Image courtesy The Electric Sheep Company.

I was excited; after a couple of weeks out of regular contact with the grid, I had decided to start getting back in again daily and getting some new articles done, and the first one I was going to write was to be about a fashion show being sponsored by an organization called iVillage. This is a pretty interesting group, in fact, when it comes to Second Life, and one I've wanted to profile here for awhile; an online division of NBC that caters specifically to middle-class women, instead of building their own virtual space iVillage instead leads tours and sponsors events featuring the things that independent women are doing there. In effect it's a great way for a corporate entity to integrate itself within the existing SL culture, something that a lot of corporate entities seem to have an impossible time doing; not by building something flashy and throwing a lot of money around, but by simply respecting the event-organizers and fashion designers who already exist, and acknowledging that their corporate in-house marketing department would never be able to whip up stuff in SL on their free time that could match what these individuals who do it full-time are creating.

But alas, I ended up facing the same problem at the fashion show that I have at all the other iVillage events: simply too many people, too much data, too much information for my puny little Mac Mini here in my Chicago apartment to handle decently. Here above, for example, is the only shot of the event I myself was able to get, after my computer literally freezing and crashing three times previous; and right after this shot, in fact, my computer crashed for a fourth time, inspiring me to not make a fifth attempt.

Now, I want to make it clear that this wasn't iVillage's fault, because I saw plenty of other people having a great time while I was there, and have seen plenty of glowing blog entries since; no, this is clearly the fault of me no longer having a computer that can handle the grid's toughest environments. And the funny thing is that this used to not be the case; here above, for example, is a live event sponsored by Creative Commons I attended only nine months ago, using the same computer equipment and featuring the same number of attendees; and it worked just fine then, even to the point that I was able to render live streaming video as well. So if my setup hasn't changed and neither has my internet connection, and if iVillage isn't doing anything different than past people have done, obviously there can be only one culprit for the slowdown -- it's something on the end of Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, something I assume is a combination of an evermore complex backend and an evermore complex client.

It all leads to two simple truths about a place like Second Life, and all the other 3D persistent online universes out there that exist, which I never realized before starting to play myself: that you simply cannot have the same experience you see in all those cool little machinima videos and television commercials, without spending an exorbitant amount of money on a high-end system; and even when you do have a system that can handle the rendering needed, the speed at which that system becomes obsolete is staggering. And then these two admissions of course lead to the biggest criticism I get here as a Second Life columnist, from veteran "gamers" who follow along: that I have to be a moron to not have understood these two things before starting to play Second Life, and that I have no one to blame but myself for not getting these things sooner.

But hey, I don't think I'm a complete moron! I've been involved with other aspects of the computer industry for decades now, after all, including the web when it was first starting out, FORTRAN and assembly code in high school, mobile programming and all kinds of other interesting subjects. It's just that, you know, I don't play videogames, so have never understood the complex relationship between the hardware involved and the details of rendering; the only graphics-heavy stuff I've had to do over the years are photo cleanups and video editing, and I've always assumed that a computer's processor either "works" or "doesn't"...never realizing that there were a whole series of video cards and patches and other customizations for making all the high-end stuff I had never used actually work well.

I understand that technology moves ever forward, and I also understand that a computer application needs to either grow or die; but man, I wish it didn't have to go so fast, to the point that a computer I bought brand-new less than a year ago now won't render Second Life well enough for it to be enjoyable for me anymore. I mean, that's fast, right? For a $600 computer to go from adequate to obsolete in less than a year is fast, and is something I now desperately wish I had known about before buying the computer in the first place. And with me now being unemployed in real life, and with much more pressing demands in my life than simply "having a better SL experience," I'm afraid I'm stuck with what I have and with the generally unsatisfying experience I'm having in the grid these days. And this unfortunately is having more and more of an effect on the publishing plans I've had regarding Second Life; enough, for example, that I've delayed the opening of my new adult magazine -avatar-, because I'm now no longer sure if I have the tech needed to actually maintain such a magazine.

It's a shame, I think, and also an example of one of the bitter ironies of Second Life; that as it gets bigger and bigger, and able to handle more and more, it leaves the players with the dilemma of either regular expensive upgrades or literally having less and less to do. And again, I wouldn't complain nearly as much about this if it were, say, World of Warcraft that I had been trying to play; that game is thoroughly a part of "gamer culture," and it's simply assumed that you know certain basic things about persistent 3D online universes before getting involved. What really steams me sometimes, though, is that this is not how Linden approaches Second Life at all; as is famously known by now, their goal is to break out into the mainstream, and to get a wide variety of people using Second Life who normally would never enter a 3D online environment (people like, say, me). I applaud that goal, and of course is the main reason I started ITG in the first place; but Linden can't have it both ways, with members of the general public simply signing up in droves but while never addressing any of the tech issues those members of the public have.

If things keep up like this, pretty soon I too am unfortunately going to be one of those avatars that drops to inactive status; and every time I have a frustrating night like I did on Monday, I think of that whopping 90 percent of Second Life residents who sign up, try it out once and never come back. I mean, that's a pretty dismal adoption rate, right? It's not just me? I keep thinking of all the things Linden could be doing right now to make that 90-percent dropout rate shrink in size -- like, be more upfront about the tech required for optimal gameplay, and provide more help to schmucks like me whose idea of "videogame innovation" still remains the spin wheel on the original "Tempest." If Linden really wants to embrace the mainstream more through Second Life, as they keep claiming through both speech and deed, I'd love to see the executives involved get out of the "gaming mindset" that pervades so much of the rest of that industry: that players will either understand what they need on their end to make the whole complicated thing work, or will learn it on their own, or will go away, and screw them if they go away 'cause we didn't need them anyway. That's the attitude all the other videogame companies have, which is a big reason why I haven't played a videogame with regularity since "Tempest;" I thought Linden was striving to be different than all that.

Just so the night wasn't completely wasted, by the way, I ended up stopping by one of my favorite clothing stores, the cyberpunk-geisha-anime themed BareRose Tokyo [Bare Rose 153/11/30], because I saw at a SL fashion blog recently that they had put out a new outfit I really dug. This is thankfully one of the things I can still do fairly well in Second Life, is travel by myself to permanent locations that are open 24/7, exploring them slowly on my own throughout an afternoon; and this is something I also find fun, on top of the big events, and is something I guess I'll be doing more regularly as part of this blog, as well as small more intimate events that aren't so laggy. (Got some small, intimate events for me to attend, by the way? Vampire balls or DJ showcases or sex-chat sessions or whatnot? You can always send me an invite via inthegrid [at] gmail.com [preferred], or through IM in the grid at 'Miller Copeland.') And yes, by the way, I did end up buying a number of new Asian-themed outfits while there the other night; because I'm a virtual-clothing whore and will probably always be, what with the absolutely amazing things that can be continually constructed there.

Anyway, so who knows what the following months will contain? Maybe I'll find a way to procure a new graphics-optimized computer; or maybe I'll be shutting down both my account and this blog; or maybe something miraculous will happen on Linden's end to make these problems suddenly disappear. As always, you'll know the latest as soon as I do; and of course I appreciate all of you hanging out and checking back here, after times when I haven't updated the site in awhile. Here's hoping I'll be getting a lot more content up here soon, and will have the new adult blog open sometime soon after that.