windy city of abaddon

 
Yesterday Linden Lab released a new "First look Viewer" for "↑Second Life" (SL) [they call the SL-client a "viewer"], a new test-client. With the ↑WindLight First Look Viewer: 1.16.0.62469 you can regularly log on to SL's main grid, and experience a new technology integrated, namely ↑windwardmark interactive's ↑WindLight, at the heart of which "is a physically-correct model of how light actually behaves in the outdoors. [...] WindLight takes into account over twenty lighting parameters, each of which map to real-world light contributors in the Earth's atmosphere. [...] Any time of day, from dawn to twilight, can be represented [...]" ↑Detect already had the test-client installed yesterday, messed around with the newly added settings options, and came up with a ↑series of pictures of his Sim, the (SLurl:) ↑City of Abaddon. Today I tried it, and have to second his opinion—it really is an improvement to SL. In the "World" drop-down menu there has been added "Sky Settings," just beneath "Force Sun." Clicking on it gives you a window with three tabs containing all in all 50 sliders to control the atmosphere settings. Furthermore there is a drop-down box with preset settings to try out—do that, as the default preset is, well, ... not so good. After having seen the presets, hit "New" and go havoc with the sliders in creating your own preset. The best thing to me is the "Day Cycle Editor," which allows to save changing atmosphere settings for a whole SL-day (currently 4 hours). This allows e.g. the owner of a Sim to define a whole day's sky and atmosphere matching the ambience of the Sim's theme. The picture above is a rendition of the nighttime for Detect's upcoming combat system "Final Days" ... "↑Blade Runner" worthy in my humble opinion. The next thing on this line which will be integrated into SL, is ↑Nimble, which creates volumetric clouds, and "allows the user to fly up, over, and through multiple cloud layers with full density and vision occlusion, all in realtime. [...] Wind control, density control, pattern attributes and coverage are all interactively modifiable by the user." It seems that, after Newtonian physics, meteorological and celestial phenomena are the current trend in bringing more naturalism into spaces created by game engines. Watch the ↑trailers of Alan Wake for that.
 

 

 

second life creation
a guide to in- and offworld online resources, or:
avatar customization 101
 
A main factor contributing to the attractiveness of "↑Second Life" (SL) is the possibility to modify and create content—up to the never-seen-before. I have to confess that during my first weeks inworld I tremendously misunderestimated [neologism by George Walker ;-] the capacities of the built-in editors and the general potential—the interpretative flexibility SL-gamespace grants is huge. The environment allows creativity and innovation to bloom. Of course there are limitations, as SL is not to be confused with e.g. standalone professional 3D-visualization software like ↑3ds Max or ↑Maya. The following should and can not be understood as a kind of technical documentation of SL—there are shortcomings and may be errors in it. This write-up is the result of my exploratory wanderings, sporting the fused gaze of a game modder and an anthropologist. But if your longing is to create content within SL, in one form or another, this heuristical guide will be of help. To avoid misunderstandings and grief I am trying to set all of it on a sound basis by starting with an appropriate vivisection of SL. By brachiation from branch to perch we will reach our goal—hands-on know-how about building in SL—as quickly as possible ... or by scrolling down :-(
 
game modder's anatomy of SL
 
Unless you are 'playing' SL by means of some freaky force-feedback device—and I never heard about that being supported—the triggers of your experience consist of information, delivered by your computer, streaming to your mind via two sensorial channells only: seeing and hearing. Pictures and sounds, nothing more. Allow me to mainly deal with the visual aspects, as I am not at all into sound or music—I can't even read sheet music.
 
When you have your SL-client running and are logged in, your screen potentially displays a plethora of things. There are toolbars and menus, head-up displays (HUDs), text overlays, windows for chat, IM, pictures, written information (notecards), script code, and your inventory folders. Presumably the most important thing to you is the threedimensional view of SL-space. It shows you your avatar, other avatars, vehicles, furniture, buildings, landscapes, the sea, the sky ... the 'world of SL'. That sounds to be quite a lot, but technically there only are the sea and the skybox (things of their own), particle effects, and 3D-meshes.
 
We can neither tinker with the sea nor with the sky (grapevine has it that Linden will improve the sky soon), so let's forget them. But we can tinker with particle effects and with 3D-meshes.
 
To my understanding there basically are thre classes of things in SL which technically are 3D-meshes: Terrain (landscape), Characters (Avatars), and Objects.
 
I do know close to nothing about terrain, as I do not own a single square meter of land in SL, and haven't yet asked anyone about modifying terrain. But I know, that if you buy a whole island from Linden, you can furnish them with your own terrain file, and they will make your island out of it. So let us allow the terrain to join sea and sky in killfile oblivion, as only few of you, esteemed readers, will be owners of whole islands, and hence won't be much interested in modifying terrain.
 
modifying the avatar
 
It's a completely different thing with avatars, as everybody in SL has one—at least one. The avatar is a full-blown 3D-character-mesh as known from 'real computer games'. It has a bone-rig and can be animated, it has several layers for textures on its surface, and a list of defined spots where objects can be attached. But, unlike to modding 'real computer games', you can not import your own character-mesh or even bone-rig (god forbid!) into SL. You have to deal with the avatar you were given—you can change its shape, its surface texture, you can attach things to it, and you can animate it. Let's start from the inside out.
 
There is no direct access to the bone-rig possible, as far as I know. But you can modify the size and shape of your avatar to certain limitations by using the integrated appearance editor to run havoc with the mesh. Go "Edit", and then "Appearance" and make yourself familiar with the 150 or so slider controls.
 
Once the shape is to your satisfaction, you will want to customize the looks of the surface of your avatar, give it human (or non-human) skin, and clothe it. You want to apply textures that means. For that end your avatar is equipped with a row of texture layers, from the inside out, and from top down: skin, skin tattoo, eyeball texture, undershirt, shirt, jacket, gloves, underpants, pants, skirt, socks, and shoes. Each of this layers you can texture independently from within the appearance menus. By default in the library folders of your inventory there already are some matching textures, which you can apply. Then of course you can grab free textures inworld, get some as presents, or buy some. Furthermore, and now we get close, you can make your textures yourself outside SL, preferably by using Photoshop (PS), and then import them.
 
By far the best way to learn to achieve this, is reading ↑Robin "Sojourner" Wood's tutorials, and to use the tools he provides. Besides of his website Robin also maintains an interactive inworld course on the topic (SLurl:) ↑at his place.
 
Once you are familiar with the techniques, and if you are good at PS, you can achieve truly dazzling results. But mind, you are 'just' messing around with texture layers, that means, all the clothes and even shoes made that way, are painted flatly upon the shape of your avatar, you created. No fancy shawl flapping in the wind, no plushy, swaying skirts, no hat, and no cyborg arm possible that way. To get this, you have to create objects and attach them to your avatar.
 
creating objects—'building'
 
A cigarette, sunglasses, an airplane, or a house in SL are technically all the same: single or linked-together groups of 3D-meshes. The latter are called "prims" (short for "primitives") in SL-jargon, meaning basic threedimensional geometrical shapes like e.g. a cube, a sphere, or a torus (which is the builder's friend ;-). SL features a limited (compared to 'real 3D-software'), yet powerful and quite intuitive interface for creating, manipulating, linking, and texturing those prims.
 
As a start I recommend Xah Lee's ↑Second Life 3D-Construction Tutorial. Once familiar with the interface you may proceed to the category ↑Build [Tutorials, Techniques, etc] in ↑Natalia Zelmanov's Second Life Diary, which is a treasure trove of easy to follow step-by-step tutorials—not only leading to immediate results, but also gradually to an understanding of the how-it-works. A good pick for the beginning is her trilogy on creating 'prim-shoes': ↑Creating Prim Shoes Part 1 (Sandals), ↑Creating Prim Shoes Part 2 (Heels), and ↑Creating Prim Shoes Part 3 (Texture and Sexy Walk). Mind that, as 'everything is the same', the principles you learn there do not only apply to avatar-modding, but also to to e.g. building houses or vehicles ... with the exception of the 'sexy walk', maybe.
 
To get the full dose of how-it-works from scratch on, and of what-is-possible with SL's building interface, you can go to the (SLurl:) ↑Library of Primitives inworld and do the interactive tutorials.
 
With today's client-release, a new feature has been implemented, so-called ↑sculpted prims. I have no experience at all with those, didn't ry on beta grid, and Detect just a second ago said to me "they're crap Zeph lol," which immediately sparked a lively discussion among those present, which is going on right now :-)
 
particle effects
 
In striving to emulate a 'real computer game', SL, like the 'real games', uses particle effects. Particles in this respect are two-dimensional animated images that always face the viewer. Smoke, explosions, rain, fire, or soap bubbles in SL are all particle effects. I guess all there is to know about particles in SL, you can learn interactively inworld at the (SLurl:) ↑Particle Laboratory. There are also free particle-script samples you can grab for free, modify and use. E.g. the blue, irregularily pulsing light in my right cyborg eye is a modified script from there.

metamorphosis

 

cyver

 
Gritty streets, rundown facades, a torn slip of a propaganda poster flapping in the wind, a buzzing larger-than-life screen showing off animated Coca-Cola logos, graffitti on the walls, freshly lit, but orphaned smoking cigarettes in ashtrays on barcounter tops ... everything overtowered by a high-tech skyscraper reminiscent of the "↑Half-Life 2" Combine Tower—must have been a lot of work to get all that right, to finally create the real thing in "↑Second Life" (SL). Most of the island of Merricks Landing 2 is covered by Sector 13 of Abaddon City. To me the most perfect cyberpunk ambience in whole SL ... and I already have seen Devil's Moon, Nexus Prime, Shalida Bay, and the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Wastelands. Geometry and textures are gamelevel-designer standard, not a notch below. The architecture, the furniture, and the countless details are pure class. Effects and scripts as well. When you are desperately seeking for the experience of flying through a large window pane, the shattering shards flying around you, then go to Abaddon, enter Bar Substance—the place's Gentleman Loser, where hard men fight in pubs, get mixed up in a brawl, and there you go. But there are also way more peaceful delights at Substance, like dancing to the tunes of the jukebox, your avatar moved by high-quality motion-captured animations.
 

 
Sector 13 is the work of ↑Detect Surface, who really knows his stuff. Go and check out his weblog, and you will know what I mean by 'the real stuff', seen from the perspective of a game modder. The place is also home of Detect's shop ↑D&D Creative Labs, where you can buy his amazing creations like the Kravatac at bargain prices.
 

 
Let's ↑listen to Detect himself:
 


 
The Kravatac is the first thing in SL I am longing to buy. While I am writing this lines my avatar dances his ass off on the other screen—earning money, just 125 L$ to go. People tell me that the "Refract" suit is the best Detect Surface has made so far, both mesh- and script-wise. Furthermore I heard through the grapevine that Detect is about to release yet another "six huge things." Things to come. Furthermore, if, and I say if, I ever will be ready to rent a space in SL, it will be the appartement above Bar Substance, because that's the kind of people you meet downstairs:
 

 

 
And then there is yet another strange thing. Whenever I visit Merricks Landing 2, the map shows me two other people, always at the same spot. I wandered through all levels of the building there, even went below, to the sea's surface, as I suspected some underground system, looked for a skybox above (there is none), and never could find anyone at the spot the map indicates ... ghosts in the Sim.
 

 

xah toll

 
I ran into him in The Future. Xah Toll aka ↑Xah Lee is a professional programmer who was brought to "↑Second Life" (SL) by his friend Seifert Surface aka Stanford-mathematician ↑Henry Segerman. The latter is the creator of the famed ↵crooked house—which was a key motivation for ↵my coming to SL—, and of most of the stunning things in The Future. Xah himself is another of those math wizards, fond of the works of M.C. Escher, and creating things in SL that make you hanging on the edge of your seat. If you want to see unending symmetry tiles (as seen in Escher's work) in 3D, then go and watch Xah's renditions at ↑The Future, (250,250,506) ... that's cheaper than flying down to Spain and visit the ↑Alhambra. Drenched with hacker ethics—all people who do the 'real thing' online are—Xah has put up a ↑Second Life 3D-Construction Tutorial. Although work in progress, it already is quite substantial and a must be for everybody wanting to create the real thing in SL. But there is way more at his site. The ↑Photographic Tour of Life in Second Life is a kind of heuristical geographical and ethnographical overview, showing off a lot of places worthwhile visiting, and never missing giving the SLurls. I especially dig ↑mathematics in SL and ↑mecha in SL. But before diving into those, have a look at Xah's ↑introduction to SL, and navigate through his website a bit more, there are a lot of goodies to be discovered, like the full text of H. G. Wells "↑Time Machine". Notice his down-to-the-basics technical and visual style of the website—real programmer's habitus :-)

cool details
Just to give you an idea about what I meant by ↵caring about cyberpunk-aesthetic details in "↑Second Life" (SL), look what this people wear on their belts and elsewhere.
 

 

 

 

 

coolness
cyberpunked second living
 

 
Believe it or not, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am getting cooler day by day—in "↑Second Life" (SL) that is. Remember when I said that graphics-wise SL is ↵insultory to my hardware? Well, concerning the absolute majority of avatars I have met so far, and concerning almost all the architecture I have seen so far, this still stands uncorrected. I am running SL on the absolute highest settings here on my machine, but when you compare the looks to e.g. "↵Max Payne 2" (MP2), a game released in 2003, SL obviously is inferior. Plus, there is no lag at all when playing MP2. But then SL is not a computer game, it is an online-mediated 'persistent state world', a malleable environment allowing a plethora of actions and interactions. Within this environment you of course can play games—just like you can do in meatspace.
 
My judgement of SL not being a computer game is based on several arguments: There is no set of game-rules, no goals are defined, the emical perspective of SL old-timers clearly encompasses "Not a game, but a lifestyle!", and the majority of those I met in-world significantly differs from the people I know from gaming and game modding communities [by "met" I mean having talked for longer, and not only once, and having undertaken some things together]. Those SL denizens have never heard about "↑Doom" or "↑Quake", they of course complain about the frequent crashing of the client, but swallow it—not a single upright gamer would accept "↑Counter-Strike" (CS) or "↑Half-Life 2" (HL2) crashing to the desktop as often as the SL-client does. Here is no deathmatching, no trickjumping, they are playing Barbie, Ken, and their dollhouse in here. Of course in SL there are roleplaying- and combat-zones as well, but whenever I spawn at some of those, I am virtually alone. From all this—and some things more—I judged that those active in SL adhere to a different culture than the one I associate with having grown around shooter games. No power or hardcore gamers here, no game modding culture in my sense, no hacker ethics, no cyberpunk-informed second lifestyle. A lot of really nice people here, but not the kind of characters I cherish so much since I first entered the game modding scene. Yet another culture, or set of cultures, for sure, cultures I do like, but not the kind I was looking for ... how preposterous a judgement! Anthropologist beware, do not be too sure of your skills of looking and seeing—never cease to readjust and recalibrate your gaze.
 
The turnaround came, ↵when the Kravatac spawned in front of my eyes. Last night we returned to its cradle—"we" means me and Miss Audrey Hepburn at my side. Just moments after our appearance, another Kravatac spawned, towering high in the dark and spooky cyberpunk ambience. We got into talking and quickly made friends with Bobmarley, the mech's integrated pilot. At one point of the conversation I carelessly said, that at the very moment I will have 1000 L$ at my fingertips, I'd immediately buy a Kravatac. A second later a window pops up, telling me that Bobmarley was paying me 49 L$. He would have given me the whole outfit, he said, as he himself wasn't really into robots, but it's tagged as "no transfer". Nevertheless he wanted to contribute to my project of buying one of those beasts, and would have liked to give me more, but those 49 were the last L$ he had. All right, now you may say, at yesterday's rate he 'just' gave me 0.18 US$, but that's not the point [by the way, even on the best paying dancepads in the hood, it would take you one hour and 40 minutes to earn this amount inworld], because if the Kravatac would be transferable, he would have given it to me—not a copy, the thing itself.
 

 
BobMarley then assumed his 'real appearance', respectively the appearance he is working on—grunge, underground, cyberpunk. We went on talking, he gave me the shape he made, and a lot of tips and hints about where to go in order to find what I am after.
 
Graphics insultory to my hardware? Yeah, mostly, but there is the real thing, too. The Kravatac is a huge example, but there are the details as well. Lovingly and professionally created perfect 3D-objects. Noticed the headphones around Bobmarley's neck? They just blew me away. Realistic shape, wonderfully textured—zooming in to the set's bow as close as possible reveals that it indeed is made of leather. The particle effect spawning notes while playing music nicely compliments the naturalistic looks of the device, adding that cartoony irony to the naturalism as a counter point :-) The result of my raving about the 'phones was, that Bobmarley gave them to me as well ... Now it's my obligation to create something worthwhile which I can give to him—reciprocity, you know.

kravatac

 
Just a quick note—I ran into the real thing in "↑Second Life" (SL). Yesterday I was proud to accomplish an animation override for my avatar (thanks Sue!), and found a pair of free male prim shoes. For the override you have to stuff a script and the animations into an object, and then your avatar has to wear it. So I for the first time created objects in SL, a bracelet. Then I had an idea. I rezzed a tiny cube, stuffed the override inside, and now wear the cube right in the middle of my left wrist, inside my forearm, that is. Now my avatar is cybernetically augmented via an implant ;-) Being tremendously proud I teleported to my home location, which is always crowded. People should see my new stride. Suddenly, without warning, this thing spawned out of nowhere just beside me. The thing is an avatar actually, 4.5 inworld-meters high (see above, and compare my blue self at the left of the picture, to the huge mech), incredibly detailled, and consisting of 1200+ prims. Parts are animated individually, I zoomed in, but the detail didn't cease, every high resolution texture applied correctly. It's a miracle in itself, that, when the thing spawned, the whole area didn't crash. Later the mech's pilot took me to the thing's cradle, situated in a cyberpunk-sim, which graphically is the best I so far have seen in SL. I will report on all this, the people I have met there, what I have seen, and so on, later. Just a little treat ... On my wanderings I saw female avatar-hair on sale for 900L$, I saw male avatar-skins for 5000L$—the mech goes for 1000L$ only! Don't get me wrong, both the costly hair and skins I saw was expert work, real quality, even to the standards of a game modder. But this simply is nothing compared to the man-hours, design-ingenuity, and skills that were necessary to create the Kravatac. Obviously inside SL there are multiple completely different markets, or even economies—symptoms of different cultures.
 

 

cyberculture—call for papers
From 01 through 04 October 2007 in Halle (Saale), Germany, the next biannual conference of the ↑German Anthropological Association (GAA) [aka ↑Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (DGV)] will take place. The conference is called "↑Questions of dispute—On the relationship of empirical research and anthropological theory in the beginning 21st century" ["↑Streitfragen—Zum Verhältnis von empirischer Forschung und ethnologischer Theoriebildung am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts"]. ↑The conference agenda is online already.
 
As of now, on Thursday, 04 October 2007, from 14:00h through 18:00h, the ↑Workshop 30: Cyberculture will take place. Yours truly is honoured to organize and lead this very workshop.
 
 
Call for papers

Modern technologies, information- and communication technologies (ICTs) in particular, meanwhile seem to be omnipresent all around the globe. Computers and the Internet infrastructure, for instance, since long have ceased to be domains of specialists or esoterical circles. Rather they have become integral parts of the most different designs of living, have become integral parts of everyday-life in astoundingly diverse regions; far away, next door, and even at your side of the door.
 
The overwhelming interest participants and listeners alike have taken in the ↵workshop "Cyberanthropology" at ↑GAA 2005, clearly has shown that anthropologists are willing to engage with recent and most recent phenomena—e.g. online communities or the changes in anthropology's "classical fields", which have taken place in the wake of said technologies. The culturally informed interrelationships between technologies on the one hand, and human beings, society, and the socioecologically formed environment on the other hand (the complex human beings and ICTs in particular), have become legitimate topics within the German speaking anthropological community. They are no more simply left to be belaboured by other academic disciplines.
 
After the "work exhibition" two years ago, it is now high time to undertake the next step. Meanwhile anthropology's unique array of methods, the anthropological perspective itself, has been consciously adjusted and calibrated, in order to gain access to the new phenomena. Timely concepts like e.g. sociocultural appropriation, plus certain areas of anthropology, newborn or redesigned during the last decade, like material culture, the anthropology of work, and technology, have been embraced by "cyberanthropology".
 
The workshop "Cyberculture" will be a forum for presenting methodology, concepts, models, and theories grounded in fieldwork—no matter if on- or offline, or both—which comprised the issue of modern technologies as a central topic. Especially visions of a contemporary concept of "culture" shall be presented and discussed. Maybe this visions can empower sociocultural anthropology to drop stances of self-doubt and -deconstruction, and instead to throw its particular strengths and perspectives upon topics, which are widely deemed to be as relevant in the societal, political, and economical sense.
 
Proposals have to comprise a maximum of 1500 characters, blanks included, and have to be sent before 30 June 2007 to me via e-mail: Alexander[dot]Knorr[at]lmu[dot]de. The proposals can be submitted in German or English. Likewise the presentations at the workshop can be held in German or English, but must not be longer than 20 minutes.
 
Please send on this Call for Papers to everybody interested—the ↑official German version is at the GAA 2007 homepage and ↑mirrored at ethno::log.

conceptual heights
When I am forced to speak academish anthropologese, I use to babble about "conceptual spaces of interaction induced by the Internet infrastructure," or else.
 
When I was a kid I was forced to read ↑Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" in school. Frankly, I never came to grips with it. I mean, just have a look at how ↑Wikipedia sums up one of the main characters, Hindley Earnshaw, who "is Catherine's brother and Heathcliff's other rival; having loathed Heathcliff since childhood, Hindley delights in turning Heathcliff into a downtrodden servant upon inheriting Wuthering Heights. However, his wife's death in childbirth destroys him; he becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, and it is this that allows Heathcliff, upon returning to Wuthering Heights, to turn the tables and to swindle the property away from him." ...
 
Way more fun than writing about conceptual spaces, or reading "Wuthering Heights", seems to be exploring the conceptual heights of "↑Second Life"'s (SL) threedimensional gamespace. Cristiano Midnight's ↑Exploring Second Life's Highest Frontiers from October 2004 is a most hilarious account on the strange above, "on some of the spectacular effects on the fringes of cyberspace-space—engaging horizon colors, and alarming AV[atar] meltdowns. Pictures were hard to come by, however, and descriptions were often colorful and based on real life contexts: one early explorer claimed to see strange, fuzzy, moving lights above him.".
 

 
When I reported on ↵Gaynor Gritzi's experiments, I knew that she sooner or later would seize the heights with her new jet pack—well, she did and confirms, that ↑weird things happen when you get high in Second Life. Above you see her already suffering severe avatar-meltdown at an altitude of 578,606 metres.
 

 
This is "↑The Right Stuff", reminding me of several things. More than a decade ago, in an age when I was not yet riveted on a writing desk, not yet incarcerated within an university office, I deduced from empirical observation while falling through the sky, that there are different kinds of human faces. If you ever get the chance of doing skydiving, look into the faces of those jumping with you during free fall. The people sporting the first face type you easily recognize, as their faces do not change at all. The features of the faces of the second type get ridiculously distorted and elongated upwards. The third type is the funniest, as with this people the facial parts wobble, flutter, and jitter insanely, like they were striving to break away from the face entirely every second. Up there you hardly recognize the members of this face-type group again, although you may know them perfectly well on the ground. Moments to cherish. When I first saw types two and three during performance, I in turn was reminded of far earlier experiences, maybe experiences which in the end made me skydive and fly aircrafts myself—oh, those days. As a kid I swallowed the complete ↑Buck Danny ↑comic book series. In one album, as far as I recollect Danny and his faithful comrades were test pilots, the hero looses the canopy of his jet during super sonic flight. A series of pictures then shows how the pilot first looses oxygen mask and helmet, and then how his face gets ever more distorted. I couldn't find that very panel today, but here is a picture of Buck Danny flying another prototype:
 

 
Back to SL—at about 1,000,000 metres above SL's flatland, Gritzi's avatar started to disappear until only the name-tag was left. Fearless she went on riding upwards till she reached an altitude of more than 2,000,000 metres, where she got bored by the whole thing and decided to return to ... erh, well ... Earth? Back in 2004 Cristiano Midnight had somewhat different experiences and went way higher already:
 


 
See now what kind of guy I am? Loathing Brontë and the idiom of my own profession, instead preferring comic books, blockbuster movies, and computer games—the stuff dreams and real life are made of.

webnography

 
Jenny Ryan is on a quest "to explore the nature of computer-mediated communication, online social networking, notions of public and private in the virtual realm, the global impact of new interactive information technologies, narrative, alternative conceptions of embodiment in the digital age, subcultural appropriation of technology, linguistic representations of self/identity, the role of play and creativity in communitas, and dynamic mashup systems." At her blog ↑WebnographY: The anthropology of online communities she writes about her research for her "Master's thesis in anthropology exploring matters of being, knowing, and being known in online communities." The blog is choke full with a plethora of literature reviews—very worthwhile. Also check out Jenny's own writing, reachable via the sidebar to the right of her blog column.

second life conceptual

 
Since a month there's a new blog on the block, concerned with exploring "↑Second Life" (SL): ↑Second Life Conceptual by Gaynor Gritzi, Who seems especially interested in seizing the inworld heights. The latest post reports about ↑flying a jet-pack at 50,000m while leaving unending vapor trails in the sky. Rigged up test-pilot Gaynor looks like a hybrid made of James Bond, a NASA-astronaut, Rocketboy, and Buzz Lightyear. The story on the ↑maiden flight of a retro rocket ship—which ended in desaster—has some hilarious passages: "This was the last photograph taken before the retro rocketship crashed and burned. Wreckage was spread over a wide area, and the pilot was feared lost." Until that sentence I deemed the post to be a specimen of those suspension-of-disbelief tongue-in-cheek style write-ups, which really can be good reads when they are well done. But then the story goes on with a shift in the level of narrative and adds a phantastic twist, mixing the realms of inworld-experience with those of technical pecularities of SL itself:
 


 
If you dig things like that, there are several ↑reports on height-record stunts in SL, and of course downright ↵over-the-top stunts in other games, documented as movies—I try to refrain from again pointing to ↵Q3A-trickjumping ... D'oh!

attitudes