The Alphaville Herald

A FIC and Facile Guide to Second Life

by prokofy on 19/04/07 at 8:59 am

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Community Affairs

Available at amazon.com

While we wearily wait for Uri’s and Walker’s book to come out (when, Uri, oh, when?!), and while we save up $22.04 US for the expenso Hamlet’s et. al Official Guide to Second Life, we now have the Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life by the unknown Paul Carr & Graham Pond for only $9.95 US — so you could buy that instead of that first-land account where oops, there’s no more subsidized first land anymore and the stipend in it is only L$300 now!

But is it a good buy? No. I’m amazed that Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder could write such a preposterous blurb like this: “This book is the only guide you’ll need to get past the Second Life hype and find out what all the buzz is about” — when the book makes no effort whatsoever to dig through any hype, especially the subscription numbers controversy, as you can see from the “millions” reference on the jacket. Instead, it’s FIC and facile and corporate and filled with gaffes and errors of the sort that happen when publishers make that unseemly rush to get a paperback like this out to capitalize on the apparently never-ending wave of media hype and corporate greed to be “first” and “best” in Second Life.

No, you’d be better off sitting with your Google reader and following links on planet.worldofsl.com and reading some of the basic Business Week, Information Week, Wired, Time, New York Times, etc. articles on SL — for free of the Internet — to get a basic guide to SL. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people that can never handle a new gadget unless you have a book in your left hand as you mouse-click your way through the menus — in that case, spend more to get the Official Guide.

I had expected so much more because the publisher, St. Martin’s Griffin, does serious and thoughtful books on history and society and politics, and I figured, unlike publishers of more mass-market popular books, they’d give this particular topic a good treatment. But already I’ve had to endure a little lecture from the editor about going easy on this one, because it’s supposed to be a book for newbies (think of the children!) and it’s well known just how snarky those oldbies get when they feel somebody’s poaching on their long-established turf.

Trust me, oldbie dog-in-the-mangerism is not the problem. I don’t know whether the two authors (Montag Alacrity and Sweetsweet Mincemeat are their avatar names)– were steered by LL or the metaversal sherpas (if so, none of them bothered to proof the ms.) or whether they just happened to naturally gravitate to the one or two well-worn grooves of studying SL, but it shows. They’ve flattered the Herald by calling it “the oldest (and arguably still the best”) of publications in SL, but they must not have ever read it for any sustained period of time.

In the celebrities chapter, they mention Anshe Chung — sure, fine — but then single out only Fizik Baskerville (well, they’re British), Adam Reuters, and Hamlet Linden and then Warren Ellis and his Army of Filth (well, they’re British) as the only SLebrities. Huh? The book contains almost no quotations from any residents interviewed. In a section called “Political People,” they don’t mention Neualtenberg/Neufreistadt at all (it later appears briefly as merely a tourist build to visit), or any other of the numerous political groups related to RL or SL.

Instead, the authors focus on this lame and discredited Second Life Liberation Army which we’ve completely exposed in the story below. Imagine, to have 2 pages on SL politics and take it up with that kind of dreck — and never mention your faithful correspondent hehe! But truly, I don’t judge books by whether they mention the Infamous Antagonist, though Hamlet et. al. thought to mention me and my salon in the Sutherland Dam. Of course from a facile book like this we’d expect a that hardy staple of FIC hagiography, the Prim Tax Revolt, but we’d expect the authors not to skip *entirely* over the years from 2003-2006 with…nothing, and not mention the telehub removal and buyback, and not mention W-hat. The only griefers they mention are something called the SL Alliance I’ve never heard of (have you?!), though the Herald is quoted about it (is this what become the Naval Alliance? Clue me in here).

Where you really have to roll your eyes, however is in the coverage of Copybot. It’s history written by the victors (libsecondlife) but a hilarious mash-up; the authors claim erroneously that the Lindens called in the FBI over Copybot (!), mixing up what had happened a year before the Copybot saga with grid-crashing by Plastic Duck and others, where the Lindens did claim they had contacted the authorities. Get your grid menace facts right, guys!

Continuing in FIC mode, the authors gushingly give Aimee Weber not only a chapter about herself and her studio but one about Midnight City, but then speak repeatedly about “The Big Three”. Now, I’m not an authority on sherpas, but aren’t they called the Big Six usually, so as to capture not only ESC, MOU, and RRR but also IVM and some of the others actually getting in the news a lot, like Keystone Bouchard’s Clear Ink which did the build of Capitol Hill?

These three get absolutely supine fanboy-type obsequenience, with absolutely not a hint of any of the controversy surrounding the topic of the corporate invasion of SL, and with way too much ink describing these empty fairgrounds that we all know have traffic in the low double digits much of the time. That’s just not Second Life.

Where I really, really take exception with this book, however, is the utterly facile, casual, and ignorant portrayal of SL history as merely a short run from the Prim Tax Revolt (Boston Tea Party) to the Gilded Age of IBM and Sony actually skipping over the entire world as it was once made by indigenous residents. I will definitely not be alone in absolutely goggling my eyes out at this eradication of the world of Second Life created by all the thousands of developers as well as ordinary people who not only populated it first, but populated it tenth and one hundred and first and one thousandth and first for 3 years. Here’s a sample passage of the awful glibness with which these two 20-something kewl kids from the UK can do to something like Second Life (pp. 134-135):

Replacing the tax system was a new land model, which basically allowed Residents to pay monthly rent in US dollars on virtual land. This enabled Residents, and real-world companies and corporations, to hold entire islands in Second Life.

In a nutshell, living and building in Second Life became much more economically viable.

The consequences of this were of course immense, with what can be described as a great scramble for land kicking off in December 2003. Indeed Wired magazine equated the rush with the concept of Manifest Destiny within American history, that is, the voracious appetite for expansionism that has so defined America’s ideology since the term was coined midway through the nineteenth century.

Within Second Life, then a period of industry hitherto unknown was embarked upon. Sticking with the American history analogy, we have now moved into the Gilded Age. This culminated in a huge influx of well-established Real Life businesses setting up shop in Second Life. At the time of this writing, IBM, MTV, Microsoft, the BBC, Reuters, Coca Cola, and many, many more have established a presence in Second Life.

The authors go on to give a nod to the “great deal of frustration that corporations have wandered in with sole intention fo exploiting Second Life as a marketing tool for their products. Many residents are of the opinion that the commercialization of Second Life is ruining it…That’s capitalism for you.”

Well, I guess this pair never sat in a town hall or community meeting or office hours with our beloved hippie socialist dope-smoking utopian Lindens and their pets…

Or maybe they have! Because their list of places to visit is the usual predictable roster of your Ivory Towers and Svargas — that’s to be expected – but also some totally unjustified picks of places with zilch traffic like ill-named “Democracy Island”. Some major landmarks are missing, but it almost doesn’t matter, since no SLURLs or coordinates are given for how you can find these items in world (yes, it’s an oldfashioned dead-tree book, but still…)

God knows why these books and articles today mention ‘teledildonics’. Other than qdot Linden, there’s nobody actually *using* the teledildonic thingies…are there? Tell me there’s nobody actually *using* the teledildonics thingies!

If you grabbed this book to try to have imaginary sex online in living, streaming 3-D, you’re going to get very frustrated. The authors don’t give you the list of the most popular sex joints, or even explain that Popular Places contains all the clubs like Barbies and Bad Girls where you can find the…ah…escorts. It tells you about a place called Nymphos, not one of the better-known ones, but doesn’t cover any of the most actually visited free sex beaches. There is absolutely nothing about gay life, and I think in this day and age, in a book purporting to be “unofficial,” that’s simply inexusable.

In the very superficial chapter on Groups, the Thinkers aren’t mentioned, nor any of the other very large groups, like Capture Roleplay. Not one but three Christian groups are mentioned that I can’t be sure even function anymore, other religious groups and then…Duran Duran is singled out, with no mention of the Waiting-for-Godot effect this band has inspired in SL…well, they’re British.

In short a hasty, quickie, facile and superficial book that really doesn’t live up to the expectations fostered by its title. It was really unfortunate for these two authors to have undertaken anything resembling a “history” of SL that would, even accounting for the small space available, so get it wackily wrong and skewed.

As for Key Places to Visit, I’ll invite the reader to think of whether this sums up your second life (keeping in mind that the Shelter was curiously put under “nightlife”):

Amsterdam
Nexus Prime
Svarga
Virtual Dublin
Camp Darfur
Neufreistadt
Pomponion Volcano
Nakama
Jesse
Wengen
Lost Gardens of Apollo
Luskwood
Virtual Hallucinations
Roma
Vampire Empire
Transylvania
Gor
Dark Life
Intimate Moments

To make it even more confusing, this hastily-put-together book interrupts the “key places to visit” with another odd history chapter on the war in Jesse, which I’m going to leave to experts on that war to parse — I don’t think they’ll find it unbiased.

In case you were wondering how a FIC-oriented book could leave out Abbott’s Aerodrome — don’t. It’s just that it got stuck in a later chapter called “Sport, Leisure, and Games” where you can also find Numbakulla and Hollywood and Hearts Enchanted (NeoRealms Fishing). Yes, they explain that “SL is not a game”…

Just to make sure nobody thinks my review here is sectarian, I won’t mention the sheer hash the authors made of the land sales and rental business, making only cursory mention of Anshe as a millionairess, not describing Dreamland, never mentioning Azure Islands, or d’Alliez estates or any other major business (the Independent State of Caledon” is put in the “curios” section), but singling out as “popular rental spots in SL” Legacy Gardens II, Lance Lasalle, Surf Island, and the Lofts at Mill Pond, all nice beach rentals which will now be absolutely inundated with would-be tenants they won’t be able to cope with lol. Oops, I did mention it…

Of course, I need not start in on the book’s secondary title, “The Essential Guide to an Amazing Virtual World–with Millions of Users.” There aren’t any millions of users, as poor St. Martin’s Press is about to find out. Some 200,000 soaking wet spent at least…a Linden dollar last month.

Will this book help usher in the next million? No. Far too many pages are devoted to gushing encomiums to metaversal agencies and their fabulous builds, and on the pages that are supposed to help you, the newbie, you’ll find stuff like “Your first stop after Orientation Island should be the equally-well-named Help Island” (thanks for that pro-tip, guys!) and “click the ‘fly button’ and off you go” (gosh, who knew?). Most people need a lot more hand-holding than that, and need to get some really basic boot-camp stuff like “why can’t I get this box of stuff open” or “why is my hair falling off every time I teleport” or “how do I find stuff”. A basic description of all the SEARCH functions and tips on getting them to work for you is missing.

I don’t know about other midbies like me, or even oldbies who go back to the heady days of Lindenor (when the Lindens still posted your “firsts,” announced events to you inworld, and paid you just for holding a meeting on your property about art), but I think even newbies will feel something hollow inside about entire pages in chapters devoted to things like “Dell” or “Pontiac Island” or “Aloft” or “Duran Duran”. Sure, all those things exist…but to make a *book* about them? And call it the “unofficial guide”? And purport to support tourists?

I’ll be utterly fascinated to see how the hype cycle moves now on this book — how all the paid-for blogs and metaversal sherpas and touts and evangelists promote it. Ultimately, one cannot complain about a book like this. One can only go out and write a better one. So somebody, please do!