Coming of Age in Second Life
by Tom Boelistorff
As I desperately searched my local library catalogue for a written treatise on Everquest and found nothing except a guidebook to The Ruins of Kunark (an expansion for the game which wasn’t yet a gleam in the eye of designer Kevin McPherson when I quit playing–Coming of Age in Second Life came up a few times. I am not a Second Life person, but one takes what scholarly interrogations of turn-of-the-millennium MMOs one can get. Try to look up Asheron’s Call, I dare you.
The history of my teenaged years is rife with always-online MMORPG memories: some people love the climb from nothing to something, but I love the beginning, when nothing quite makes sense and the world feels impossibly large. Once someone has played enough of any game, it is hard to avoid bumping against the seams that hold it together; the underlying decisions of the programmers are laid bare—“They think x is the altruistic response, and y character likes you more if you’re altruistic”—and it takes conscious effort to avoid metagaming, a term that covers the interaction between what the player knows and what the character does. Choosing how you play based on what is “best” (“best” in gaming usually doesn’t mean “most fun,” unfortunately, but “most efficient”) rubs up against a problem when you avatar isn’t supposed to, say, prepare all their best defensive spells before an event trigger that will launch you into a surprise battle. But if you’ve played the game before, or can read utilitarian foreshadowing like “Hey, there’s a save point right outside this ornate boss door,” then perhaps….
Thus, I have a shallow understanding of a lot of MMOs, because once I grasp their patterns, I tend to find fresh mysteries in a new world to bonk my head against for a while. So a scholarly application of classic anthropological practices to mid-aughts massively multiplayer networking technologies is absolutely my jam, irrespective of my preference for the colored baldrics of Sierra’s On-Line’s The Realm, the bat-stabbing of early Everquest, or the chatroomesque time spent typing “/play ocarina aimless” in front of the Empath’s Guild in Dragonrealms. To flex my bona fides, I’ve dipped my toes in Dark Age of Camelot, Tera, Rifts, Vanguard, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Wildstar, Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic, Lord of The Rings Online, the Finals Fantasy 11 and 14 (both before and after ARR). This non-comprehensive, but still wildly long, list represents a strong sense of time well wasted. I was there for these, my friend, and my nostalgia centers are dripping with ganking and stolen gear, deleveling, corpse runs, starting zones, and auction houses. And I would start over in nearly any of them, right now. At least for a couple of levels.
Everquest boxart vs character model
Sierra’s The Realm had a short trial, so I was forced to create new characters often
My first and truest love
Books that tackle these games comprehensively aren’t very easy to find. After the amazing I am Error, I typically rely on the MIT Platform Studies texts to point me toward tech/culture texts. There is a dearth of cross-cultural work on early MMORPGs in their catalogue, though: I want deep, dry discussions of what it meant, culturally, that people paid for macro-based language tutors in Everquest. Perhaps I should explain: all the different fantasy races (like Elves) that the players could choose from could change how what they type into the chatbox appeared to the people around them: non-elf characters would see gibberish (I think, or maybe it said “Keebler spoke in Elven?”) in the region. Eventually, if someone directly messaged your character enough in their native language, the gibberish would become comprehensible, and your character would “learn” the language. Some people would pay to have someone type to them for hours—which most people automated with macros. Still, most characters choose to “speak” in the chatbox in common. There has to be some sort of sociolinguistic drive at play that would cause someone to spend their potential questing time and in-game cash watching gibberish scroll by. Right?
Another dream text of mine might be a historiography of the different ways to refer to the onscreen MMO characters—“avatars,” from Ultima Online? “Toons,” which I believe has fallen out of fashion, from the free browser game ToonTown Online? And lets not ignore the broad category of secondary or alternate characters [alts] being called “mules,” because they would carry your extra items before most MMOs had extra-item storage.
Then there are interesting social eddies that swirl around longtime players, such as the surprisingly frequent occurrence of high-level players—to whom money is mostly meaningless—being extremely generous to newbies. Where drives this generosity, and why don’t real-life billionaires dump 1,000,000 gil on the first sprout they see?
There are a few books that might tackle these subjects–Braving Britannia, maybe, or Treacherous Play. But MMO histories tend toward personal essay and experience–nostalgia bait–and not cultural implications. I hesitate to read another story of what someone’s PC/toon/avatar did or did not do within the game world. I want psychological context for my extinguished desire for playing my level eight elf wizard once I sold a .01%-drop-chance pair of brown wizard gloves on eBay in 1999 for 50$. As a non-specific example.
So while I have never played Second Life, the chance to read scholarly work that takes the subject of virtual worlds seriously was too good to pass up. And Second Life does bring me back to my law school days of trying–and failing–to get any of my cybersecurity professors to engage with the wild things happening in virtual worlds. If I had 2006 back again, I would do more than just bring printed-out Something Awful forums about flying phalluses to office hours and play at issue-spotting with people who couldn’t possibly care less.
Now that we’ve built some background for why Coming of Age in Second Life appealed to me—and why it might appeal to you, if you also have multiple-dozen personae littered across the MMO landscape—we should talk about the book itself. Coming of Age in Second Life does a good job preparing someone with little or no anthropological background to understand some foundational anthro research techniques and their supporting texts. Even the title is a nod to the classical curriculum–Coming of Age in Samoa–and the opening pages start with an excerpt from Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Neither of these are something I would have ever understood before, but it’s sort of like titling a book about the NES “Super Mario Children” and opening it with the text crawl from Zelda: if you know anthropology, you know these references to seminal 1920s works.
Additionally, this is a work from the mid 2000s: prime MySpace era, when webrings flourished and facebook was still a collegiate hookup program.
During my fieldwork, the three most consequential aspects of language were the predominance of text over voice, the distinction between “chat” and “instant messages” (ims), and the preponderance of American English. In identifying these three factors, I deemphasized neologisms (like “newbie”), acronyms (like “rl” for “real life” and “afk” for “away from keyboard,” many of which date from MUDs) and emoticons (like “:)” for a smile). All these have attracted attention, but they are less central to culture in virtual worlds.
What is a little bit stunning to me is how the functions and concepts from virtual words have snuck their way into daily life. Almost every aspect of what the author has designated as a unique part of Second Life has a tendril wrapped around what now is just considered standard online living in America. Perhaps it is because I just came off the back of Because Internet, but having the shorthand “deemphasized,” even though it and its linguistic offspring is our modern lingua franca, is wild. Every current moment, almost everyone exists in a dozen different always-active chatrooms now: facebook groups; twitter; slack and discord; your high school friends textchain. Sincerely, the biggest difference between Slack and the MUD I played in the mid 1990s is that I rarely type “slice goblin with scimitar” on slack.
And there is bleed-through: I was really surprised to hear that your character in Second Life made a little typing motion when you were chatting, so the people around you would know you were about to say something. This presages the “three-dot typing bubble” on your smartphone by nearly eight years, if the dates on the how to turn this feature off articles can be believed. I think it is really interesting to have the avatars miming typing on invisible keyboards to each other when they are diegetically supposed to be speaking to each other: is this a nod to the need for imaginative representation via the avatar, a forced narrative landmark that tethers the virtual and the actual to their technological interstice? In other words, does the air-typing of the character break the verisimilitude of the virtual world, or does it bolster the connection between the typing of the player and the action happening on the screen?
There are hundreds of different concepts like this that arise in Coming of Age in Second Life: it is very much a survey course by design. I’m cannot dive into depth on all of them, but before I wrap up I’ll touch on a strong contender for most interesting—the idea of “space.” We already know that the death of time began with the telegraph, and that, in communication technologies, time equals distance. So when distance is an irrelevant function (because you can chat to anyone in Second Life at any time, and travel can be instant), what does that do to the world?
Linden Lab also created differential value [of land] by adding “telehubs” in the version 1.1.0 (October 2003) upgrade to the Second Life Platform. Under this encoded relationship between place and time, if attempting to teleport to a particular location a resident would appear at the nearest telehub, a location outfitted with a building that usually looked like a bus stop or kiosk. After rezzing [appearing] at the telehub, a resident would have to fly to their destination. Land near telehubs became valuable, particularly desirable for commercial venues like stores or clubs, since residents had to cross such land en route to other locations. Some residents liked the telehub system because it forced persons to fly over large swaths of the Second Life landscape, where they would encounter buildings of which they might otherwise be unaware. Other residents found the teleport system cumbersome. The fact that objects had to “rez” [load on-screen] meant that flying away from a telehub often resulted in bumping into buildings that were not yet visible because the data of which they were composed had not entirely downloaded. Due to these issues, the December 2005 (version 1.8) upgrade to the Second Life program eliminated telehubs and allowed “point-to-point” teleporting anywhere in Second Life. While they existed, telehubs recreated a feature of actual-world physicality that not obligatory in a virtual world–the idea that it takes time to traverse distance.
The idea of purposeful player inconvenience (i.e. “intentional friction”) is not a unique thought, but it is something that becomes increasingly relevant as game and narrative design concepts continues to integrate into technology-mediated lifestyles. When you can teleport anywhere, being somewhere doesn’t really matter. The friction of having to get to a location can be its own pleasure—Journey to the West, the narrative that I would argue is the foundational text for video gaming writ large isn’t Arrival at the West, after all. What would Everquest have been without people (me) begging for the Spirit of the Wolf spell—which increased your character’s running speed—to outrun monsters on dangerous path from Felwithe to Qeynos? Or having to find a group of adventurers to delve a dungeon, rather than relying on the deus ex machina party-finding tools to warp you all together instantly? There were warp spells that were diegetic—I can’t quite recall if it was warlocks or wizards in vanilla World of Warcraft that could create a portal that transported specific people to a dungeon entrance (probably because I tapped out on WoW at level twenty-one)—but eventually player convenience obliterated world building. As a short aside, it always bothered me that non-expansion WoW was called “vanilla,” as vanilla is still a flavor. And yet, we use what words we must, as the consensus deigns, to continue the dialogue.
all videogame boss battles
I recognize that people don’t want to spend their time hour playing online games only to sit around town yelling “looking for healer” hopelessly into the chatbox—very pointedly not having fun exploring a dungeon—but this just wraps back around to the point I made 10,000 words ago; what is “best” in games is often wrongly conflated with what is “most efficient.” The collapse of the teleport hubs in Second Life certainly seems to have increased efficiently, but at what cost?
[When telehubs existed] residents could “offer a teleport” to other residents; under the telebhub system this was the only way to teleport to an exact location (other than one’s home). Residents who had arrived at an event would “offer a teleport” to others, and offering teleports to guests was an important aspect of hosting events. The importance of offering teleports declined dramatically after telehubs were abolished and the platform was recoded to allow free point-to-point teleporting. This also transformed land use: proximity to a telehub was not longer a source of value and meaning.
This is exactly what I want from books that explore culture through technology. We can learn things. Does it say something about our social needs that the MMO experience de rigueur is countless and efficient “runs” of the same dungeon to collect specific loot previously seen by the player on a wiki page? If there’s nothing to “do” in a game while you’re waiting for the computer to match you up with a bunch of silent strangers so you can efficiently rip through a bunch of non-integrated instanced content, consider that it might not be a massively multiplayer virtual world but a chatroom with an attached dungeon game. Coming of Age in Second Life is the type of text that gives a virtual world resident the tools to begin asking themselves, “What, exactly, am I spending my time on?”