Just when I’m starting to think I’m actually quite good at Pine-cube-omancy, I see something like this:
Second Life: The Future, The Crooked House
(Found via New World Notes – article here )
One thing that consistently surprises me in my Second Life wanderings, is how many people, despite the setting, tools and potentials of the thing, persist in Late Twentieth Century Realism, as their chief mode of expression.
It’s a world where there are zero material costs, perfect and instantaneous creation and duplication of matter, optional gravity and semi-sentient housebricks, more reminiscent of Banks’ ‘Culture’ or Moorcock’s ‘End of Time’, than any kind of world in which we toil, and yet again and again, I see the ‘comfortably affluent suburb/holiday timeshare’ pattern, replicated in as much detail as possible. We at Van Hemlock do not condone condos. Certainly there are exceptions – the odd Transylvanian castle, or fairy-tale grove, but on the whole, it seems the majority of SL Residents come in search of the familiar, but a little better – they take the tools and create the sorts of things they’d like in Real Life – typically what they have now, but one step up the ladder.
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it – the whole platform exists to fulfil wishes in a sense, to allow self-expression through the actualisation (albeit virtually) of long held dreams and ambitions. I just wish people would dream a little harder, is all! I guess the raw materials don’t help much – the underlying LL-provided world is a place of grassy hills, rippling seas and rivers, all under a blue sky and yellow sun. It is a facsimile of Earth to begin with – which naturally leads to Earth-like building. Perhaps if some of the Regions had a more abstract underlying structure – zero gravity, alien skies, checkerboard landscapes, Tron, etc, - then the subsequent building would become similarly divorced from Reality too.
Still, all this does mean that when you do find something like the house mentioned in the article above, it stands out all that more.
I went to visit the place with a friend who hadn’t read the article, and had no idea what to expect, and seeing their reaction to the thing was priceless in itself. The article above describes it in detail, but essentially, it’s a late 19th century townhouse, that stretches on forever in every direction, becoming an enclosed loop in four dimensional space.
As you progress between rooms, a creepy feeling of having been here before quickly develops, and travelling three rooms in any one direction will bring you to a door that opens on the first room you entered, through the opposite door to the one you originally left. The staircases operate in a similarly mind-buggering manner, and as Au says, even knowing ‘the trick’ and how it’s done, the experience is still quite unsettling regardless.
The Trick, which is best observed seated in the first room, and zoomed right out, while someone else takes the ‘focus’ and goes exploring, is masterful, and rather than feeling cheated in any way, I was lost in awe and appreciation of that level of proficiency with the arcana of SL scripting, and the impression quickly moves from one of Alice in Wonderland, to one of Cube, only with less bland décor and people being brutally killed.
This is the kind of thing I’m looking for in a virtual world – the very laws of space and time being toyed with for our entertainment. It’s true that Second Life is largely a place of pretend suburbia, pretend dressing-up boxes, pretend shopping malls selling pretend tat for pretend (yet real) money, and of course pretend casinos, pretend nightclubs and pretend hot furry cyb0rsecks, but amid the dross, is the occasional pretend artefact that makes you really stop and stare, and really does impress, and this really is one of them. I resolve to begin work on a nine dimensional time-travelling house at once!
To visit the place, use the above SLurl page to teleport, and 'The Crooked House' is signposted from the landing point. The transport tubes to get there are quite fun too! Take look around the rest of the Sim too, which is clearly home to some of the more eccentric geniuses of SL.
(Incidentally, new addition to the Monsterhunter List, New World Notes, is not new at all, and is largely the work of Wagner James Au, formerly Hamlet Linden, widely regarded as the leading journalist in Second Life. The New World Notes blog has been going for nearly as long as Second Life, and is an indispensable guide for anyone even remotely interested in what people actually do in there. You’d be surprised how many of the articles are nothing to do with people in fox costumes doing the nasty. Worth a read!)