SL recognition and newness: griefers and the fashion scene

This is the third post in my series: SL Recognition and Newness, about things familiar and unfamiliar in Second Life from an old mudder's perspective. The previous posts are:

• Furries and Goreans
• Dicksian themes and live music
  

We'll continue this series with some discussion on griefers and the fashion scene.

Recognition: griefers

They are called griefers in Second Life. They're quite familiar to me from muds. I forgot what we called them in muds, if anything. "Trolls"? "Annoying"?

Griefers come in many different categories. Their main aim is to affect people emotionally, usually negatively (as that's easiest). That's what drives them. That's why, following Richard Bartle (one of the creators of the first MUD), I sometimes call them clubs. This comes from an excellent paper that he wrote in the 1996 called Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS. Recommended reading that. I'll summarize it very quickly. He classifies different types of players like suits of playing cards:

• Hearts: they want to socialize. Second Life, being a social mud primarily, is of course a system that is excellent for people who want to socialize.
• Diamonds: in it for the game, or the money (the 'diamonds'). Want to "win" the game, reach as high a score as possible. But Second Life is not a game, you might say! Perhaps, but humans have evolved to deal with social networks and are playful creatures, so a system that combines the two can be gamed. This interesting article makes the claim that "Second Life is a level and class driven MMO." Many hard-core diamonds wouldn't consider Second Life a real game, but then you read this (tongue in cheek as it is) and you start to believe there may be something in the reputation game after all. And there are of course also the economic aspects to it, with Second Life's micro-transaction based economy. So, plenty to do for diamonds in Second Life, once they look beyond the obvious.
  
• Spades: there are much more rare than diamonds and hearts. Spades like to dig. They like to find out new ways to use the system, play with new features, discover strange behavior of the software, and so on. Second Life is an excellent platform for spades, so we have plenty of them, building, scripting, creating, working on the client code. That's good as spades tend to be smart and creative and thus contribute a lot to the overall system.
  
• Finally we have the clubs. They like to club people over the head, with, like, a club. Affect people. They get a thrill out of affecting people. Some clubs are friendly and like to affect people positively, but it's far easier to get a response if you try to annoy people.
  

Of course nobody fits neatly in these categories, but it's still a useful way to look at players and their motivations. Below we'll see various combinations of people who are primarily clubs.

The traditional club type, in muds as well as Second Life, is not very sophisticated. The simplest variety tries to annoy you in some way. In Second Life there are quite a few opportunities for them to cause mischief, like bumping into you, or using weapons on you. You could call them the "diamond" variety of club, in that they try to use simple game-like mechanisms to somehow beat you. Sitting down counters many physical attacks in Second Life. Ignoring them is another way to deal with them.

Then there's the "heart" variety of club. These try to upset you by social means. The easiest and therefore most common way to do this is to use words. Fortunately, they're commonly not very sophisticated and use rather child-like strategies to upset people. Sort of like this:

Annoying Club: beam ray u r so gay!
Beam Ray: I'm not gay! I like girls! At least, girl avatars!
Annoying Club: these girls r GUYS in rl you are SO GAY!
Beam Ray: No way! I am NOT GAY!
Annoying Club: u r a patetic little mommas boy who is GAY
Beam Ray: I'm so upset!!!! You should be banned!!!

In the scenario above, the club gets what they want: they have affected someone emotionally. Their strategy only works if you actually let it upset you, though. Ignoring them is therefore again an excellent way to counter their strategy. I sometimes enjoy a conversation with them though, as it tends to get pretty silly:

Annoying Club: beam ray u r so gay!
Beam Ray: Really? Why do you think so?
Annoying Club: see! gay!
Beam Ray: If you say so. Why are you so concerned with this?
Annoying Club: because i dont like pathetic people
Beam Ray: That's really interesting. Why do you think gays are pathetic?
Annoying Club: beam ray is a GIRL!
Beam Ray: Thank you. I'm not, but I take that as a compliment.

Of course the most dangerous kind is more insidious than that. They might actually be able to communicate properly. The most dangerous kinds are the ones that seem different at first, and then suddenly turn out to be trying to hurt you.

The last category of griefers in Second Life are the ones that one could call "spade clubs". This tend to take a bit of sophistication, so these are quite rare. The simplest way a spade club could try to upset you is by taking some very offensive avatar shape. Ignoring that is a good strategy. The most dangerous clubs of this kind are the ones that actually know how to script the environment and use this knowledge to do evil.

A good way to really screw up a scriptable virtual environment is to create a self-replicating object. We've seen this long ago in muds, though in many cases there these were in fact more accidents than deliberate attempts to disrupt the system. A self-replicating object operates quite similarly to what the IT world calls "viruses" and "worms". The griefer creates one object, preferably an annoying one, and then lets it copy itself over and over until the exponential growth starts using all system resources. Enormous lag and crashes tend to be the result. We've seen several of these attacks on the Second Life grid over time, though luckily it appears that Linden Lab has become more effective against defending against it.

That concludes my review of griefers. They've been with us in virtual worlds from the beginning. The good thing is that most of them are quite dumb, so ignoring them is an excellent strategy to make them go away. We will have to remain vigilant though against the more intelligent variety: insidious social griefers can do quite a lot of emotional harm on an individual basis, and scripted attacks on the system can disrupt a lot of people at the same time.

New: the fashion scene

Second Life is the first virtual world I encountered that has an actual virtual fashion scene. Fashion is something that didn't really work in text-based virtual worlds. In Second Life this has really become a major aspect of the whole experience. Fashion is one of these things that can be turned virtual quite easily, unlike for instance food. Virtual fashion is still fashion, it's just on avatars instead of on ourselves. Dolls have already made us quite familiar with the phenomenon of fashion for human representations in our childhood. Fashion for an avatar makes more sense than fashion for a doll: an avatar is after all representing a real person in some way, unlike a doll (unless it's a hand-puppet). Fashion is about representing yourself, and so are avatars. Combining the two is natural. Second Life is also about fulfilling fantasies, and fashion, being glamorous, is the subject of quite a few fantasies. Virtual fashion is also cheap; you can be a complete shopaholic without spending beyond your means. Try that in the real world.

So the fundamentals are right: it makes sense that there is some demand for virtual fashion. Second Life's micro-transaction system makes it actually possible for designers to sell fashion and make money with it. This has caused a supply, stimulating demand which then stimulates more demand in a virtuous cycle.

Linden Lab once every while adds a new feature to the system that the fashion scene can use to generate a whole new range of things. The feature that has had the most impact so far that I've seen is flexible prims. This revolutionized both the skirt and hair fashion. Sculpted prims are also used to generate a whole range of new items. The introduction of bling (before my time) also had a lot of effect on fashion, though this particular person doesn't think it's been exactly a positive one.

I've seen lots of people complain about Linden Lab adding new features to Second Life while there are still scalability and stability problems with Second Life. While of course some level of stability is important for Second Life to be usable at all, I've never been in favor of a ban on new features myself. Perfect stability cannot be reached anyway - there are always more bugs to resolve. If they are wise, fashion designers should be very much in favor of new features that allow for the creation of new types of fashion item. The fashion designers should also be watching the spades carefully to see what kinds of new ways they develop to use existing features as well: some of these might be quite useful to the fashion scene as well.

There are quite a few aspects to Second Life fashion that amuse and entertain me. I'll give a few examples below.

The basic thing that entertains me is of course my ability, as a male, to ogle as many gorgeous (albeit virtual) women as I like. Since there is an enormous diversity of skins, hair, clothes and shoes available, there's a lot of variety to see.

Then there are the models. The Second Life fashion scene gives me the opportunity to meet models, top models, elite models and super models by the boatload as well. I don't recall ever encountering a real-world model, let alone an elite model, but in Second Life I bump into them without even trying. Isn't it glorious?

Also quite interesting are the glossy magazines. These are often very well made. They are just like the glossy magazines in the real world, except that the pictures are of avatars, not people Given the amount of photoshopping that takes place in the "real" magazines the distinction is smaller than you'd think at first, too.

In fact, the glossy fashion magazines that are available for Second Life fashion mimic the glossy magazines available in the real world so well that at any moment I expect the virtual covers also to be graced with lines like "10 ways to drive him totally wild for you. Real life glossy magazines are amazing. As a male, I quite support this type of content in magazines for women. You'd suspect some kind male conspiracy. What else explains this pervasive education program to turn all women into temptresses and sex goddesses? Apparently though it's entirely spontaneous. Crazy! Sometimes the universe is a very friendly place, isn't it? But I digress.

So to this old mudder, the fashion scene is quite a diverse and interesting addition to a social virtual world, and I think an amazing success story of Second Life. I'm all for it! The fundamentals also seem right, so I expect virtual fashion to be with us for the foreseeable future.