Kami Harbinger

I just had a moment of self-awareness; the me-of-20-years-ago just looked out through my eyes and freaked out. I'm sitting in a cafe, listening to Japanese pop music, writing a videogame in a virtual world, using a bottom-of-the-line laptop that's more powerful than any but my latest workstation, using a wifi network that's as fast as most company T1s I've used over the years. The me-of-20-years-ago would say it was too cliché and cheesy a cyberpunk moment even for me to write, and I was Cyberpunk Boy #1 (I read Johnny Mnemonic in OMNI when it came out...).

So yes, there's a lot of hype about Second Life these days. Ooh, Ben Folds, ooh, Reuters, ooh, Nissan, whatever. Taken individually, these events aren't that significant. There are concerts in SL all the time, and Suzanne Vega is certainly more important than Ben Folds.

There are in-world news agencies already: New World Notes, the Second Life Herald, , and In the Grid.

The Dominus Shadow and the Cubey Terra Ornithopter 2 are more interesting than a Nissan Sentra.

So, yes, there's a lot of hype. Yes, there's a lot of newbies who don't know what they're doing. Yes, there are a ton of marketers looking for new ways to reach your eyeballs...

But what is interesting is the awareness this brings to Second Life. There's new people who will be enthusiastic Residents, who will create fascinating new things. There's more money for Linden Labs, so they can scale up.

Some people find hype deeply offensive, and I feel sorry for them, but they need to get over their disorder. Hype is vital at the start of a new thing. Hype was good for the Web. It's shining a light on SL, and bringing more energy to the world. Don't attack the hype. The hype brings good things to the world.

So last night I felt sociable, and went out to the Ahern Welcome Area to see if I could help out some newbies... Of course the constant refrain is, "What is there to do? Where should I go? Is it true I can trade Linden $ for US $? How do I get Linden $ without buying them?"

This is something Linden Labs needs to address, immediately if not yesterday, with the exponentially growing population. MORE ORIENTATION. I'm going to be talking about this some more in the days and weeks to come, and there are things Residents can do even without LL's help, but LL's obviously in the best position to be working on it.

I gave a few newbies some advice and some landmarks to interesting stuff, and told them how to find the stuff that's already in their inventory, but I left feeling a little less than superhuman, because there just isn't a really solid answer for them. I know what I do: I make stuff (sometimes for sale, sometimes just as architecture for my land), I explore the world and sightsee the things other people have made, I shop, and I hang around and chat. But that's my answer. Like "The World" of .HACK//SIGN, everyone has to come up with their own reason and way to play.

I went to see if the Free State Project group was up to anything interesting, and coincidentally the subject under discussion was jobs for the newbies. One suggestion was high-speed pizza delivery, which is certainly very Snow Crash, but doesn't make a lot of sense in SL terms; Why would anyone order a pizza? What does high-speed delivery mean in a world with point-to-point teleportation?

Cubey Terra has an airtaxi, which you could use to take fares around the grid. While teleportation and the elimination of the telehubs makes this pointless as a practical means of transportation, it's a good sightseeing method. But the tour guide needs to know a fair amount about the world, and vehicles are always trouble.

I think I have an idea that'd work: Door-to-door salesmen, hot dog carts, and cigarette girls. You attach the sample case, cart, or cigarette tray (for advertising that you offer this service), then go find customers. Now you're forced to socialize with people, explain your service, and run a line of patter. You need to wander around the grid, learning what SL has to offer. The actual service is simply delivering a product from your case, or customizing a hot dog and having it pop out of the cart, or putting a cigarette in the customer's mouth, curling around the customer and lighting it... The customer's really paying more for the patter or flirtation than for the product. No real experience is needed for any newbie to run this business, and unless the market becomes completely saturated, it's certain to be more profitable than camping chairs, and far less pathetic.

I'm too busy right now (too much work in FL, too little time in SL for the things I want to accomplish) to start one of these up myself, so I'm offering this up as an opportunity for someone who wants to help themselves and help the newbies. Message me in-world if you're interested and want to talk about it.

Publitas has a blog post (and a followup) talking about the possibilities of marketing First Life goods, groups, and services in Second Life.

I've long expected this to start happening once the world reached a critical mass, and unlike the paranoids, I don't see it as a bad thing, as long as they don't flood the world excessively. Big companies have a lot of money and talented people to use on creating content.

Second Life's population is not just in the best age demographic and has an unusually large female population, but it is also almost exclusively from the richest and/or most technical people on the planet. You can't even be in SL unless you have a pretty awesome computer, a high-speed Internet connection, are neophilic enough to try something like this out, and are smart enough to understand what's happening and find something interesting to do there. These are the people every marketer has wet dreams about reaching, because they set the trends that less cutting-edge people will follow.

The benefits are getting interesting commercial work in SL. Real art galleries, architecture prototypes, product translation, and games and simulations (Western Union's Stagecoach Island was cancelled, but apparently worked quite well). And under all this, there's good commissions for people in SL who are already skilled at building, scripting, etc. (<shameless>email me here or IM me in-world to discuss business!</shameless>).

The only danger is if the scummiest end of marketing come in and just spam up a few thousand shiny, scripted, self-replicating attack billboards. It's certainly possible to make some very aggressive "marketing". Everyone will hate them, develop a deep loathing for whatever position or brand is being sold, and probably treat it as a Grid-wide attack to be abuse reported and counterattacked. This has already happened in one virtual world (was it Eve Online?), and the sales campaign was a disaster because of the persistent annoyance. Less-intrusive virtual world advertising and product placement will not provoke a backlash.

Raph Koster, perpetrator of UO and SWG, has posted What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?

Raph's been playing the wrong games, I guess. Many of these don't apply to FFXI:

• You can change jobs freely. The only reason to ever start a new character is if you don't like your name, appearance, or species.
• You do have a home, and you can decorate it (the FFXI newsletter even has a regular feature on artistically-decorated homes), though nobody can visit it.
• There are children, though only NPCs have kids. Adventurers never reproduce. Actually, what with the in-game marriage ceremonies, I'm surprised I haven't heard of people role-playing families with Taru-Taru playing children.
• Death hurts, because it costs you experience, which is equivalent to time and effort. Every death can cost you hours of your life to replace.
• Charity to NPCs is pointless, but charity to needy young adventurers is perfectly reasonable, since they start with a loincloth and a stick, basically.
• "The birds never migrate. Strawberries are never in season."... Okay, the birds don't migrate, and strawberries aren't in season, but there are seasonal holidays, the cherry blossoms bloom in spring, there's Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating, and so on. Life changes in FFXI. WoW and SWG are abandoned wastelands, but that's not true everywhere.

And of course, almost all of them are wrong or totally irrelevant to Second Life (of course, Second Life is not a game):

• There's no killing, or if there is, it's a wargame played between willing participants. Attacking someone who doesn't want to fight is a crime, and you will be temporarily exiled (suspended) or executed (banned) for doing so.
• Freaky alien life forms? They're people, too. Furries, robots, zombies, vampires, whatever.
• Making things is the best way to gain admiration, and one way to earn money.
• Holding social events is the second-best way to gain admiration, and again earn money.
• Every premium account user has a home, and many basics rent a home, and it's there to show off things you've made and to have people over to hang out in (or have sex in).
• Your eyes point where the mouse cursor is, and you can easily do body language. "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance", as Stephenson put it. You can make your own gestures and animations, and wire them up to respond to anything you say, keys you hit, or controls hidden in your HUD.
• There are people playing child avatars, and the Teen Grid is entirely made up of children.
• There is a constant development of new technologies, such as better scripts, better vehicles, better sex organs...
• There are in-game governments with laws. There are a few democracies, the borderline-governments of the land barons, and of course the filthy Gorean slavers.
• There's a near-limitless range of appearances. The average person is pleasant but not HOT. You can tell who someone is from appearance, you don't need to see their name over their head.
• Music fills the world. Almost everyone streams some music they like into their land.
• Everything you see around you was made by someone in the world. It's beautiful to someone, because it's theirs.

But the number one lesson in "MMORPGs", is that MMORPGs are pointless. Nothing you do there means anything. If you kill a monster, if you save the city, if you cure or don't cure a sick person, it doesn't matter. Nothing changes. You can't create your own art. You can't create your own buildings. When you leave the world, nothing changes. All victories are hollow. It can be fun to play at the time, but mostly you're an interchangeable part with any other player.

Second Life has no purpose, no objective. But because it's permanent, because you can change the world, it's meaningful in a way no MMORPG is.

I set sail on a 3-hour sightseeing tour; my crude raft barely sufficient to hug the coastline. A freak wind came up, and blew me far to the south.

I find myself lost on a desert island.

It appears someone has been here before me. I will have to make do with this crude shelter...

At last, I'm in business!

Landmark: Kami Harbinger's Curiosity Shoppe: Jiminy (116, 222, 104)

I now sell a polyhedral RPG Dice Set (L$100)

and RPG Character Journal (L$1000)

More amazing products are soon to come, supporting your gaming needs in SL!

The dice set is very simple: click on the appropriate die, and it says the number and shows it above the die. Should be completely fraud-proof, so you can actually trust the results given in game. Kami Harbinger dice are never rigged!

The character journal is more complex. It allows you to store information about one or more characters using simple chat commands, display that information privately, email it, and export (for backup) and import (for restoring). If you mail your exported data to someone else (say, your game's Judge/GM/Keeper/Storyteller/Screen Monkey/etc.), they can import it and have the same data. It's like a handheld database.

I'm looking into ways of simplifying the character journal, and will give free lifetime upgrades to anyone who buys an older version. As long as you export regularly, you will never lose your character data.

A piece of paper and a pencil are not a role-playing game.

They can be used to play a role-playing game, along with some kind of randomizer and rules.

They can also be used to perform many other activities.

You don't have to use the pencil; maybe you just want to make origami. That does not make paper and pencil an origami set. You don't have to use the paper; maybe you just want to stab someone in the eye. That does not make paper and pencil an assassination toolkit.

If you express the notion "I am convinced that pencils and paper exist for the purpose of playing RPGs", you will be considered eccentric, at best. Have fun with that, but don't expect anyone else to agree with your argument.

I design pencil-and-paper and computer RPGs semi-professionally. I've thought and written longer and harder about RPG theory than most people ever should. Playing an RPG doesn't expose you much to theory. Designing them does.

SL doesn't even come equipped with the most basic tools you would need to do any serious roleplaying. You can't change your name; without that, you cannot change your identity when your current character dies or you join another game. There's no easy way to store stats and adjust them; without that, you have only the abilities your body actually has. Action LARPs have much the same problem, which is why most LARPs are now the Camarilla-type where you just say what you're doing while standing up instead of sitting down. There's no public randomizer in the chat system. SL has no objective. Just like life, you do what you want to make you happy for yourself.

You can build all these things, and play an RPG with them. I'm working on that, myself. But unless you seek out those tools and activities, what you're doing is not a role-playing game.

What people do most of the time in SL is play-acting. It's the thing you do when you're making stuff with Lego(tm) blocks, or terrorizing the citizens of your nightmarish cyclopean SimCity, or putting on a mask for a masquerade party, or dressing up to go out clubbing.

Darren Zenko writes:

" Yeah, the American Dream dies hard, even in the limitless realms of the fantasynet. Check out any neighbourhood in SL; beyond the lingerie malls, porno shops, casinos and cheesy streaming-audio discotheques populated by animatronic dance-campers, there lies hillside after crammed-up hillside of participants' personal palaces, vast favelas of countless bleak McMansions furnished with virtual Nice Things and idle cyber-sextoys.

All the power of completely flexible VR with no pesky laws of physics, and all most folks can dream up is a neo-Tudor split-level with a baby grand in the foyer and a couple of DOGGYSTYLE M/F fuck-simulators in front of the fireplace."

I don't think that that's so bad, myself. What people want is to live the millionaire lifestyle. Gambling, drinking (bring your own booze--I sure do!), clubbing, fucking, and owning a nice mansion. No responsibilities, no chores, and the taxes are reasonable.

The only thing missing is fast cars, yachts, and private aircraft; you can buy those, but vehicles mostly suck in SL. My Cubey Terra Ornithopter is fun to fly because it's slow and low-prim enough that it runs okay even crossing sim borders, but it doesn't really satisfy my urges for fast cars zooming down the interstate.

Admittedly, I'm abnormal. The "dream houses" I've built so far are a recreation of KUOI-FM, the college radio station I used to DJ at, a giant hollow tree, and a dungeon (which will be the site of a game I'm building). I'm not the mansion type... But most people are, and I don't knock 'em for it.