“Next!” A voice bellowed from behind the large, wooden doors that seperated the ornate corridor from the throne room. With a click, one of the doors opened, and a small man with terrible acne in a guard’s uniform two sizes too big appeared. He set his halberd (+ 1 against souvenir hunters) against the wall and unrolled a scroll.

“Sir Day of the Ranging mountains?” a slightly squeeky voice announced, “The King will see you now.” The voice cracked at the word ‘king’, and the guard clumsily plucked his halberd and stood aside.

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The _blacklibrary is easy to spot in Games1 sim.

For the sake of Second Life ergonomics the _blacklibrary is a big, open, warehouse-type structure, with a high ceiling and plenty of airspace for flying in.

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The place where the journey had begun, and where I continued to wander amiably through, was known the New Continent. It is here that Linden Labs are concentrating their efforts in expanding their virtual world. It was apparently begun as a fresh start, where the creation of new land zones and their subsequent flotation on the market could be controlled, or at least kept from getting out of hand. I’d already been through the silent battlefields of the public-auction regions, and as I penetrated further in I would see this in later stages. Everything around me struck me as being fresh, a positive discontinuation of the standards set in the Old Continent. New ideas were being pursued, new franchises being set up, and new styles being experimented with.

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The _blacklibrary is the Second Life extension of this website.

Second Life is a ‘virtual world’ game, where players create characters that freely populate a computer generated environment. Great emphasis is placed on creativity and the game features comprehensive tools for building and scripting objects in real-time.

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A couple weeks ago I was amazed to read Sen. Hillary Clinton’s statements in the LA Times expressing her shock and amazement upon learning of the existence of sexual activity in computer gaming. Her statements, although pointed in the direction of a particular game, sounded sort of inappropriately wide-eyed and innocent, and I thought to myself at that time: exactly *how* clueless does a person have to be to run for President of the USA? Of course given the course of the US government over the last several years, with Congress and Executive branches sort of agreeing together that civil liberties and traditional American assurances of freedom of expression are old fashioned and out of date, I would guess that my question is merely rhetorical. After all, we are presently governed by an administration that feels strongly that duct tape can protect people in the event of a terrorist attack.

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When I was 12 years old and supposed to be studying for my Bar Mitzvah, I was instead spending lots and lots of my time staring at what was then called a “dumb terminal,” on the screen of which scrolled hundreds of lines of text from the classic of all classic computer games, Adventure. It was 1978 or ‘79 and my father was taking his CompSci masters at the State University of New York at Albany. We had a big, aqua-colored CRT that lived on the dining room table, as I recall, and which, when you switched it on, would do exactly nothing. To liven it up, you had to dial the university’s PDP-11 computer (that is, turn the dial on the house phone), listen for the burr of the computer tone, then jam the handset into the pair of fat black rubber bushings that protruded from the brick-sized modem attached to the terminal.

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Originally published at http://www.bigkid.com.au/ on 1st April 2002

Well, I did it. It was not without some sadness last week that I logged into Norrath for possibly the last time, said my goodbyes to my guildmates, distributed some of my possessions to friends, and retired my brave Bard. There is always the possibility of returning as many have done before me (as Verant rarely delete inactive accounts), but due to my reasons for leaving it is unlikely.

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The first port of call was the outermost extreme, the very edge of the populated world, not counting the private islands that are inaccessible without teleportation. I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting – it certainly wasn’t going to be the social hub for the people of this virtual world, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t expecting… nothing.

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Last year I attended classes at Cal State LA the Conservatory of Fine Arts. Each week we would get a new teacher and a new type of art. One time we had this teacher named Ms. Greta, who in fact had a Hansel and Gretel type of accent. We had to draw a picture of an ancient African mask with charcoal, which is my favorite medium because of how easy it smudges and shades.

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The problem is this: people just don’t travel any more, ironically because travel has become so easy. In Second Life teleportation is the norm, the quickest and easiest way to get from A to B. While being able to cross the relatively vast distances involved in-game in a heartbeat does mean players have better access to all the exciting locations on offer than they would otherwise have, it actually means that players are exposed to less of them.

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