I think I’ll go in and take Moonshine’s name out of the interview altogether, just to try to make everyone happy.

If you feel that Prokofy is less acidic than Dyerbrook, consider these facts: the FIC in SL is simply not as evil as the Sim Shadow Government was in TSO. Precisely because the FIC contains some very talented individuals who do mean well, and who are occasionally nice, it is a harder ebil entity to attack. But it is ebil, because it is feted, and it does block growth as a class, with a set of patterns of behaviours.

My business in SL is not fading. Shrugs. I dunno. Talk to customers, who don’t read forums or SLH and simply just a man by what he does in the game, which would be helpful for many of you. And I have perfect facility with the building tools and even scripting in the game. I have figured out enoug of it to do small chores and simple jobs for myself, which is all I need. I constantly, all day long, pass on the knowledge I’ve personally acquired about these tools to others, like tenants who are newbies. So your nasty claim that I am somehow some high-school runt getting sand kicked in my face by the jocks on the football team just doesn’t wash. You don’t like getting a little sand kicked in YOUR face, is what’s up.

If I chose to spend hours and hours of unpaid time learning the building tools, which even the top, most in-demand architects in SL admit has a very steep learning curve, I could do that I suppose. But I prefer to have a more social game and a game that has some income to cover expenses. The game should have room in it for different types of activities, and once again, this fixation on the celebration of the content class, the content barons, technocrats, scripterati, uber-architects, etc. is fascistic and corporatist in its ideological base. I’m having none of it.

I put land barons in a different class. A price is an agreement between a willing buyer and a willing seller. *Shrugs*. All you had to do was not buy the overpriced land. You don’t need land to enjoy this game. Start a new account, start 5, and link their 5 first-lands together in one area. Whatever. You don’t need to ever interact with land barons to have a rich SL experience.

That was my only point.

WS: This one you’ll have to live with, Cris, as it doesn’t change the sense of what you said in the slightest. The interview was simply edited for space. But the original is in the comments thread now anyway. And thanks again for doing it in the first place, I still think it’s a great interview.

All very childish behavior. Like a high school geek who hates the “in-crowd” because he can’t get in. Instead of focusing on making changes and making things work out, he just keeps whining about how hard done by he is and how the others have it better. Makes you wonder how he’s able to survive the real world with a shitty attitude like that.

You are misinterpreting my statements. I disliked that anyone came along and controlled such an important part of SL at the time, new player or old. In any other market in SL, be it clothing, skins, hair, shoes, scripts, textures, furniture, whatever, there is a huge thriving market. If you don’t want to buy from a particular vendor because you don’t like their prices, there is a vibrant market there.

In the case of land, at that time there was a shortage of available land and the systematic purchase of so much auctioned land by one person who kept reinvesting RL wealth to buy it and shut out other players created a situation where if you wanted land, which unlike a shirt or hair, is an important commodity in SL , you had to basically choose to either pay outrageous prices or not own land. There were no alternatives until the land market crashed. As a new player, I sure you would not have appreciated paying $20,000k for 512m of land – yet this was going on. So it is not about being beaten at any game – it was about price gouging on an important part of the SL experience.

Cristiano

PN: Well let me see, there is Kris Ritter, Ulrika Zigzag, Chip Midnight, Moonshine Herbst, Hank Ramos, Nolan Nash– who used to be courteous to me but now he has taken to using nasty intel-type tactics to troll for info and make nasty unsupported allegations
PN: I mean, who haven’t I had a fight with among the regs, except for the lovely Olympia Rebus, who is far above all that sort of thing
CM: She is lovely.
PN: I want to go out with Olympia Rebus but she barely returns my Ims, ah well.
CM: I have had fights with Kris, Ulrika, Chip and Moonshine myself.
CM: I don’t find any of them to be shining examples of the feted inner core though.
PN: oh wait scratch that
PN: Not Moonshine
PN: I have no quarrel with Moonshine to my knowledge, I mean Weedy Herbst
PN: Weedy was impossible during that whole dispute with paola Jade or whatsis, can’t even recall her name, the one with King Kong in the bay
CM: I finally saw what you were talking about
PN: Well there is feted and there is feted
CM: Someone sent a snapshot into my site and it had the gorilla
PN: the most feted of the feted don’t bother with the forums
PN: well I posted bunches of photos Cristiano
PN: I tried to make light of thewhole thing because people got so fucking serious about it
PN: It’s a clash of cultures and values.
PN: People like to pretend it doesn’t exist, and that they will merely prevail; they are wrong.
CM: they exist in RL – they certainly exist in SL

/nostalgia

Aww, Cristiano… That forum discussion we had was hardly a fight, was it? I never considered it one.

This is an interesting comment to me. Prof’s stated issue with the ‘FIC’ is very precisely encompassed in it. This makes the comment interesting because it was made by Cris. Funny how people can talk right past one another at time, isn’t it?

From all I read (and as a week old n00b player, all I have is what I read from you folks), Prof and those who think like him dislike the ‘FIC’ for having a dominating position in the hierarchy of SL and for controlling access to that hierarchy. (whether this is a true statement is almost irrelevent, as it is the perception and, when dealing with culture, perception is often reified as reality.)

Meanwhile, Cris (and perhaps the ‘FIC’?) dislikes that some ‘upstart’ came along and beat the land barons at their own game.

Different ponds, but the same ripples.