More metaversal antics from the world of books  - GalleyCat reports on publishers getting to grips with Second Life. Random House are going for the local library feel by starting a book discussion group for readers – with plans to get authors all av’d up and rolled out for digital meet-and-greets at some point down the line.

Transworld, however, seem to know the value of a good flame war. They’re screening a looped video of Richard ‘God Delusion’ Dawkins in-world talking about his latest controversial opus, and

“[o]utside the auditorium, Transworld have built two message walls, one for supporters of Dawkins’ thesis and one for the dissenters.”

That’ll be an interesting location to check out for the duration of the screenings, I’m thinking. Nothing like a faith fight to set the blood pressures soaring.

***

Meanwhile, The Guardian has been chatting to Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) about Second Life, the runaway universe he has created. They try to draw him out on some hot topics, but he stays pretty cool under fire:

“TG: You are running a real economy but it is essentially a dictatorship, one headed by you, Philip Linden – as you are known in SL – the dictator.

PR: Yes, but it is a subtle question. If a country establishes a record of repossessing land for no real reason, then that colours the extent to which it’s a dictatorship. We haven’t done that. Could we shut the servers down if we get pissed off with somebody? Yes, we could do that but we haven’t and I think it is very unlikely that we will because it would so risk everything we have built.”

And on the porn issue?

“TG: I understand that porn is the biggest part of the economy.

PR: I don’t think it’s the biggest, but it’s hard to tell. Some of the transactions are person to person and some are transactions from vending machines. Sometimes the transactions have some text that allows us to tell what it is but people are so inventive that we don’t always know.”

As if being based on porn did any harm to the original internet! For a guy who’s currently under fire from the press (and constantly under fire from his user base) he deals with PR pretty smoothly. But the sooner the open-source iterations of the software get going, the safer a position he’ll be in – talking a good game is fine, but pretending to be deaf has never helped any business. SL has some serious operational problems, and its regular population are getting very annoyed by being continually fobbed off with filigree while the bugs go unsquashed.

***

That’s not stopping people developing it as a platform for more than hyper-real kinky antics and combat sims, though. TerraNova has an interview with Rebecca Nesson, who is using SL as a platform environment for distance learning classes that have previously been run on websites and via email:

“I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.”

Think about that for a second, and bear in mind the flood of overseas students that come to the UK (or the US) to be educated. That’s not a cheap proposition for, say, a Chinese or Korean family, even a well-off one. A virtual platform like SL could become a much cheaper way of getting the same education – why fly half-way round the globe when you can just log on to your PC for four or five hours a day? The world is getting flatter – and I don’t mean geographically.

***

And, as I keep saying, this will effect authors eventually. The effects of the internet and the Long Tail are already causing fundamental changes to the lives of independent musicians, for example:

“Along the way, [Jonathan] discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.”

I know a lot of writers resist the temptations of blogging for exactly that reason, and it’s a logical approach. Whether or not that invisibility will hinder their career (because nothing gets Google juice like blogging regularly) or help it (will an air of mystery have a cachet of cool in a transparent world?) remains to be seen.

But see it we will – and Second Life (or something like it) will be the next step on from this, as Jason Stoddard suggests. New formats for a new era, perhaps?

That’s the question being asked here and there on the intarwebs at the moment, after a story appeared in a Belgian newspaper claiming that police in Brussels are beginning an investigation into allegations of a rape that occured in Second Life.

I’m no lawyer, nor am I an ethicist, and I don’t claim to have an answer one way or the other. But the fact that we can even be asking such a question is fascinating; the walls between the real world and the virtual – what Edward Castronova calls the ‘permeable membrane’ – are becoming increasingly thin and easy to cross, and the legal machinery is going to take a long time to catch up.

I like to use the ‘Wild West’ metaphor, describing MMOs like Second Life in terms of new frontiers where new experimental ways of life can take place, thanks to the relative lawlessness that prevails. It’s a double-edged sword, as the virtual rape case demonstrates, but these spaces are test beds for the social systems of the future.

Of course, much like there was in the American West, there is pressure on the people benefitting most from the expansion into new territories to police the anarchic goings-on. Which is probably why Linden Labs has announced their intent to exclude SL users from ‘Adult’ content in-world unless they can provide evidence of their legal majority … though the fact that the enforcement of non-adult content in a region labelled as such is to be left as the responsibility of the landholder leaves them a neat get-out clause for when something goes wrong. Every lazy sherriff needs a box-full of deputy badges.

Who says men can’t multitask? While working on some reviews last night, I was also hanging out at a music festival in a dusty junkyard.

As you’ve probably guessed, Scorched Earth (the music festival in question) took place in Second Life, so it was easier for me to work and hang out than it would have been at the fields-and-tents type of gig. That’s yours truly on the far left, stood on the pile of slagged tyres.

The venue was The Junkyard, on a patch of land just south of my own virtual pied-a-terre. The Junkyard is the second of the two sims that make up The Wastelands, a post-apocalyptic themed RPG sim. As a casual visitor to Second Life, I was utterly repelled by the shiny bling-ness of the mainland, so when I finally found somewhere that fitted with my own rather grungy and wrecked aesthetic tastes, I settled there immediately.

To tell the truth, most of the music wasn’t really to my taste. Paranoid Foundation specialised in a sort of droning beatless elctronica, complete with mumbled ketamine vocals, and the Redzone DJ set was fairly murky also - I felt the absence of drums and guitars quite keenly, rock fan that I am. Bela Emerson was a rare act, however - one girl, one cello, and a whole bunch of effects pedals. 

Her music was a landscape of sculpted and sampled bass tones, jittering and looping around themselves, building up and collapsing into nothingness. Again, not my normal thing, but intriguing. It’s good to step out of the musical comfort zone once in a while. It certainly fitted the ambience of the sim!

To be quite honest though, a large part of the festival’s appeal was the chance to hang out with some of my virtual neighbours, and some visiting oddballs from other places in SL. The Wastelands isn’t a clubby sim, or prone to events that attract large groups of people. It’s a quiet neighbourhood, really (unless a fight breaks out over a good piece of salvage), and it’s rare you get many more than five or six people chatting together at any one time. Scorched Earth acted as a nexus, though, and so it ended up being a bit of a social more than anything else, at least for me:

What interests me most about this sort of event is their potential. They’re very clunky at the moment; SL is far from being a mature piece of software, and the streaming of audio and video is still a fairly arcane process that relies as much on luck and the alignments of planets than any skill with code. But give it a couple of years (and an open-source peer-to-peer version of the SL server software), and you’re going to see virtual festivals that will make Burning Man look like the Teddy Bear’s Picnic.

I mean, look at that picture above; that’s a dolphin at the left edge. When was the last festival at which you saw a flying dolphin wearing flourescent beads on its tail while talking about the finer points of electronic manipulation of cello tones? And what had you ingested to achieve such a state?

Welcome to Second Life; the frontier of an unevenly distributed future.

Thanks to a number of people for dropping me a line about this – I’d have caught it in the daily news-trawl anyway, but it’s flattering to know that you care about my coverage!

So, yes; Earth-like exoplanet spotted. Lot’s of poor journalism about though, which I’ll not bother linking to. For the more detailed facts of the matter, I refer you on to the ever-reliable Centauri Dreams, which discusses what is known for certain (and what is mere conjecture) about the planet and the solar syastem it is situated in, and then looks at the potential of the planet as an environment habitable to humans.

Of course, not everyone is particularly impressed by this – transhumanist philosopher Michael Anissimov believes (with some justification) that we should use our time and effort more effectively, and stop getting excited about other planets until we’ve properly addressed the issues and potentials of the one we find ourselves on already.

That difference in attitudes throws an interesting light on the post I just made about modern (and post-modern) science fiction themes, come to think of it. While I’m overjoyed that we’re exploring space (albeit only by telescope at the moment), I’d dearly like to see a lot more focus on issues closer to home – though not at the expense of the gosh-wow space stuff, if at all possible. Yes, I’ll have my slice of hypocrisy cake and eat it, thanks.

[This post adapted and expanded from an original at Futurismic, because I don't have the time to write things out twice if I can possibly avoid it. Shout-outs for news alerts to Jetse and Ariel - thanks, guys.]

Following on from my mention of the Dune Project roleplay sim in Second Life, here’s an article on New World Notes that talks about another roleplay sim that looks far and away better developed, coded and styled:

[Image lifted from original article at New World Notes blog; please contact if removal is required.]

“There’s a pretty elaborate backstory to CoLA , but to sum up: you are playing in a world that saw the Apocalypse but forgot to die. Most of humanity is wiped out, undead, mutated or cursed. As a role-player you get a nice spread of species to choose from, so no matter what mood you’re in, we have you covered.”

Much like the Dune Project, it looks a little too hardcore for me – I left my roleplay days behind long ago, not through any sense of shame but through lack of time to devote to them. But it’s interesting to see these things develop – sure, there are plenty of MMORPGs out there, but the way that Second Life can act as an adaptable host platform for a multitude of different user-created games is nothing short of unique. When the server code goes open-source and peer-to-peer, things are going to get very strange very quickly.

Now, I don’t want to brazenly name-drop … actually, scratch that, yes I do. I was hanging out in The Wastelands in Second Life last night with a bunch of my neighbours, when Integral Danton (who is probably better known to most of you as comics writer Warren Ellis) dropped by wearing a rather impressive outfit.

Click through for the larger size – that’s Mr. Danton on the right. Despite the fact that he’d been preceded by someone turning up in a dragon avatar with full fire-breathing capabilities, everyone present with a bit of a science fiction background recognised (and was fairly impressed by) his outfit – a stillsuit, as per Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

It turns out that some people have put together a sim entirely based on the Dune universe. I popped over there to get some photos, but it turns out it’s a very hardcore roleplay sim, and I didn’t have the time or motivation to read and absorb the huge list of rules of conduct that would have been necessary for me to venture in without pissing off the natives. I may well pop by over the weekend for a better look, but if you want to see for yourself, just do a place search in-world for ‘Dune Project’. However, work on the theory that if you haven’t read the Dune novels, it’s not going to mean an awful lot to you.

Just as a side note, memes from meatspace have a way of bleeding through into the metaverse, too. Let’s just hope no one from the Boston Police Department visits The Wastelands any time soon…

Via the inimitable Jason Stoddard comes news of a genre fiction con that anyone with a serious interest in promoting their writing should consider attending – if only for the fact that the magazine sponsoring it has a claimed readership of 5 million (yes, million) people.

Of course, the Chengdu convention, like the magazine in question (Science Fiction World), is based in China, which may put it out of your financial league – unless you plan to bolt it on to your attendance at this year’s Worldcon in Japan, in which case the power of my searing jealousy will keep you awake for weeks to come.

But fear not, my economically-challenged friends! Because they’re planning on running the Chengdu convention virtually in Second Life in parallel with the meatspace version, which means the financial issues aren’t anywhere near as bad as they could be if you have access to a broadband internet connection and a reasonably pokey computer.

I assure you that I’m going to be there with bells on – and hopefully by then I’ll have my own little patch of SL land developed enough to entertain visitors who tire of panels …

I was hanging around in Second Life last night, and gatecrashed a bunch of people chatting about Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin (which I have yet to read, so I mostly listened to what everyone else was saying).

Inevitably someone brought up the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, and someone else mentioned that he’d not only been to Second Life, but been interviewed there too. The things you find out from random people that you’d have never thought to Google for, eh? So here’s a video of Vonnegut being interviewed in the metaverse.

Talking of Second Life, I’m considering buying a plot of land in The Junkyard. One just came free, and I’m looking into the financial considerations (which are quite low for a single small parcel, all things considered) before laying out some Lindens and begging Jason Stoddard and Co. to build me a cool hangout in keeping with the local ambiance …

… the local ambiance being very much post-apocalyptic, a la Mad Max. My kind of place. Pop by and visit – the locals have some diverting (and deadly) entertainments should you feel the urge to join in. Otherwise you can just wander around, chat to people and check out the scenery. And not have people try to sell you crap you don’t want, quite unlike a huge swathe of the rest of the metaverse.

Oh yeah; Warren Ellis has a new gaff in SL, which I also dropped in on. It’s called Winterstate. And being the sort of host who understands his client demographic, he’s laid on entertainment in the form of a set of zombie-infested tunnels for you to blow off steam in, should you wish – you’ll need to buy a gun elsewhere, but that’s not much of a chore. There are also little helicopters, and it snows a lot. Mr. Ellis wasn’t around at the time, regrettably.

Any VCTB-reading SL users, please friend me, because I still hardly know anyone. Just IM for Isambard Portsmouth.

It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. I’ve been threatening to get acquainted with SL for months now – I think I just found my motivation. Any regular visitors to the metaverse care to share some tips of good places to visit?

As might be considered fitting on the birthday of Copernicus, a few items regarding the Fermi Paradox turned up in my feeds today, so I thought I’d share the wealth. Continue reading “Fermi Paradox manifests”