The Alphaville Herald

Bored of War at the Jessie Weapons Fair

by Alphaville Herald on 09/03/06 at 8:43 pm

by Special Correspondent Lexander Solzhenitsyn

Thankfully, hunting deer and foxes from horseback was recently made illegal in the UK. Any Englishman wishing to revel in the thrill of the chase must now pursue his prey as our ancestors did — stripped naked, covered from head to foot in woad and armed with nothing more than a stout oak club. Indeed, I was attired in just such a fashion — and bleeding heavily after a four-hour battle with a particularly energetic stag — when I received an assignment from the taskmasters at the Herald to cover the first Jessie arms fair.

It had been explained to me that the Jessie sim was one of only a handful of places in Second Life where injury and death were possible. By all accounts, the inhabitants of Jessie were raging psychotics. Nevertheless, I accepted the assignment (in truth I had little choice), and ventured off to Jessie.

My previous experience of SL weaponry was confined to the large range of griefing devices in depressingly common use throughout the rest of the world. The idea of simply causing annoyance had never attracted me, but Jessie appealed to my videogaming sensibilities. It held the promise of bodily harm and fatalities; a chance to meet my opponents head on and as equals. Weapons are no fun unless using them carries some sort of consequences — preferably for your target, if not for yourself. “Out of my cold, dead hands” doesn’t mean a lot when you can’t die, when you aren’t even able to bleed. In Jessie, it seemed, the “player-vs.-player” players had reinvented the notion of mortality for the pixelated world.

Was this evidence of a reactionary spirit that ol’ Charlton Heston would be proud of. (“An end to death and suffering? But then there’d be no need for the Second Amendment. Git the hell offa my property, y’damn commie!”) I arrived at the weapons fair’s opening gala, arranged by SL resident Apollo Case (and apparently planned as a recurring event; contact Apollo for details) wanting desperately to believe in some other explanation. Maybe the Jessieites only shot at tin cans, rats and abnormally large cockroaches? Maybe they lived in a damage sim so that they could better appreciate the risks and responsibilities of owning a real gun?

Alas, my self-delusion could only hold out for so long. I finally stopped looking for a positive angle on the story when I saw a cartoon fox in a camo tank top casually firing a gattling gun into the air. I’d come in search of the sense of camaraderie found in videogame combat, but I felt like I’d become stuck somewhere between the Disney channel and CNN.

The first fatality of the evening occurred about an hour after my arrival. An avatar named Donk had collapsed by a row of one-armed bandits, spilling pints and pints of blood in absolute silence, as though he’d hit some kind of gruesome jackpot. I hovered over the sticky wreckage a while, making out like a uniformed extra in a glossy prime-time police procedural. Everyone else ignored him, treating it like any other well worn party piece.

The rest of the evening was spent hoarding free samples and playing blackjack. At one point the proprietor of the fair’s impromptu Las Vegas saw fit to pelt me with throwing knives – an experience oddly reminiscent of my first, and last, visit to a real life casino.

But let’s get into some hard-nosed analysis. Certainly there’s no comparing an in-game event to a real-world arms fair – in my real-life capacity as a student activist and part-time Marxist, I’ve picketed plenty of the latter. There, what little of the hubbub and chit-chat that’s audible over the chants, slogans and drumming tends to focus on contracts and quantities – lethality is almost a secondary concern. In Jessie there were booths advertising the Meteor, the first application of shield-buster technology. The booth’s suicidal product demonstration would bathe interested parties in a deep red firestorm, burning away their health, ignoring any protective measures they had in place.

What we’re seeing here is the stark distinction between a market driven by the economics of subsistence, and one driven by the economics of craft. The scuttling suits who cluster around the ExCel Centre for the UK’s largest annual arms fair are more interested in generating money by exchanging and manufacturing arms than they are in putting them to any actual use. The weaponry that turns up on the evening news is the product of an industrial interaction. By the time a firearm is passed on to someone who actually intends to use it — be that a starving child in a central African nation, a terrified farmer in the Middle East, or a teenager in an affluent Western democracy — its exchange value will have dropped to almost a twentieth of the price it was originally sold for.

But SL weaponry, as with so much else in the Lindens’ world, is the product of artistry and ingenuity. Novelty dictated the value of the wares laid out in Jessie that evening, and it always will. Because I’ll get tired of my toys eventually. In other virtual worlds, you pay to participate in an artfully constructed fiction; you bend to the rules of a narrative universe. In Second Life you build the narrative, you participate, you communicate – you experiment with your ability to form social bonds. Guns seem like an inhibition, a distraction from the great collaborative project. For gamers, regularly shooting each other is a social ritual, but in Second Life the options are broader, and in that context, gunplay starts to seem a little unimaginative.

The gunfight that erupted in Wandering Yaffle’s _blacklibrary, when I returned to show off my haul of freebies, soon became tiresome and turgid, as net launchers went from being a delightful folly to a glitchy inconvenience. A carelessly handled chunk of C4 soon put an end to that problem, but it couldn’t explain why weaponry remains so popular in SL when it gives so little scope for innovation.