Something important, with no punchline or genital humor

* wild applause *

Free Nelson Man Cristiano! (incase he gets in trouble for speaking out about speaking out)

Hear hear!

The problem begins when people take the "supposed to exist for us" part and extend it into "to shit on". As most shared environments, forums usually come with requirement to at least try to keep things clean.

Being a customer doesn't mean carte blanche to act in any way one wants to. Go to any business place and start to "discuss" in loud, obnoxious manner which specifically of their workers sucks the most and which of them should be kicked out first. See how long you're allowed to continue that before you're asked to leave. Bonus points if you immediately go back and start complaining about how unfair you were treated.

You may ask "we are what, bad children?" but this _is_ behaviour of a (spoiled) child. An adult would've simply known better and had more sense of decorum, than that.

Agrees.

Lewis

I agree, completely. I thought about this for a day, and also looked at some of the relevant threads.

You're talking about two concepts that attract me to SL, and fascinate me - identity and communication, or dialogue.

The notion of identity is completely redefined in SL. Liberated from the manifestations of your identity in RL, you can reveal, reinvent, explore an identity of your choosing. It starts with a name, but it is expressed in so much more. It's in the symbols we choose, our creations, actions and dialogue. We can choose those symbols in a way not possible in RL, and we can transcend, traverse gender, race, age even species.

Restricting those means of communicating, dialogue or symbols, restricts the expression of identity. Yet I see it being restricted in a way that is more rigid than RL. If the rules for these exchanges are so narrow they can't accomodate parody, or dissent, or subversion - it's a smack in the face to the last century of cultural, social and artistic thought.

To me, Dada re-wrote the rules. Ever since it's been carte blanche to co-opt whatever device, symbol or word, to communicate an idea. I think the system we are operating under can't accomodate such thought, or the expression of it. It's not just the forums, and res-mods, either.

Symbols, images and objects, language, and their meanings... they can be employed in ways beyond their primary meaning, to make another statement, even a totally opposite one. Or to simply provoke thought. There's images we can't use (in SL), regardless of context, no matter what it is we are trying to communicate. We live in a cut + paste world, where art, media, and social changes have collided to conspire to allow us to subvert meaning, appropriate imagery, symbols, language, to employ in new devices.

Punk appropriated symbols like the swastika ... not to say "I believe in Aryan supremacy", but in some cases because of it's power, the social implications of its meaning, to make another statement... "I am as offensive and socially unacceptable as this symbol. I have no regard for what you consider sacred. I want to destroy the rules." It's an expression of dissent, a social statement. People not agreeing or understanding, or being offended, doesn't invalidate the statement. The meaning that draws offense, has been subverted, only relevant as a component of its new meaning.

In RL, it found a voice, if not liked, it was at least possible in many places, outside of Germany you probably wouldn't be arrested. In SL, no way. You can't even have the name 'Skinhead', because of what some people that refer to themselves may be expressing with that identity.

That's a more uncomfortable extreme, compared to that, parody should be a no-brainer. We clearly find it an acceptable device in society and media, and it has a long tradition. No one blinks when an Amercian night time TV show host reassemble's George Bush's words to make another statement, and that's as mainstream media you can get. To disallow it, to go even further, to punish words used this way by restricting the inworld manifestation of a person's identity... it's oppressive and repressive to both identity and discourse.

I'm reminded of Chance's art piece, I think it was called 'Land'... parcels for sale with big red 'sale' signs above them. He did a poll, and there were people who believed that it was griefing, even if it was intended as art (and people who believed aesthetic beauty was a criteria for art)... it's just lucky 'ugly' isn't ARable, and even luckier residents aren't involved in their resolution.

If residents are going to moderate the forums, I believe we should be able to discuss them and their actions. Parody shouldn't be considered an attack, neither should dissent, or criticism. If our words are accountable, and bear consequences, the system by which that is done should also be accountable, and bear consequences. It's fundamentally essential to our freedom of expression.

Linden Lab may own the forum, but there's two SLs... the entity they own, and the SL that is us, our media, and our society. They own the forums, but it's part of our media, and in society, we have expectations of both the freedom and accountabilty of media that transcend ownership.

Vote has varied meanings in our language. As opposed to "we the people/one man one vote stuff", I'd say that "we the consumers", "vote with your feet", and "put your money where your mouth is" better describes my perception of myself as one of LL's paying customers. I don't envision myself as being a freedom fighter in a virtual nation. I'm just a consumer and the many requests I've received for customer feedback from companies I've done business with has led me to believe that they want to know that sort of thing; anyway, some companies do.

You may have hit the nail on the head right there, though. Of course, I'm thinking about the kind of "user" which you'd advise your best friend to drop if she were dating one. There are a lot of users here; take more than they give. And I couldn't agree more that it would benefit LL to be more selective in who they've been beholden to. Rather than "many", the few who do pay out for a slice of the server pie seems to be a wise choice from a business perspective.
After you change your panties, try thinking about it in terms of a business owner faced with someone known to be a regular customer and a gaggle of kids hanging out at the mall, all coming into your shop at the same time. Which are you inclined to focus upon?
Do you feel that LL shares your nonchalance over losing disatisfied customers? I think that they do; but I'm curious if you, as well as the numerous others who readily state this sentiment, feel that you are reflective of LL's attitude when saying so.

I think the nail's head might be hurting from you hitting it so hard!

Really though, great post.

"I'm going to report this post for being offensive." - A Resident.


We all have the power, Coco. Don't we?

Except that it isn't distributed equally, and it depends who you are reporting as to whether anything gets done or not just as much as who it is reporting. The actual content of the post and the reason for reporting doesn't appear to be particularly relevant.

Lewis

Looks like the start of a marketing campaign:

Aim High Shoot Straight

Things aren't what they used to be?

Ulrika, panda, Burke, Ingrid, Khamon, Hiro, flipper, Margaret, Cristiano, and even Anshe!

Pictures, Drahma, Oh My!

All we need is about 20 prokpages and it will REALLY be like old times!

That's it, I can't keep it in any longer. One word has been popping in my head all morning like a bad jingle.


Tourists!!!!

What a difference a year and a kajillion alts & unverified accounts make; eh, Anshe?

/148/82/49605/4.html#post1155681

Yes I agree----putting my evil plan into place the past year was a stroke of genius.

SL is falling apart, pretty much a dead sea of lonely, miserable, avatars.

Within no time at all I can swoop in and rename this KillLife and take my seat on the throne.

Look King Phillip is doing nothing more than playing rounds of golf like a good brain-washed minion I turned him in to be.

Good ole times are gone buckos. . . . . my World Domination is in full swing....

The way I see it is thus:

There are three levels any game may be played on. Second Life is no different from other games in this respect.

There's the first level, where people are exploring the actual literal game itself - here, learning how to build, script, animate, make movies, make friends, go to clubs, hack LSL, own land, build a business. This level: FUN. FUN as all GET OUT. SL has something for nearly everyone at this level. Did I mention shop? Craft an avatar? Blazillions of possibilities. It's really hard to offend others or break LL ToS while playing at this level, too - it happens, but normally a warning solves the issue.

There's the second level, the meta-level, which involves politics. Social Climbing, dealing with griefers, competing businesses, dealing with LL to clarify land-holder policies, crafting in-game governments, being disgusted by the cardboard castle that just went up on your lakeside or the casino/mall that just went up next sim over, negotiating misunderstandings. Most of this is not fun, but people see dealing with it as a kind of necessity, in order to better their experience / others' experience of the first level. Linden Labs has somewhat acknowledged and embraced this level through the in-game user-run government experiments. This also is the level at which ResMods and Lindens have to act in their official capacity. It's the level on which griefers obtain their enjoyment, by being munchkins.

Then there's the third level, which is purely the meta-level. It is purely gaming the game - whether that game is politics, the LL ToS, one's social organisation, someone else's social organisation, etcetera. It can be played without actually needing to log in to the SL client through posting to the forums, calling people, swapping e-mail, posting to other forums. It is at this level that powerful, persuasive people make and break reputations (theirs and others). They see this as necessary level. I see it (and while I can't speak for the Lindens, I suspect, they, too see it) as a pain in the ass - because it consumes fun people, good friends, and worthy causes and arts.

Most people don't have very much fun at this level. It's also at this level that people tend to start thinking of themselves as a paying customer, not getting what they want from $game.

Anyone who feels that they are not having fun, or are being treated unfairly, ought to - in my humble opinion -ask themselves:

Why?

Am I spending my time creating content in the game, building, exporing, touring what others have built, reading the code they've published and figuring out what I can do with it? Or have I allowed myself to be caught up extensively in how I can better administrate the tiny empire I have built? Or worse yet, am I accomplishing nothing at the first level and am purely playing out the third level of the game? Is what I am doing away from the first level /really necessary/?

Being with one's friends and hanging out and joking is all well and good - there's almost no limit to what one can do or say inside closed doors in a mature sim with friends. The official LL forums are a different state of affairs - they're not in a mature sim, and they're not behind closed doors. They have a stated purpose, and that purpose is squarely within the second level of gaming - to help you and the Lindens improve and administrate the first (and second) levels.

Getting called on an offense committed on the third level (which, I have to admit, my first seventy posts or so have been third-level-game and don't directly address nor benefit the first level of the game in any way whatsoever) is a wake-up call that one ought to focus more on the first level. Or at least on the second level.

It is my suspicion that Ulrika may have single-handedly made a rarefied meta-meta-abstraction of Second Life - a fourth level - by protesting the punishment of the protest of the punishment of the (I'm getting dizzy, you know what i'm talking about, fill in the blanks here). I like her, and I like her aims. I am distressed that she has difficulty understanding that LL has to restrict themselves to administering the first and second levels of the game, and that when she's running/discussing third-level in a second-level forum, it's inappropriate - and that she's the most visible target of the people who disagree with her and they're going to take any opportunity to game the system to her detriment. Do the ToS get applied universally and evenly at the second or third levels? No. There's not enough resources for LL to undertake such, and the third level is out of their purview. They even want the /second/ level to be out of their purview.

The answer, to me - to the problem of discussing things on the Second and Third level on the LL forums, someone-else taking offense for present or past real or imagined actions, and getting one banned from game -

Make an unofficial forum, one not run by LL, with its' own ToS and its' own second-level/ third-level administration. (I am /so/ not volunteering)

Which is an involved way of saying, if LL doesn't want X on their forum, and you feel the need to express X, it may help to express X off-forum until you can persuade LL of the legal, business, and other ramifications/necessities of allowing one to discuss X on the forums.

*shrug* Yes, we pay money. We get a lot for that money, which as far as freedom of speech goes is imnsho only slightly less-AND-more than what one can get for free on any street corner in America - we give up the right to call ourselves $expletive and gain a relative amount of immunity from being bodily thrashed and hounded by zealots at home for saying "I'm $unpopular_opinion_minus_inflammatory_tag_word". I rarely use anything from the set of $expletive myself, and/but support anyone's right to use same - except where it's done to harass others or denigrate their enjoyment of the game or harass a business.

Linden Labs is still a business. Maybe once LL gets "service provider" status recognition, and the transformation of the law of the United States is accomplished to handle this brand-new way that people interact and the open source code for the clients and servers gets published and LL is no longer running the second level of the game in any way whatsoever, and its' purely the laws of the USA - anyone will be able to call themselves "Skinhead" or whatever $expletive they want - and everyone else will have the tools and the freedom to not have to see that, if they so choose.

My lengthy rumination. I know, it's unfair to talk about Ulrika in her absence, but I suspect that - like in any information economy - she will have little trouble in eventually reading this post and responding to me if she so chooses.

Your post has a familiar ring

I really liked your entire post, but most specifically the part I quoted above. I think the last level kinda ties into Cheyenne's comment as well, however unintentionally - that whole "famous on the forums" thing. The vast, vast majority of residents don't have a flaming clue who I am, or Ulrika is, or Cristiano, or Gabe, or panda, or anyone else posting in this thread. They could give two hoots that Ulrika's been posting for 2 years. Its like...its a whole seperate game!

So, let's look at the problem from that angle - not that the forums are an extension of SL, or the official communication channel, or an extension of the community, or any of that. Let's call the forums The Forum Game. Yeah, we talk about SL a lot, but shit, even in the threads that brought this whole topic about, it didn't have a single thing to do with SL. People are still pissed that the people that own The Forum Game decided to put other Forum Game players in quasi-charge as resmods (or "liasions", if you prefer). It has nothing to do with freedom in SL, "your world, your imagination", none of that. It was entirely encapsulated in The Forum Game.

Looking at it that way, it solidifies my feeling that forum ban should not equal inworld ban. They aren't even the same game, and The Forum Game only has a tenuous relationship to SL. Of course, the next step would be LL just ditching the forums entirely with the exception of the Announcements and Technical threads, which honestly at this point, I don't see why they shouldn't. There's any number of 3rd party sites that cater to the SL crowd that would be happy to pick up the slack, and frankly, most of The Forum Game players (myself included) have already dabbled in them.

Insanely astute.

I personally find the metafiction that Ulrika and others have "documented" on the official forums as being just as important as your first two levels. Anyone can daytrade on a website, futz around with Lightwave 3D, and IM some peeps through AOL. Maybe I just have a different sensibility and sense of what would/does make SL a "virtual world", "Metaverse", or even "a protocol".

Fucking pirate.

~Ulrika~

Possibly one of the most interesting threads I've seen in a long time. Well done!

How interesting then that the SL forums are being shut down ;)

I wonder what that means to the "meta-gaming" concept.

Actually, I don't subscribe to the "meta-gaming" concept for several reasons. IRL, I don't consider email exchanges with colleagues, associates, and friends, as a World Domination Now™ masterful plot. It is just — communication. I don't associate "outside of RL" with people that I have no interest in associating — all are related to my RL to some degree. At the very lowest level — they're merely "acquaintances" and that's all. Forums, IMs, private mailing lists — they're additional levels of communication. But it's communication in respect to some aspect of my RL.

In SL, the concept of discussion "above" the level of SL, as a means to somehow "meta-discuss" SL, is inadequate. It is another form of communication around SL. While it's certainly true that some people never log in to SL any more, but still have a "presence" in the SLogosphere®, their purpose is still related to SL.

A certain person that Should Not Be Mentioned In The Forums always makes a point to the Lindens that they don't really know what's going on in SL, since they never log in. Come on! How many of you have seen David Fleck in-world, discussing with residents, hosting events about the way to market SL? :) (besides one TH meeting, I mean)

That Person That Cannot Be Named in The Forums is quite right. You can't possible keep a reasonable discussion about SL if you have no clue on what goes on in SL. And while certainly nobody can claim to know everything about SL (well, except for Torley, of course, but then again, Torley is special :) ), at least one should have a concept of what the issues are, and why they're important.

More important than that. SL is way more dynamic in change that people usually understand. Two years ago, I knew by heart who were the top clothes designers in SL. Now I have to struggle to remember a few dozens of names, and have constantly to look up on the SL fashion magazines/blogs to keep in touch (oh, so you can't even name the names of the SL fashion magazines...? So that's how out of touch you are in SL!). So now imagine that the "meta-players" of SL, who haven't logged in for well over a year, discuss fashion in SL. Do they have a clue? :) Probably not.

Instead, the true "meta-players" are involved in SL at all levels. They help out newbies; they go to malls; they attend Tringo events; they talk to youngsters shooting with new guns on the sandboxes; they host discussions on trivia; they listen to music and attend live music events; they comment on Prokofy's or Hamlet's blog; they talk to Lindens on a regular base; they discuss with professors of Harvard or Northwestern; they chat with Goreans, furries, Elves, and W-Hatters; they attend developers' meetings; they run at Relay for Life; they discuss rental strategies and discuss democracy with Anshe; they understand how parcelling land works and why radios need to be deeded to group; they participate in at least 20 blogs/forums/websites regularly (some of them just marginally related to SL... but you'll be seen posting on those under your avatar nickname) and still keep up with the forums; they're seen at IRC; they're invited to parties; they manage to squeeze in to talk with Kurt Vonnegut or a Californian politician; they will probably be at SLCC... and — whew — they'll be happy throwing snowballs at the Lindens during the Winter Holidays.

If there is a single thing you don't do of the above — you're not one "meta-player", but just someone focused on something that you particularly like (btw, the list is far from exhaustive...). The usual excuse is "oh, I don't do Tringo, I couldn't care less". Wrong. If you want to be a "meta-player", make sure you show up at Tringo as well. Or else, how can you know what it's all about? (hint: think social :) )

Now, naturally enough, all of this happens in Second Life. The purpose of bringing these discussions into forums, blogs, websites, IRC, mailing lists, or closed-group chats is that you bring your experience of SL and communicate about it. The SLogosphere® is an extension of SL; it's not outside it.

I'm always very skeptic about someone who proudly claims "oh, I've seen what SL is and know all about it — now let's discuss about it in the forums". What kind of closed mentality is that? Every day, something new is created inside Second Life — how can anyone possibly claim they know about everything?

Sociologists might claim that "SL is about people, and you can study people anytime, no matter what their environment is". That could be a valid claim indeed. But you'll be talking about the people of SL — and not about SL itself. There is a difference. People shape SL, and SL shape the people. Leave one of those out of your equation, and it will never balance out. You need both.

So while I certainly agree with Finning's first two levels — I would classify them as the "autistic phase" (you at the centre of the universe) and the "social phase" (you in relation to others), the third phase would be "metaphysics" (you, transcending others). I'm afraid to report that that phase does not exist, except as a hallucination :) You have stronger or weaker social bonds on the 2nd phase, but if you go beyond the social bonds related to SL, you're escaping to something completely out of phase with SL. And, to be honest, that shows...

BTW, some one quoted that "95% of the people never read the forums". That figure was about right by mid-2004. Two years later, the percentage of people that aren't even aware of the forums is so low that most of you would refuse to believe it. Why do you think the forums are being shut down, anyway? :)