1128: Suddenly Silenced

While I don’t particularly relish the circumstances under which I left Twitter recently — which I won’t go into now as it’s all still a bit “raw” and upsetting, to be honest — it’s sort of been nice to not have the omniscient little blue bird hovering over my shoulder all the time.

Twitter was a big part of my life for a very long time. According to my Twitter archive — which I downloaded before I closed my account — I first posted a tweet on May 8 of 2008, but didn’t really do anything with it until the end of June of that year. It’s fair to say that I — like many other people — didn’t really “get” what it was all about to begin with, largely because it was so ill-defined and hadn’t pervaded popular culture quite as much as it has today. “It’s like Facebook statuses,” I’d say to people when trying to explain it, “but without all the other crap.”

It sort of is like Facebook statuses without all the other crap — those early tweets of mine very much followed the “Pete is… [doing something]” format — but it quickly became a lot more than that. It became one of my primary means of communication with my international friends.

As many of you reading this may know, I have a lot of friends, but disappointingly few of them live in the same place as me. I have at least rectified that a little by moving back to Southampton to be near my university and board game buddies, but many of my other friends are still scattered the world over, all the way from America to Japan and lots of places in between. It’s sort of awesome to have such a global group of friends, though it naturally means that I’ve never actually met an awful lot of them and possibly never will in some cases. It also meant that I needed a good, simple, reliable means of staying in touch with them; Facebook was all right, but as it gradually became more and more cluttered with crap, fewer and fewer people were using it as a serious means of communication. Today, it’s a bloated mess that it’s very difficult to be “heard” on, but it still has a place.

Twitter, meanwhile, was simple, pure and to the point. It was like exchanging text messages with friends, only on a global scale. I made a lot of new friends through Twitter and got to know some a bit better. I got through some tough times, too; the immediacy of the service meant that it was a good outlet for me to talk about the way I was feeling when I was going through my “difficult period” a few years back, and I appreciated the support I got from my friends — and sometimes strangers — during that dark period.

Twitter is addictive, though. It becomes a compulsion. Install it on your phone and you’ll find yourself idly opening the app to see if anyone has said anything interesting in the last two minutes, even if you just stepped away from your computer where you were staring at a Twitter client. You’ll find yourself wanting to step into (or start) conversations at silly hours in the morning, and get relatively little sleep as a result. It’ll worm its way into your life, in short, and start to take over.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing — as I’ve already outlined above, it proved to be a good means of communication for me, and a good means of meeting new people. It allowed me to put myself out there a lot more than I feel comfortable doing in the “real world”, and in many ways helped me to build confidence. And let’s also not forget that I met Andie through Twitter, so that’s pretty cool.

The recent things that happened to me, though, brought the service’s public nature into sharp focus. Sure you can be free to be open and honest about your feelings, your likes and dislikes, but that also means that you can be open to attack, too, without provocation. And once you’re in the sights of one of these obnoxious groups, it’s very difficult to get yourself out of them. Twitter the company aren’t much help, either — after several support messages keeping them apprised of everything that was going on, the only thing I’ve heard from them is a request for a clarification on something. They take great pains in their terms and conditions to say that they don’t mediate personal disputes — though I feel there’s a strong case for what happened to me to be considered a criminal offence, and as such I reported it to the police and intend to keep hounding Twitter until they do something about it.

In some ways, I feel sickened and angry that I was forced off a service that has been a prominent and important part of my life for a long time now. In other ways, it’s actually quite relieving to know that I don’t need to read that feed of inanities any longer, or get frustrated at people trying to have in-depth discussions on tricky issues in 140 characters when what they should really do is pen a 3,000-word blog post. I’m not ruling out a return in the future when the scumbags who drove me away give up and do something else, but for the moment I can certainly live without it — and there’s no way I’m going back to a service which I don’t feel safe using.

1115: Twittertwat

Quite a few people I know have quit Twitter in the last year or so. A few of them have also come back again, and some have gone through this process more than once, but a few have gone, never to return, either. Fortunately, in the cases of people I’m actually interested in staying in touch with, I have alternative means of contacting them, and Twitter was only ever a way of easily sending short messages to them — a global texting service, if you will.

I use Twitter a lot, for engaging in conversations, posting links to my work and just generally being part of the global community. But over the past few weeks, I’m starting to understand why increasing numbers of people are jumping ship.

The experience is, of course, as with so much else on the Internet, exactly what you make of it, and I’ve taken fairly ruthless control of my experience by simply blocking people I find objectionable and/or annoying. Not necessarily people who are being abusive — I appear to be a relatively inoffensive tweeter that doesn’t attract trolls compared to some — but people whom I just don’t want to hear from. (If only real life were that simple.)

Even with doing this, though, it’s still increasingly frustrating when the entirety of my timeline is taken up by some sort of snark on one subject or another. Today, there were several subjects — a report by Edge about the next-generation Microsoft console which framed a bunch of rumours as if they were confirmed facts; the ECA announcing that HipHopGamer was going to be their new ambassador; and something about J. J. Abrams and Valve. I’ve only really dipped in and out of Twitter today, and the snark in relation to all of these things was unbearable then, so I can’t imagine how irritating it would have been had I had a client open all day.

This is the thing, though. There’s nothing really fundamentally wrong with having strong opinions on matters such as those mentioned above — which will, of course, mean nothing to people who don’t follow the games industry — but Twitter is not a particularly good place in which to have discussions about those opinions. It’s fine for raising awareness of something — perhaps posting a link to a relevant story — but when people start trying to have “debates” about these things, it all sort of starts to fall apart a bit, really. Any pretext of rational discussion is inclined to quickly go out of the window in favour of short, snappy arguments, and the ease with which a tweet can be posted means that things are often spoken in haste without any real thought. To me, the very benefit of arguing a point using the written word is that you can take your time over it and consider it carefully; not so if you’re in a Twitter argument.

I haven’t been involved in any of these discussions/debates/arguments as I know how they inevitably go. I also know the people to avoid engaging with by now — those who seem to take offense at everything it’s even slightly possible to take offense to. Even though I don’t engage with them, though — and in many cases, as mentioned above, have blocked them — it’s still exhausting to feel that there are certain subjects which just can’t be broached; certain turns of phrase which can’t be used; certain words which are off-limits. (And I’m not talking about anything explicitly offensive like racial epithets or anything like that; I’m talking about words which these people specifically choose to interpret using the worst possible meaning rather than the tone and context in which they were intended.)

I’m rambling a bit, I know, but the gist of the matter is that this week I’ve come closer to quitting Twitter altogether than I have ever done. Twitter has been an important part of my life for a long time, a key way in which I stay in touch with a lot of my international friends and the means through which I first met Andie, but I’m beginning to feel that “honeymoon” period is over. It doesn’t feel like the warm, welcoming, positive community it used to be. Perhaps that’s just the people I follow, and I’m long overdue for a ruthless unfollow-and-block session — or perhaps people really are being more snarky than they were. Either way, the negativity is starting to get to me a bit.

It’s doubtful that I will quit Twitter at any point in the near future — I still have too many friends who use it as their primary means of communication, and it’s still the best way to quickly and easily share things that probably don’t really need to be shared with the world — but I just found it mildly interesting that this is the closest I’ve ever come to actually ditching it.

#oneaday Day 110: Private Hysteria

Earlier today, a story broke which caused a fresh round of privacy concerns, as it was revealed that the iPhone is, in fact, recording where you’ve been and storing that information in its backup file that it transfers to your computer every time you sync it. Here’s the story from the Telegraph’s “Technolgoy Consultant” (a typo which doesn’t immediately inspire me with confidence) — judge for yourself.

Here’s my take, and I understand completely you may not feel the same way: I don’t give a damn. Why should I? What possible use could that information serve? What could people find out that I haven’t already made abundantly clear via other means of social media? That I like to drive to Southampton a lot? That I tend to prefer Costa Coffee as my coffee outlet of choice? That I have been known to drive to Tesco in the dead of night for groceries and snacks?

“But, privacy,” people bleat, without really explaining what they mean. Well, what about privacy? The minute you connect a device to the Internet, you’re putting yourself on display. The minute you use your GPS-enabled phone to find out where the hell you are and where you should be going, someone knows where you are. The minute you search “oily lesbian midgets” on Google, someone knows what a complete pervert you are. If you’re that concerned about privacy, you should reconsider your decision to carry around a constantly Internet-connected device with satellite tracking in your pocket. Or at least turn the fucking thing off.

Most of the time, though, the hysteria over privacy seems to be worry for the sake of worry. Take the app Color which came out a while back, for example. Color is, in theory, a clever way for people in the same place to collect the candid mobile photos they snap of an event — and possibly meet new people. It does this through a variety of means — GPS tracking if possible, then Wi-Fi identifications, mobile phone base stations and even recording the background noise when you take the photo and comparing it to the noise print taken when other people take photos. My first reaction on hearing how it worked was “Jesus Christ, that’s clever,” followed by “but ultimately unnecessary as most people I know with iPhones will just immediately upload their photos to Facebook anyway.” My immediate reaction was not “Shit! My iPhone is recording me without telling me! Bastards!” — which was the reaction of a few people I spoke to about it.

Why, though? Why the panic? It’s just sound. Are you a secret agent? Probably not. And if you were, it’s unlikely you’d be using social media to share photos on your iPhone. Again, what possible sinister use could the recording of background noise have? Could advertisers figure out that you like hanging out in noisy places and start providing you with targeted AdSense ads for earplugs and ear drops? Perhaps. But again: so what?

The main objection seems to be that the device is doing this without the user’s knowledge. But I even can’t see the problem with this, really. If you’re going somewhere you shouldn’t be or doing something/one you shouldn’t be, then don’t take an Internet-connected GPS-enabled device with you that — shock horror — might know where you are. And for fuck’s sake, don’t check in on Foursquare while you’re at your bit on the side’s house. It’s always your choice. If you want to be part of the digital revolution, then you have to get used to the fact that your information is out there for as long as you’re connected to the Internet.

Potential spoilarz for Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story ahead.

If you’ve played Christine Love’s Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, you’ll know that the culmination of the plot deals with this very issue — the supposed “erosion of privacy”. The young characters in the game have grown up with this attitude to data, and as such are not surprised to know that other people are looking at their theoretically “private” information — and indeed take full advantage of this fact. I’m starting to feel like I can understand their attitude somewhat. I’m not sure if I should be pleased about that, or if I should be more worried than I am that my iPhone knows how many times I’ve been to public toilets in the last year.

Ah well. Can always turn it off. At least until The Machines take over.

#oneaday, Day 302: Faceache

So, apparently Facebook are launching their own email service. Here’s a writeup on it from the very lovely Keri Honea. Go read it and support her work. Then come back. I’ll wait. I’ll even stay open in this tab while you go and read it.

Okay. Here’s the thing. Facebook is so prevalent in modern online life, so splattered all over pretty much everything we do on the Internet, that setting up an email service probably makes sense for them. After all, there’s a bunch of people who already spend a considerable amount of time on the site each day, and not all of them play Farmville, even. So why not incorporate their email into it, too?

Now, granted, few of us have had the chance to test out the new features yet. And there are a few neat ideas in there, like the filtering options, which are apparently pretty cool. But the thing that will give some people—particularly the more net-savvy amongst us—pause is Facebook’s rapidly-eroding reputation for personal privacy violations.

There are all sorts of responses to this. No, you shouldn’t post things on there that you’re not happy to share with the world—just like any website. But you don’t always have complete control over everything you appear in. The tagging process, while cool in principle, is open to all sorts of abuse and has been the source of many arguments I’ve heard in the street. This is something which wouldn’t have happened five years ago.

And then there’s the controversy over exactly how “personal” your personal information remains, even with all your privacy settings jacked up to the max. Sure, you may be able to lock off your wall, photos, messages and all manner of other things from prying eyes. Everyone, that is, except for advertisers. Those supposedly “targeted” ads on Facebook that get everywhere—what will happen once email, an inherently more private form of communication, enters the picture? Will we start seeing targeted ads on Facebook based on your emails?

Yeah, GMail does this already. But at least GMail’s ads are non-obtrusive, limiting themselves to simple text links that are at least relevant to the message you’re reading at the time. But imagine, just hypothetically speaking of course, that you sign yourself up to a particular kind of site that you don’t really want to talk to other people about. It could be a dating site. It could be a porn site. It could be a forum specialising in some sort of obscure fetish which only you and a gentleman from Bulgaria frequent. But the advertisers spot this, and so the ad campaigns begin.

This isn’t a problem until you decide to show someone who’s popped over for coffee this hilarious new link you posted earlier today. You click over onto your profile and BOOM! Ads for tortoise porn. Or something.

Okay, it’s a bit of a kneejerk reaction, of course, and Facebook themselves claim that they’re not intending to be a competitor to the big boys of the webmail arena. But given the huge number of Facebook subscribers, it’s not unreasonable to assume that a goodly proportion of those people will happily opt-in without checking the terms and conditions thoroughly. Which, as many people have been finding out, is becoming more and more important to do.

I remember joining Facebook a good few years back. It was a relatively small community that was kept private to your close group of specifically-allowed friends. It was a good place to post photos and private-ish messages, and a complete contrast to the other big-hitter at the time, MySpace. Nowadays, though? Facebook is something of a running joke to long-standing users of the Internet, many of whom have either switched completely to Twitter, or only use Facebook when dealing with people who don’t understand Twitter.

Trends change over time, and it’s possible that Facebook will eventually fall from grace completely when the next Greatest Thing Ever comes along. What will happen to those petabytes of data they’re storing about everyone then? Including, now, super-private emails? You can guarantee that not everyone will remember to delete their accounts and remove any incriminating “evidence” from there.

Simple solution: scale back on your Facebook use and find alternatives. I barely use Facebook these days. I’m a Twitter man primarily, and am slowly creeping around to using GMail as my email client of choice. Can’t argue with perfection.

In short: if you email me anything @facebook.com, I probably won’t be reading it, because I’ll assume anything that comes to that address will be something to do with Farmville. I am yet to hear anyone in my group of friends say something positive about the prospect of having a Facebook email address. Why not be the first? Convince me why it’s a good idea in the comments!

Or, you know, don’t. Your choice, really.

Free bonus: What Your Email Address Says About You, from The Oatmeal

#oneaday, Day 235: Social Networking

I’m taking a few minutes out from cleaning and packing to write this as I will probably be too exhausted later in the evening. Things are going reasonably well; thanks for asking. Perhaps not as quickly as I’d like, and I’m terrified that I won’t fit everything in the back of my car despite my genetically-enhanced Tetris skills inherited from my mother. Still, if it doesn’t all fit, then something’s going to have to be thrown out, isn’t it? Divine justice or whatever.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today was social networking. I’m not talking Facebook, Twitter, Friendface or what have you here. I’m talking actual social networks.

“Social networking” is one of those terms that sprung up a few years back, along with the word “leverage” being used as a verb (stop it!), and the obnoxiousness that is “monetize”. But it actually has some grounding in good sense, for once. Our social lives are nothing if not a network. And society in general is one gigantic network of people, some of whom are connected to each other, others who are not.

Let me give you an example. You walk into a shop. You attempt to buy a Cornish pasty from the gentleman behind the counter. For some reason, you have some difficulty. Perhaps the shop in question does not sell Cornish pasties. Perhaps the gentleman behind the counter is having difficulty understanding your heavily-accented English. Perhaps you muttered what you said. Perhaps you delivered your request in sign language and the gentleman behind the counter is unfamiliar with it.

Regardless, you have difficulty acquiring said meat-filled pastry product. As a result, your brain informs your mouth that it would be a really good idea to call said gentleman a “twat”. So you do. Then you storm out of the shop. Cut back to gentleman behind the counter, who is standing flabbergasted at the frankly disproportionately offensive response that a dissatisfied customer just gave him. (It was a bit rude. There are plenty of other places to get a pasty.)

His friend comes out of the back room to see what’s happening. He tells her that he just got called a “twat” by someone, and he’s actually a little bit annoyed about that. His friend tells him not to worry and reminds him that there’s a night out planned that evening.

That evening, gentleman and his friend go out for a drink or two with a crowd of friends. Gentleman is a little sullen, so one of his friend’s friends (let’s call her Alice) comes over and asks him what the problem is. Gentleman knows Alice, but not very well. But he quite likes her, so he tells her about the earlier incident and describes you perfectly.

“Oh!” says Alice. “You mean Sam / Don Woods / Kittycow / Elana / Matt / Jeff / Jen / Pook / Rachel / Moonsong / Jane / Mandy / Calin / Graham / Chris / Amy / Denise / Mark / Lynette / that person I know whose name escapes me right now*? Yeah, they’re always like that. Don’t take it personally.”

The next time you see Alice, she tells you to stop calling people in shops twats. You raise an eyebrow at her, then you both have a good laugh about it. Or she punches you in the face. One or the other.

This is a small-scale and somewhat contrived scenario, of course. But these sorts of things are happening every day on varying levels. What is happening to me right now is indirectly going to affect the lives of many, many others. While it would be somewhat presumptious of me to overstate my own influence over other people, I know for a fact that there are at least a couple of people out there who have very strong feelings about the fact I am leaving. These reasons are very different from one another. Some of them know each other, some of them don’t. All of them know that I wouldn’t do this if I had a choice.

Unfortunately, I don’t. And I’m sorry that the actions and choices I have made, along with actions and choices I have no control over, have led to this point, where so many people’s lives are going to be just that tiny bit different from hereon.

Those of you who are going to be that little bit farther away from me than you were before, I’m just an email, comment, text, phone call, tweet, IM, PingChat message or really, really loud scream away. Those of you that all this isn’t affecting directly? Well, I hope you can join everyone in keeping your fingers crossed that this is the beginning of something new and awesome.

I leave town tomorrow sometime. Those of you in the area, keep an eye on Twitter and your phones for details of a meetup.

* Interactivity! Delete as applicable.

#oneaday, Day 143: Formspring Durch Technik

I’m not sure what it is that appeals to me about question-based-sort-of-social-networking-web-2.0-nonsense Formspring, but I find it hugely addictive. I’m not the only one, either. High-profile online figures such as Leigh Alexander and Jeff Green seem to be having a blast with it, too, as are plenty of others.

The concept is simple. Anyone can ask you a question, either with their username attached or anonymously. Most people choose to ask anonymously. And it’s actually more fun that way, because you then have the sort of metagame of working out who asked you what. And if you get a slightly questionable, err, question, it becomes all the more exciting to answer – was it one of your hairy male friends asking sarcastically, or was it asked by that hot chica you’ve got your eye on?

I think the most fun thing about it is that in coming up with creative answers to the very creative questions people come up with, you get the opportunity to talk about yourself. This is the very worst sort of narcissism that Web 2.0 brings out, of course, but it also gives you the opportunity to share things about your past, your personality, your hopes, your dreams, your tastes… all sorts of things that might not come up in conversation unless you blurted them out randomly like some sort of Fact-Tourette’s sufferer.

A friend commented that the whole thing smacked of the sort of questions you get on dating sites. That’s sometimes true, of course, but the difference here is that it all depends on what people choose to ask you. If people choose to ask you dating site-type questions, that’s what’ll happen. If people choose to ask you a series of increasingly-outrageous “what if?” scenarios, then that’s what you’ll get. Or in my case, you get a mixture of both until it becomes very confusing and you have no idea who asked what any more. Largely because for the most part you didn’t know in the first place.

It’s a service dependent on interaction, of course. If your friends are the sort of people who baulk at typing anything into text boxes, whether or not they have to bother signing up for a service beforehand, then you won’t get much out of Formspring. If, however, you have creative friends who enjoy coming up with ridiculous things for you to answer, then you’ll have a hell of a lot of fun with it. And your friends might even learn something about you that they didn’t know before. You might even learn something about yourself that you didn’t know before. Deep, huh?

If you want to ask me a stupid question, I have a list of the last few ones I’ve been asked somewhere to your right in the sidebar that you can click on to see my responses. Or you can just go here. You don’t have to sign up for the site to take part, but if you do sign up then you get email notifications when someone asks you a question or when someone answers your question, whether or not it was anonymous.

#oneaday, Day 59: Social Mobility

So social games are here to stay. So say the people in the know, particularly the outspoken Brian Reynolds from Zynga who has commented on the subject at great length. Understandable, really, given that his company are behind some of the most successful social games in history.

I have to say, though, that I don’t understand them. And it’s not through lack of trying. I’ve played Mafia Wars. I’ve played Epic Pet Wars. I’ve fired up Farmville a couple of times. But the elephant in the room seems to be that these games are dull, uninspiring and boring. People used to joke that Championship Manager on the PC looked (and played) like a spreadsheet. Mafia Wars looks like an Access database – and plays like one too. I haven’t done much with Farmville but from what I’ve seen (and heard from others) it’s not much better, just a little more “visual”.

These games market themselves on their “social” capabilities. They call themselves “MMORPGs” and they clog up the iTunes App Store RPG section something chronic with their various denominations of microtransaction space dollar bundles. But, from what I’ve seen, there is little to no socialising involved. You add people to your friends list to let them “be in your mafia” or “be your neighbour”, but besides increasing your stats or occasionally sending you an item they can’t use (not one that they don’t want, it’s always one that they can’t use because it’s set aside as a special “gift” item) there is no interaction with others. Sure, in Mafia Wars you can attack another player but there’s no strategy or interaction there, either – whoever has the best stats wins.

Brian Reynolds commented to developers at the GamesBeat summit that “shame” is a powerful motivating factor for players. “No one wants to be caught letting their crops wither and die,” he says. But does it really matter when you have four thousand people on your friends list, none of whom you’ve ever spoken to? That’s not socialising, that’s MySpace-style “friend” collecting. It doesn’t help that anything even vaguely related to these games – iTunes reviews, Facebook reviews, Facebook groups, comment threads, blog posts – always degenerates into a swarm of several hundred people all going “ADD ME! 9932569!” with absolutely no conversation going on whatsoever. I would mind it less if the “social” aspect of these games was something more of a metagame, where people actually talked to each other and then added each other. But the amount of friend-whoring that goes on by people is just ridiculous, and it strikes me as completely against the spirit of what these games are supposedly trying to achieve – bring people together to play.

Maybe I’m missing the point somewhere. Maybe these social games really are the next big thing. It’s true that some games get the whole thing absolutely right – PopCap’s wonderful Bejeweled Blitz is a fine example – but for every little gem (no pun intended) there’s a billion and one identikit Mafia Wars clones. And they’re all devoid of any gameplay whatsoever.

Games for people who don’t like games. I guess that’s something – bringing the medium to the masses and all that. But is someone reared on Mafia Wars and Farmville ever really going to graduate to games that are actually, you know, good? I’m not so sure.

On Virtual Worlds

I haven’t really blogged about this much on this particular site, but I figured it’s time to sit down and talk about it as it’s something that I’ve found consistently interesting for quite a few years now.

The subject is virtual worlds – online spaces where tens, hundreds, thousands of people can log in and join a virtual community for one reason or another… it may be purely to socialise, it may be to battle monsters, it may be to have fun, it may even be to have sex. And I’m not talking about community or social networking websites here, as those are a different beast entirely. No, I’m talking about actual virtual worlds, where you can wander around as an avatar, explore the world, meet other people and interact with them in any of the ways described above.

There’s literally hundreds of virtual worlds available for people to use nowadays, of many types – some are more “gamey“, others are more “social“, others still are focused on the less salubrious side of online interactions. Today I want to focus particularly on the virtual world of Second Life and its appeal to me, despite its many, many flaws.

I remember first hearing about Second Life while I was big into The Sims. My whole flat at university became obsessed with The Sims shortly after I built our first house, made virtual representations of all six of us in the flat, then realised that we didn’t have enough money to buy beds to begin with, so the whole “family” slept in recliners. Over the years – yes, I was that guy – I bought most of the expansions and later moved on to The Sims 2.

I was, like many other fans of the series, extremely excited at the prospect of The Sims Online, offering the opportunity to have the same kind of fun, but with other people involved. It never made it over here to the UK – at least, not in any prominent way – so I never got the opportunity to try it. I forget exactly how I came across Second Life as a result of this, but it was something I stumbled across without hearing anything about it beforehand, and I thought that the concept sounded rather like The Sims Online, with players being able to design their own virtual person and “live” in a virtual world. As it happens, it has very little to do with The Sims Online, but I wasn’t to know that at the time.

For the uninitiated, Second Life is an ambitious virtual world project by Linden Lab, offering “players” (and I use the term loosely, as it’s really not a “game” as such… unless you choose to make it as such, which we’ll discuss later) the opportunity to enter a world that is almost entirely user-generated. Buildings, textures, landmasses, interface features, animations, body parts, clothing – everything is created by the residents of the virtual world, and this is the thing that initially fascinated me. I couldn’t comprehend the idea of being able to log into something where the content was so fluid, where there wasn’t a static virtual world that was always the same every time you logged in, with monsters in the same place, prime “camping spots” and so on. So I signed up and signed in, not really knowing what to expect.

Second Life is a peculiar experience the first time you log in, especially if you’re more used to aforementioned online games with static content, such as World of Warcraft. You quickly become used to the concept of “rezzing”, which is the process whereby you enter a new location and you can see things downloading and appearing around you. This is disconcerting the first time it happens (and more than a little irritating if you find yourself stuck against a wall which hasn’t appeared yet) but, like many things in the world, you become used to it the more it happens. Similarly, you become used to the fact that other residents’ avatars also go through this rezzing process in front of you, so it’s entirely possible that someone could appear in front of you with no hair and no face until the textures and shapes have downloaded. Rezzing accidents are the subject of many a good laugh amongst SL residents, but they are accepted as part and parcel of life in the virtual world. People more used to traditional MMOs will likely find it a complete turn-off though – at least until they accustom themselves to it.

Upon arrival in SL, the question on many residents’ lips is “what on earth am I supposed to be doing?” And the answer is not simple. Explore, interact, build things, take photographs, join groups, play games, look at art, shop, fuck, roleplay, pretend to be a vampire… the list goes on for a mile, and all of these interactions are built using the basic engine of the Linden Lab-developed software, with extensions built, designed and scripted by residents of the world, just like everything else. People make in-world money either by paying out of their own pocket to buy “currency” – or by working a job, just like real life (albeit with MUCH better hours). It’s always interesting to hear how seriously people take their SL jobs, whether they’re a DJ in a club streaming their music through something like ShoutCast, a live musician, a virtual performer, a dancer, a greeter, a builder, an estate agent, a facility manger, a prostitute, a Game Master for roleplaying areas – again, the list of things goes on, and people have the opportunity to completely subsidise their virtual existence through virtual hard graft if they so desire.

Another thing that is almost immediately noticeable about SL is the sheer diversity of the avatars present. And we’re not talking a set choice of races here, with arbitrary “body size” sliders. We’re talking complete customisation. We’re talking this situation here:

This wasn’t anything particularly special happening – it was a discussion group where we sat down and had a civilised chat about a set topic. Like a real-world discussion group in fact.

And that’s the thing with Second Life. It has this immensely odd (yet perfectly natural-feeling once you’ve been there a while) ability to combine the mundane and the absurd. Everyone is distinctive in Second Life – because you’re not limited to hard-coded appearance options, you can be whoever you want to be. You don’t even have to be human. I picked up an awesome Pac-Man avatar the other day that allows you to spawn dots and ghosts and turn any place you go into a game of 3D Pac-Man.

In fact, the question of not being human is one of the more interesting sides to Second Life that I haven’t explored yet. It also happens to be the side that there’s a lot of sordid assumptions about, particularly around the “furry” avatars. Yes, there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals and then have simulated sex whilst masturbating furiously at the sight of their interlocked pixels. But equally there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals just because they like them. On one memorable occasion I was spending some time at a hangout with my earliest friends in SL (who are still good personal friends to this day, I might add) and I was introduced to an immensely clever man from a university who was working on lots of exciting things to do with AI. My friend Lyndy, who introduced me, assumed that because I “knew about computers” I’d be able to chat to this guy no problem. However, he was explaining concepts that were way over my head… but they were interesting to hear. The really peculiar thing, though, was that he was dressed as a fox. Not a foxy lady, no, an actual fox. In a waistcoat. If anyone remembers a really old DOS point-and-click adventure called Inherit the Earth… the main character from that? Fox-in-a-waistcoat called Rif? That’s about it.

Why do I remember that? I never even played it.

Second Life is flawed in many ways. I’ve talked about this many a time with Jennatar, and she suggested the notion that virtual worlds are a much younger technology than the Internet. Currently with virtual worlds, she says, we’re at a similar sort of stage to the Internet was in in the early 90s in that there’s a lot of stuff out there to explore, but navigation, user interfaces, efficiency and practicality haven’t quite reached the level of stability you’d need to be completely “mainstream”. This means that titles like Second Life are, at least for now, going to be “niche” interests. However, interestingly, the “niche” for Second Life perhaps isn’t what you’d expect – an oft-quoted “statistic” is that of the many residents of the world, a significant majority of them are female and over 30. This is certainly true amongst my circle of online friends – I think there’s one guy and about thirty gals on my friends list. This is also backed up by the fact that the “retail” sector in the world is very much female-dominated, with vast business empires and shopping malls devoted to female clothing, hair, animations and the like, with male products often relegated to the virtual equivalent of a dusty old cellar. One may argue that this may lead to a lot of males representing them as females, and of course this goes on – given the opportunity to live out a fantasy life, I’m sure there’s plenty of men out there who wonder what it would be like to be a woman – and a hot one at that (no-one is ugly in SL unless you make a specific effort to do so!) – and give it a try.

There’s a kind of implicit understanding amongst residents though – don’t ask, don’t tell. If someone doesn’t want their “first life” brought into it, then you don’t ask. If it’s a female on the screen, then as far as you’re concerned, it’s a female you’re dealing with. I actually don’t have a problem with this. Perhaps it’s because I’m not spending my time going around having sex with these people, but it certainly doesn’t bother me – if they choose to represent themselves in that way, for whatever reason that might be, then that’s their business.

Despite its many flaws and its perceived “niche” interest, I have a lot of time for Second Life. It’s an experience that is very much made by the people you interact with. Without people to meet, talk to and interact with you’re relying on stumbling across interesting content solo – and while there is plenty of interesting stuff to do by yourself, it’s always better to share with other people. Much like real life, in fact.

I’ll certainly be very interested to see how virtual worlds develop over the years. Will Second Life remain in its pioneering position of almost entirely user-generated content? Will it be overtaken by something else? Who knows. I do know that I have made some genuinely close friends in its strange world, many of whom I am unlikely to ever meet face-to-face. And I’m fine with that. By having their “virtual” face in front of me on the screen – even if it’s nothing like their real-life face – I still feel like I “know” them better than people I interact with on the Internet in less direct ways. Perhaps “know” is the wrong word – it’s difficult to describe, but knowing someone’s avatar feels a lot more “physical” (for want of a better word) somehow than a username on a page of text.

It’s not an experience for everyone by any means. It would bore the pants off someone expecting to play an exciting game, because it’s not a game. But as a means for virtual social interaction, it’s an interesting experiment… one that still has a long way to go, but also has an incredible amount of potential.

I blog about my experiences in the world in more detail here. I post my photos from the world here. Feel free to check them out if you’re the slightest bit interested.