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.
cool details
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
Workshop: Cyberculture
Thursday, 04 October 2007, at ↑GAA 2007
Organisation: ↑Alexander Knorr
Deadline: 30 June 2007
Send abstracts to:
Thursday, 04 October 2007, at ↑GAA 2007
Organisation: ↑Alexander Knorr
Deadline: 30 June 2007
Send abstracts to:
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:
(8) At 2 million meters, the AV’s body begins to distort. First symptoms involve hands and arms: fingers curl the wrong way, and arms abruptly shorten and lengthen, over and over. Eyes sink down and begin to emerge through the cheekbones.
(10) By 3 million meters, the AV’s eyes have passed through the cheekbones and are flying in formation with the AV, in front of its face. Over the next several million miles, the eyes sink down along the AV’s body to a point just above its crotch. The AV’s fingers distort and eventually separate from the hands, flying in formation a meter away. The AV’s legs enlongate, and the feet shrink. A reddish haze develops around the AV, coloring its clothing and skin. The AV begins to lose coherence.
(11) At 9 million meters, a strange, golden glow appears in the sky at the meridian. At 10 million meters, a granular structure and details emerge in that glow. The granular structure looks like nothing so much as a cityscape seen from far above—or below. […]
[…] I have just passed 12 million meters altitude dead-reckoning, e-key locked down. While my body parts are slowly dissolving, they are still maintaining good flight formation. The golden glow wraps completely across the sky now, and the granulation is becoming clearer, closer, and very suggestive…. […] Looking up now….My God! It’s full of st….
(10) By 3 million meters, the AV’s eyes have passed through the cheekbones and are flying in formation with the AV, in front of its face. Over the next several million miles, the eyes sink down along the AV’s body to a point just above its crotch. The AV’s fingers distort and eventually separate from the hands, flying in formation a meter away. The AV’s legs enlongate, and the feet shrink. A reddish haze develops around the AV, coloring its clothing and skin. The AV begins to lose coherence.
(11) At 9 million meters, a strange, golden glow appears in the sky at the meridian. At 10 million meters, a granular structure and details emerge in that glow. The granular structure looks like nothing so much as a cityscape seen from far above—or below. […]
[…] I have just passed 12 million meters altitude dead-reckoning, e-key locked down. While my body parts are slowly dissolving, they are still maintaining good flight formation. The golden glow wraps completely across the sky now, and the granulation is becoming clearer, closer, and very suggestive…. […] Looking up now….My God! It’s full of st….
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:
You see, there’s this thing with flying vehicles in Second Life. If you fly over land where there’s no spare prims, your plane will disappear from under you[r ass] and be returned to your inventory—if you’re lucky.
And if you’re unlucky? Well, you’ll be going through a heavily lagged sim, and not going as fast as you think you are, when the nose of your craft will push through into a sim where there’s much less lag. And suddenly, the front will be going much faster than the back, and the plane will get stretched longer than the distance where it’s possible to link prims—and suddenly bang, your plane disappears, and you fall through the air, to end up at location (-300,-250,-500) or somewhere near. And your plane? It’ll be returned to you over the course of the next three or four days, one prim at a time.
And then you’ll get an irate IM from someone because one of the noisy, particle generating engines has landed in their next door neighbours’ garden, they can’t delete it, and it’s driving them mad.
Second Life is not built for flying rocketships!
And if you’re unlucky? Well, you’ll be going through a heavily lagged sim, and not going as fast as you think you are, when the nose of your craft will push through into a sim where there’s much less lag. And suddenly, the front will be going much faster than the back, and the plane will get stretched longer than the distance where it’s possible to link prims—and suddenly bang, your plane disappears, and you fall through the air, to end up at location (-300,-250,-500) or somewhere near. And your plane? It’ll be returned to you over the course of the next three or four days, one prim at a time.
And then you’ll get an irate IM from someone because one of the noisy, particle generating engines has landed in their next door neighbours’ garden, they can’t delete it, and it’s driving them mad.
Second Life is not built for flying rocketships!
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
Linux is like anal intercourse—great when you are into that kind of thing,
otherwise just a pain in the ass.
—someone
Of course Windows is useful. I used it to download Linux.
—someone else
talked to me!
Robin Wood’s ↑cloth templates for “↑Second Life“ (SL) really are an ingenious gift for every wannabee clothes customizer. Still my project is to make a decent black suit for Fantomas, but it is always wise to start out humble. So today I went through the process of making a T-shirt by running through Robin’s according tutorial and using ↑his template. Offline I abhorr wearing T-shirts with print on them, but this is SL … on the front I put a Soviet poster showing the 1960s Fantomas. The poster resides on my HDDs since several years, and I can not at all remember where I got it from. I didn’t want to write upon the shirt: “I made this T-shirt myself, and all I got is this T-shirt,” instead for its back I opted for a spoof of the “Wrote it!” anecdote—I wonder how long it will take until someone asks me “Who is ↑John Romero?” …
Using the Sojourner’s stuff and following his instructions it is no problem to make a decent T-shirt, nevertheless it doesn’t show completely correct on my avatar. The problem with skinning SL-avatars is, that their shape can be altered by the users. This normally is not the case with avatars in ‘real computer games’—once the shape has been generated to satisfaction, it will not be altered very much anymore. In consequence you can make the textures match perfectly. Before I finally uploaded the T-shirt texture, I looked how it would look on the male upper body in the preview window. It looked perfect, but then a bit distorted on my avatar. The preview window uses default parameters for the body, but my avatar’s mesh has different settings. So, if you want perfectly fitting clothes, you have to customize your textures for the exact shape of your avatar. But with all the help Robin Wood gives, especially the UV-suit I am currently wearing, this is possible. The next T-shirt will have “Masters of Doom” (↵Kushner 2004 [2003]) on the front, and “Read it!” on its back … which has a double-meaning as I only now recognized.
Anyway, after having uploaded the texture, I immediately had to resort to the paying dance pads, as I had to compensate the L$10 upload-fee. Hence the location for the snapshots.
omg
