Gosh…not often I get bombshells like this going off in my own metaphorical back-yard:

Second Life Blog: Forums Take A New Turn

It’s another of those spikey ‘free speech’ clampdowns, although to put it in perspective, the kind of free speech one enjoys when someone else invites you into their house to tell them what you think of them, usually by writing it in crayon on their living room wallpaper.

The press release (blog, my arse…) is a suitably elegant exercise in Marketing and Public Relations, and predominantly cites ‘significant maintenance’ and ‘Resident-run blogs and forums have mushroomed’ as the reasons for the upcoming staged closure of the whole Second Life forum set in the coming months. In other words, too costly to run (and police), and there are better places elsewhere to chat. Sounds plausible, of course, but sit down and let grizzled old Uncle Van Hemlock tell you what this is really all about…

The Second Life Forums are much like any other Official Game Forums, a kind vague gesture in the direction of ‘Fostering A Community’ – starting as a place to generate Beta Buzz, with the odd press release, then a place to meet new friends in a brave new Post-Release world, then gradually a place to try and get a hotline to a developer, to get one’s own personal gripes attended to, and ultimately, when this seems not to be working, a place to find solidarity, and to raise virtual linch-mobs – a kind of Support Group. At the same time, they are also a kind of mental target-range for the Fanbois. The Second Life forums are not so different, despite their high-falutin Metaversal aspirations.

The key is the ‘Near Term Changes’ plans, and the list of forums there:

  • Bulletin Board: This is the one you go to if you are primarily an attention-whore type of person. Fatuous birthday (as in “My Character is 1 Year Old!”) notices and the like. It’s also the primary soapbox for overblown public denouncements – (“Van Hemlock is a Scam Artist!eleventy!”)
  • The Sandbox: What possesses an MMO Operator to actually encourage a place where people are supposed to talk about other games, or indeed, nothing to do with gaming at all, is something of a recurring mystery. This one tends to see a lot of Bush Bashing, Pro/Anti Semitic Sentiment, Religious Smackdowns, and the textualisation of pretty much every concept a man has ever killed another man over, ever.
  • Land & Economy: The home of the Armchair Venture Capitalists. Theoretically meant to encourage discussion about the mercantile aspects of SL, this instead becomes something of an open-fire PVP arena between The Capitalists and The Socialists (as previously outlined here) – a war which to my knowledge has yet to be satisfactorily resolved ‘IRL’, but maybe, just maybe, the Interesting Folks of SL can solve it for us all, in here! Pitch in with your half-arsed statistics while you still can!
  • In-World Political Science: Imagine if you can, the entire mass of seething, incandescent World of Warcraft Forum energy, as a star. Then imagine a cultured upbringing, a degree in Politics, a keen logical mind, good grasp of spelling and grammar, and a huge pretentious streak, as an immense, light-minutes wide lens of the finest imaginary crystal. With me so far? Good – then place the lens at the correct focal distance between the star and the Earth. The resulting beam of horrendously focused energy is the kind of weapon commonly in use here. We at Van Hemlock do not condone space-based photonic weapon platforms! Bizarre analogy, I agree, but you get the idea; dozens of regular aficionados of the barbed dialectic, all out to remake the Metaverse and its people, into their own madness-tinged vision, mostly by trying to confuse the enemy into submission.

But of course, the crowning glory is, as ever, the ‘General Topics’ forum. As in pretty much every other instance where this phenomenon occurs, this particular one is a bear-pit. The trouble is, that in the cluster of tall buildings that is an Online Community, this kind of forum is invariably The Clock Tower, and ours is a very stormy medium. Over and over, the lightning crashes on the community (“Your game sucks!” “fix samurai plz!” “Van Hemlock is an exploiter!”), delivering 1.21 Jigawatts again and again down the perceived path of least resistance to the Devs, at ground level.

I’d say that this subverts the purpose of the forum, only in this particular case, it doesn’t really seem to have one. Perhaps they are more cunning than that, and torturing the analogy further, it isn’t a Clock Tower at all, but a huge Copper Rod, expressly designed for the purpose, to protect the other forums from storm damage, so those can be used properly? Who knows?

Unfortunately, not all the ‘lightning’ is malevolent, and more often than not, the ‘General’ forum is the first port of call for the Potential New Player, diligently doing their research in preparation for a possible new subscription. Rolling up and seeing page after page of bitter, twisted vitriol is likely to be counted in the ‘Cons’ list when the final decision to pay up is reached.

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long, as the SL General forum has really taken a turn for the worse in recent months – since the abolition of Age Verification, in fact...

Some choice topic gems from the last couple of pages (no clickeys):

  • LL is selling SL to the highest bidder.
  • Jumped the Shark? What’s Next?
  • Duran Duran and their evil machinations
  • Pink Socks vs. Come Bubbles
  • F*** you and the removal of forums (My censorship, not theirs – V.)
  • [Name Removed] is a Self-Aggrandizing Fascist
  • Ban all the Prudes from SL!
  • An Escort is a Prostitute
  • [Name Removed] took all my money!
  • Child girl AV, sex with Adult male AV? is this right???
  • Extreme Harassment (don't know what else to do)
  • Land scams and theft
  • Favorite Places To Buy Guns
  • Under 18 yr Kids being Escorts and Strippers for Lindens
  • More strick rules for harassers
  • Love doesnt live here anymore...
  • Texture Resellling ONCE again WHY NO PROTECTION?

It would take far too long to explain the context behind each of those, but imagine, as is the case for many of you reading this, that you’d never heard of SL, or been inside their world, and this kind of list was the first thing you’d seen in connection with the thing. Would you want to join in the fun and games?

In the words of one wag in a recent thread about this very news, ‘burn the motherf***ers down!!’, indeed. But unfortunately, the Second Life Forums as a whole, perhaps remarkably, do serve a useful purpose. In addition to the troublemaking black-spots above, there are a large number of Content Creation forums that I’ve always found quite helpful, discussing the more obscure points of construction, texturing, scripting, animations and the like – a good place to get help with stickier parts of a project, especially when you're new. They also host a number of classified forums, useful places to promote or find specific in-world goods and services. With the abolition of newbie pocket-money in any shape or form, the Employment Ops & Help Wanted forum in particular, is needed now more than ever. There are also the usual support and preview testing forums, and several dedicated technical help forums for those peculiar Mac and Linux people.

Yet again, a few bored idiots ruin things for everyone else, but one can hardly blame LL for the move. Despite all our incensed ramblings about ‘Free Speech’, it is their living room we’re scribbling on the walls of. Freedom of expression only goes as far as the tolerance of those who we express to.

As for the future, things are less clear. LL plan on using the very blog this news was released on, as a replacement for the forums in some manner. I’m not sure the typical Blog Comments system can realistically achieve that to be honest. They’re also planning on expanding the website to compensate – but a website is not a very interactive thing usually. Perhaps that’s the point – we’ve had our chance to prove we can be trusted to talk back, and blown it. Now we just have to listen, and go find someone else’s living-room walls to scribble on.

They also talk at length about The Community picking up the slack. Forgetting for a moment that these are the very same people who made your volunteer ‘ResMods’ lives a living hell for the last ten months, which particular SL Fan-community are we to pick, out of the hundreds of little floating dandelion seeds now drifting out across the internet? Who represents ‘The Real Second Life’ now? Then again, if Second Life is to mirror Real Life in any fashion (A goal I’m still not too keen on – see previous ramblings), then perhaps this kind of diaspora is a necessary and inevitable thing. Maybe Second Life is developed enough now, not to need one single community anymore...

Ding-ding! Next stop, The Tower of Babel! All change! End of the line!