Pat the Rat: Beyond the Valley of the Webcams
by Alphaville Herald on 10/03/04 at 6:26 pm
Just the other day I invited Uri to join me in a webcam session, and to my great surprise he was utterly unfamiliar with this essential piece of technology. Where has this boy been? Well despite missing out on viewing the splendor of my unsurpassed androgynous hottiness, he’s also been missing out on The Thing to Do in Alphaville. This is a primer for Uri and all those clue-challenged newbies, academics, and vice presidents of corporate communications that think TSO is about hot kisses and talking to mirrors.
Love beds and hot tubs are, let’s face it, lame. And typing dirty thoughts out in IM is fine if your mind is slow to generate dirty thoughts (I never had that problem myself). Plus, one wants to know: what does this sim that I’m cybering *really* look like? You know, it’s hard to get off when there is this nagging feeling that it might be John Ashcroft or Gary Coleman at the other keyboard and not the Wonder Woman or Vin Diesel that the avatar resembles. That’s where webcams come in! You hook up your cam, put on your headphones, and invite your sim friend in for a nice…er…chat.
Now of course the trick is negotiating the distance between chatting and flirting and getting your webcam partner to loosen up a bit (i.e. strip/perform/abuse him/herself), and I can’t offer you any advice there. I will say that if you are wondering how to make it happen, your webcam partner is probably wondering why you are so farkin’ slow.
Once you get good at negotiating these little audio-visual get-togethers, you may soon find yourself playing the alphaville webcam circuit, and new vistas of virtual debauchery will open up to you. Not a few sims have made their mark as webcam power gamers. Do you have what it takes to play that game? Well, here are some stories of Alphaville’s premier webcammers (names are changed to protect the guilty).
SG is not around much these days, but in his day he held court before a lot of ladies (or lady avatars anyway). Just how many is unclear, and just how many he proclaimed his love to is also unclear, but Pat the Rat has it on good authority that the number was… well, let’s just say too large for comfort. Someone told me he would do a show for several at a time. Well, that’s one way to economize! And then there is the story about the time he pudded on a piece of plexiglass and used his index finger to write “I love you” in the milky effluvium. Gism art not your thing? Well…
JB isn’t around these days either, but apparently he had sooo much manhood that lady sims paid as much as $50 US a pop to see his webcam shows. OK, so maybe it was cuz he was black and long and tso soccer moms just had to feed that boy-am-I-repressed Scarlett O’Hara fantasy life. But wowzers, $50 dollars will buy you a lot of… hmm… what can you get for $50 these days? I mean besides 5 months on tso talking to birds and mirrors. Ok, ok, so they got a great deal after all.
Now you have to be careful with all this. I have it on good authority that not one, but two sims have been taken in by the “sure I’m 18″ line only to learn that probably they were in violation of some serious state and federal statutes. Both of these deceptions were engineered by enterprising Mafiosi, who apparently thought that setting up their 16 yr old friends to do webcam sex with an adult was easily worth the extortion value in simoleans and bragging rights. Hey, what good is a game if you can’t take it out of game?
I’m sure there are many more stories like these – some of them endearing, most of them nauseating (I’m still trying to get the thought of gism art out of my head). But with Uri’s permission, I’d like to invite you all to share those stories here. No names please. Talk of r/l identities get’s me all pixilated.
Well, gotta go take a cold shower. ’til next time I am rabidly yours…
Pat the Rat
just somesim
Mar 11th, 2004
Thank you ever so much for bringing up good old SG. It was such fun for this female sim to play mouse to his cat. I belatedly applaud his months of untiring and imaginative efforts to sweet talk me into cyberland. Alas, I was too ignorant *wink* to understand exactly what he was trying to get me to do. (Isn’t there some sort of sim statue for such acting?) I was wondering when this would come up and have to add that I actually miss the guy. lol
Over Yonder
Mar 12th, 2004
Fucking ICK.
TC
Mar 13th, 2004
How often does this kind of thing happen? Is this secretely what Sims Online is all about, or is this more peripheral behavior?
Urizenus
Mar 13th, 2004
I think web-camming is less common. Cybering on the other hand…
Banshee
Mar 15th, 2004
The question I have about this is why bother at all with TSO if you are into web-camming? I had thought that one of the ideas behind TSO was “be somebody …. else”, but the whole point of a webcam is simply broadcasting yourself to someone else … heck, who needs to pay for TSO and the monthly fee to do something you can do outside TSO completely … namely be your real life self and broadcast that to others. One wonders why these folks don’t stick with AOL or some other service that offers video chatting without the need to pay subscription fees for an online video game like TSO.
urizenus
Mar 15th, 2004
That’s a really good question Banshee. The way I think about it, tso is really a kind of portal into other activities and games. So, for example, a lot of the mafia gaming takes place in YIM. I think a lot of the romantic connections are forged in TSO, but then move into IM and webcamming. People go back “in game” but it is a kind of staging area or base camp for the real games that utilize other communications media.
Banshee
Mar 16th, 2004
Uri –
I guess that must be what is happening. It is interesting to me how different people utilize TSO really differently …. some are they to play a game as themselves, some are there to fantasy role play an alternative vision of themselves, and some are there to meet people for relationships outside TSO … the game allows all of these different uses, and it is interesting to me at least to observe the diversity of needs that the game seems to satisfy to some degree for its user base.
B
Alpha Native
Mar 28th, 2004
I think web-camming is less common. Cybering on the other hand…***woah how many hands do ya think I have? sorry. I agree cybering more common then Web camming. I get offers to cam from my yahoo addy never have in game.
I agree with Uri you hit it right on the head. It is interesting how one game can be taken in so many different directions. I personally started because a friend who I met years before in mIRC or pIRCh asked me to be a Beta tester with him. I LOVED it. I could be who ever I wanted and have chats with people from all over. I still miss my Norwegian “boyfriend”. I know that there are people I met in game that I have friendships outside of the game. Sometimes it is hard to keep your rl out of sl and vise versa. I just wish I had more time to play, but alas, rl has taken over.
Urizenus
Mar 30th, 2004
I agree that web camming must be much less common that plain ole cybering, and it also seems signficantly more “out of game.” –for obvious reasons. Something I haven’t thought about is using a YIM voice connection while in tso. Do people do that? Does it combine the best (worst?) of both worlds?