They say all good things must come to an end. But, while some things age well, passing on into their later years as a fine wine, others pass off in an instant – ephemeral.
I had come to this whole thing expecting the former; surely, good games age well. We still have our Tetris, our Marios, and our Warcrafts, embedded into the psyche like a marketeer’s wet dream. This was clearly the next big thing! People loved this new toy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they were, embracing the worlds it spewed forth like newborne babes grasping their first mobile.
And then the laws of physics changed.
Primmies. A game destined for greatness. A game that claimed much of my blood, sweat, and tears over the last several months.
A game the world will probably never see.
You see, Primmies suffered a fatal flaw. It was a great achievement built on a platform inhospitable to its worth. It’s the technical equivalent of building the Eiffel Tower in San Francisco; the foundation, made fluid every patch day like a great earthquake, simply fell out from under it.
And through it all, I am absolutely unsurprised.
In early April, I was among 16 team leaders tasked with the creation of a fully-featured game in the world of Second Life, a simulated reality “created and owned by its residents.”
In fact, the people that own the world actually live in San Francisco, renting active server space called “sims” to residents willing to pay premium for their virtual property. Each sim, roughly 16 acres apiece, are little different than owning a stake in a massively-multiplayer online game, the current staple placating the gaming masses.
So similar, actually, that the same problems apply. But let me continue.
Our “task” came in the form of a bid to help market the world. Lovingly coined the “Game Dev Contest,” it called for us to effectively market our invention as “the coolest thing ever” to the company’s founders, as well as gaming veteran, Doug Church. The best of the crop being given the honor of… being slapped into the corporate canon, with the winning contractors (ie. us) being given diminishing amounts of land, money, and deferred costs for the top three games.
Rules in place, the contest began. My “team,” if it could be called such, consisted of four people – residents, as we were called – struggling with the task of making an entire game in an extremely short span of time.
Naturally, about 70% of the entrants copped out. Teams shooting way too high and low for the goal were the first to disappear. Teams preaching “amazing first person combat” and “real-time strategy” met the harsh reality of the world in which they worked: Second Life simply cannot do these things well. Boat racing simulators and grid-searching scavenger hunts also disappeared into the ether, too primitive to garner any real attention.
Our own game? The Lindens, arbiters of the world, called it, “Shoot ‘em up meets Lemmings.” Given my original pitch referenced titles like Pikmin and the strategic elements of Lemmings, I doubt they even read my proposal.
Regardless, we got the job, and were granted a half sim – 8 acres – of virtual land to do our dirty work. In the first weeks, brainstorming was waylaid by the cool factor of owning this much land. Imagine a kid in Disney World, building the rollercoasters from giant swaths of track, and you’d get the idea.
But as the months dragged on, the “team” I had assembled didn’t. They decided instead it was far better to do something else. Clearly, I was doing all the work. Why should they?
Shadow Weaver was the first to go. Long-standing friend as he was, his real life turned itself upside-down. As told, he had lost his job, and would no longer have time to devote to a pet project. And that was that.
Francis Chung, next to leave, was a bit more tricky. Fran wanted glory. She didn’t want to work much to achieve it. After my last teammate went for the throat on this matter, she was – to put it politely - “so offended” that she wanted to quit. Boo-hoo.
In reality, Fran had made a breakthrough that was selling like hotcakes – the Wet Ikon ROAM. A device that moved avatars at controlled speeds rarely seen, she sold her invention as a service. It got quite a lot of press in a world that, at the time, did not allow direct teleportation.
Of course, she was too proud to admit something quite clear: she’d rather profit and bask in the glory of her latest success than slog the game out with me, an unproven coder. And so it goes into the chronicles of white lies and facades in Second Life that, as in the real world, happen daily.
Alas.
My last hope was my other long-standing friend and resident, Alan Beckett. His was a more tangible excuse: the college system was sapping his time. And so I was left alone, for months, to make the game.
In the end, it was Alan that actually came through for the project. Proving to be a passionate artist, despite his hatred for “teh cute,” his skill made the game’s image. Without it, I doubt the entry would have won.
And it did win. Despite several setbacks, including scheduled judging during a major patch, poor correspondence from “Reuben Linden,” and rules about as clear as mud on a summer afternoon, a game pulled completely out of my ass and brought to life by Alan took first place.
It’s worth noting at this time that I’m a college student. University of Miami. Senior in Computer Information Systems. Job at the time was okay. Average life in the upper-middle class. I began the game during my finals; I ended it at the beginning of the fall semester.
And so, satisfied with myself, I moved into the next semester at the Uni. Great stuff that turned out to be, with another group experience perfectly mirroring that of the last.
Paying attention to my studies for once, I learned of another patch to the Second Life system. Version 1.7. Pretty mundane in its notes. Fixes. Typical. Exploits patched. Okay, sure. Script scheduler to limit scripts and keep sims from crashing. Hmm – I’d better look into that. Removed object item passing. Uh-oh.
Logging in on my spare time, I decided to fire up my game and see if it still ran properly.
It didn’t. With one patch to the world, the game was forever broken.
“Why,” you might ask, “would they stand for that? Surely, it broke others’ work too?”
It did. But the Lindens, intelligent as they are, are still only human. Fallible. Limited. And sometimes outright stupid.
Yet I do not fault them in the death of my game. Instead, I fault the process they’ve taken to get here. It too is as flawed as the human beings working to make it possible.
You see, Second Life is a simulation, meant to emulate the real world while not understanding it fully.
Imagine a funhouse mirror, cracked and skewed, held against the product’s city of origin. What’s projected back is a world where people can be anything that they want, do everything they wish to do, and create entire worlds of their own – on a limited platform barely capable of the task. Giant, antropomorphized animals mingle with images from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Mundane houses dovetail into elaborate medieval castles, then crash downward into brothels and virtual whorehouses.
The world was created upon an image found in a book – Snow Crash. A lengthy novel about an evil media baron and the world – this metaverse – that baron created. In his book, status quo would remain the prevalent theme. Assuming this, a concurrent world would work perfectly, if everyone followed such preconceptions equally.
Yet they do not. The world is instead a patchwork of a hundred minds all competing for attention at once. All of them as shallow as the pixels on the screen, pieced together in an artificial construct known as the grid.
If anything, it should teach us this: all minds are not created equal. Preconceived norms are for minds that cannot grasp the need for choice, an idea that until recently was the canon of Second Life.
And now? The gods of this virtual world fight heavily to maintain the status quo seen in their minds eye. We now have a script scheduler, a communist construct aimed at giving “every script equal time.” In actuality, it breaks all scripting processes equally, making the threat of such directly proportional to the difficulty of the task.
And this spiral continues downward. We now have a subsidized virtual suburbia. Our hands have been tied several times at the code level, proving rotten apples can spoil the bunch.
Missing from the world is that sense of choice. Avatars are still limited to carbon-copy male and female human figures, requiring imagination to alter. Parcels are still limited to earth-like structures. The sky is always blue in the morning.
The only things that ever change are the rules. Our interactions with the world can change on a whim.
But they must change everywhere at once. My game failed to this fact: the whims of the Lindens did not flow in my direction. Like a Greek prophecy, the gods had spoken. What am I, a simple human being, to do against their will?
I can only choose to go elsewhere or put up with the status quo, now. Second Life, as an open world where you can do anything, has failed.
I think with all of this, we’re really seeking to reforge reality. An apt title as any, this “Second Life,” even if it still misses the point.
Reality allows us to choose. It is a construct that, like the imitations, gives us the freedom and means to act as we wish.
The surge in popularity of these false worlds suggests the real one, while still the better system, has also failed. People seek to “escape” from it to these worlds; clearly the real one is no longer “doing it” for them.
I blame society for this outcome. In our move from the natural order to higher schools of organized civilization, we’ve simply forgotten why the natural order exists in the first place.
Nature is meant to limit the influence of monotony. While our collective society caters to political agendas and the machinations of small minds, Darwinism and competition are meant to keep life interesting.
So when that process breaks down, people have been forced to go elsewhere to keep things interesting. Natur ex machina.
And on this front, Second Life the world has failed. It caters to monotonic thought in the form of tangible gods that exact their will on everyone seemingly at random. Until a time exists where we can choose freely in these worlds, unshackled from unilateral decisions, we will continue to have this debate and read of martyr stories like my own.
