cute game about bunnies taking on increasingly more difficult bosses while the game simulates typical MMO raid mechanics.
Our entire communication was to bounce and wobble using the bunny sprites and so after each victory, we did our little silly dance. We never talked about doing that. We just kind of naturally did.

An imperfect system has created a wholly new expression. It's my experience that this is universal. First Person Shooters had the infamous tea-bagging thing, where they used repeated crouching to simulate a certain act as a taunt. Dark Souls had entire legends surrounding the use of certain emotes and Minecraft has crouching as a courtesy bow.

The reason I'm writing all of this is a simple question: How the hell is Second Life special, then? Transgressive, revolutionary spaces? While Second Life can be that, it's certainly not unique to it.

Case in point, have a gander at this picture (source: https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-xiv-community-spotlight-hgxiv-interview-housing-community-designers-glitch/)

What you're seeing is players breaking the spaces and confines of the game (the ability to place premade objects inside of player houses) to create new and unseen items. For example, the light source above the stove is the bum of a snowman. Stool tops double as cooking plates. In some places, the houses have gone through twelve years of constant revolution, of constantly being broken and intentionally glitched to create something new. This has led to communities whose entire expertise it is to know how to break the game. There's an element of subversion in there, of taking a predefined space, breaking it and making it your own and I kind of see that same energy in Second Life.

Like, the whole thing of mesh is frankly ludicrous the way it is implemented. First, we more or less hide our system avatar, then attach body parts on top of it and then layer further parts over that while again hiding parts of the meshbody on top of the already hidden system body which funny enough, technically already IS a meshbody. So we're wearing two bodies but hiding one of them and half of the second one. That's breaking the system to create something new. I posit that it's not that different however from glitching a snowman into a cupboard to fake a lamp with it.

Now then, what other qualities does Second Life have that are mentioned in the article. The historical aspect of abandoned builds and history. Okay, maybe? While I do think that some of the houses in Ultima Online are older than Second Life itself, I'll give SL that it probably has got a lot more of that and with more creative expression. There's a certain eerie feel to driving around and seeing houses that still look like they were last updated 15 years ago. It does allow the mind to wander and as a person that adores industrial ruins, I enjoy that aspect. However and this is obviously personal opinion, I am not seeing decay and rot, I'm seeing regrowth and reclamation. I don't see a world forgotten by time, I see a world ready to be reshaped, remade and reborn. Potential, versus the sensation of loss.

As for the closing statement then, that the disjointed chaotic janky mess of Second Life can serve as an ironic retreat from an ever more gamified real life - well to that I've got this to say: Hello, heya. Welcome to virtual worlds, games and otherwise! We've been here since the days of MUDs and it's a beautiful communal escapism that you're very welcome to join. New and revolutionary, however, it is not.

Thx so much for taking the time to explain all this! The article makes a lot more sense now. SL is the only game-ish thing I have ‘played’ other than Gone Home and another whose name I can never remember and that I cannot find in any search I try (it’s about two friends, one of whom I think is named Kira, and hurricane that destroys the town; main feature is that the MC can make choices and see the consequences, then change her decision and follow that path), so I was totally clueless about the deep gaming culture you describe. Your discussion gave me a deeper understanding of what the writer of the article was trying to say, or at least the illusion of having a deeper understanding lol. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

You're defending something with way too many mistakes and misconceptions way too hard.

I am not "defending" anything, Paul. I've offered many criticisms of this paper, beginning in the OP, and I've agreed with numerous other criticisms produced by others.

I was simply informing you that you were mischaracterizing and incorrectly defining a particular word.

5 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Also, I laugh at you if you think LL or the use of SL is somehow fighting against a repressive political and cultural system and not simply existing to fleece us out of way overpriced server space.

The paper is certainly not arguing that LL is fighting repression. It is arguing that users are co-opting and subverting the platform itself, which is not quite the same thing as marching on Washington. It also, however, argues that in doing so, users are creating spaces for themselves within the platform that are in some sense "liberating."

That's actually one of the criticisms of the paper I've already made a number of times: the enforcement of a certain kind of conformity on this platform derives at least as much -- I'd actually say more -- from the mechanisms by which content creation and the SL economy work as from the code itself. To use an analogy, we don't so much groan beneath the repression of a fascist government, as allow ourselves (myself included!) to be happily seduced into a complacent conformity by the workings and products of the free market.