Omega Point

September’s Take5 films are up!

I noticed this morn­ing on the Alt-Zoom Stu­dios site that September’s Take5 shorts have been posted. September’s theme was “Unhealthy”. Yay, machinima!

LSL Wiki back up at LSLwiki.com

It’s true, the LSL Wiki has returned, now hosted at LSLwiki.com. This is the com­plete data­base as it existed on SecondLife.com as of the moment it was taken down. Your logins are all the same. There’s still a cou­ple redi­rect prob­lems I haven’t cleaned out yet, but it works. I’ll fin­ish fix­ing that stuff tomor­row. In the mean­time, happy LSLing.

Edit: There will be changes and upgrades to the wiki in the near future. Some of this may include port­ing the data­base to a more mod­ern wiki engine. I’m cer­tainly not mak­ing this deci­sion alone, but I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.

Emotional cues in virtual spaces

While fre­quently used to great effect in prose, text is a noto­ri­ously poor medium for con­vey­ing the emo­tional meta­data humans rely on for face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion. How do we know exactly how to inter­pret some­one else’s words, stripped of their emo­tional con­text? What was intended as a sim­ple request for infor­ma­tion may be taken by one reader as a joke, while another may see it as a per­sonal attack.

The sys­tem used by many mod­ern inter­net users was pro­posed in the early 1980s by Scott Fahlman, a com­puter sci­en­tist with Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity. He sug­gested that users employ a short series of char­ac­ters, evok­ing the iconic smi­ley face, to demon­strate that their words were to be taken lightheartedly: :-)

While at the time, the pro­posal was viewed by many as some­what tongue-in-cheek, the smi­ley quickly caught on, and is as rec­og­niz­able as the let­ters “www” today, demon­strat­ing its effec­tive­ness in clar­i­fy­ing human-to-human inter­ac­tion in text-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In the decades since, inter­net users have extended the orig­i­nal sys­tem by adopt­ing many other emoti­cons, con­vey­ing dis­plea­sure, sad­ness, dis­gust, exhaus­tion, and many oth­ers, insert­ing much-needed emo­tional con­text to their chat and email conversations.

Just as vir­tual envi­ron­ments like Sec­ond Life are fre­quently described as updated MUDs or cha­t­rooms, user inter­ac­tions within them can be sim­i­larly enhanced by the use of body lan­guage and ges­tures based on that of real-world humans. Con­sider the image of an avatar fac­ing another and smil­ing, look­ing away dis­in­ter­est­edly, or stand­ing with arms crossed; each con­veys a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent mes­sage even when asso­ci­ated with the same text.

But what about cases in which we see avatars’ body lan­guage injected into our com­mu­ni­ca­tions with­out our explicit per­mis­sion? There have been count­less posts to the Sec­ond Life forums by newer users, angry and hurt by the dis­dain­ful, supe­rior man­ner of an estab­lished res­i­dent, and how they were delib­er­ately ignored.

These new users describe an inci­dent that usu­ally fol­lows a set pat­tern. They approached a Lin­den employee or an older res­i­dent, usu­ally a fairly high-profile con­tent cre­ator, and greeted them. The estab­lished res­i­dent turned to face them, looked down their nose, and turned back to what they were doing. In actual fact, this is a client-side avatar animation–when chat is “heard” on the client, avatars appear to turn their heads to face it with­out any input from the user con­trol­ling that avatar.

From the per­spec­tive of the Lin­den or long­time res­i­dent, they are unlikely to have even known any­one approached them, as they were busy doing some­thing else: pro­gram­ming, brows­ing the web, or work­ing on tex­tures, leav­ing behind a pup­pet with its strings cut.

This is an exam­ple of a “sub­con­scious” mes­sage injected to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nel. While no infor­ma­tion has delib­er­ately been con­veyed, to a human observer, a clear mes­sage has been sent. The body lan­guage of the avatar has effec­tively spo­ken for its user. Yet, to the recip­i­ent of this mes­sage, the avatar is the human. From their per­spec­tive, they’ve just been snubbed by some stand­off­ish per­son who clearly can’t be both­ered to even give them the time of day.

Next: Delib­er­ate sub­con­scious fil­ters and their implications.

Hamlet, stop that.

Ham­let needs to not talk to reporters about me while drunk. Seriously.

Update 16/09/06:
It seems some peo­ple have got­ten the wrong idea here. Allow me to explain:

• Yes, I was home­less. How­ever, what Ham­let is talk­ing about in that video hap­pened in Feb­ru­ary of 2003. In fact, his orig­i­nal story about it even notes that I hadn’t been home­less for some months as of its writing.
• I did not build a lap­top; I had one with me. Ham­let is drunk and mix­ing up his words. Besides, have you ever looked inside a lap­top? Not gonna happen.
• I did build much of the com­puter I actu­ally used to con­nect to SL from parts I scrounged up, both before and after I became homeless.
• “Hack­ing” into wire­less net­works is more a mat­ter of antenna strength than soft­ware. The soft­ware is a mat­ter of point-and-click.
• Pick­ing power sup­plies out of a dump­ster is not a feat of unpar­al­leled hacker skill.
• I have been liv­ing well out of slum con­di­tions for over three years now.
• Had I been home­less for the past four years, there is almost no way I could have con­tin­ued to enter Sec­ond Life dur­ing this time. Com­put­ers break. Com­put­ers are stolen. Com­put­ers are sold for crack.*
• I attended SL Views at Lin­den Lab ear­lier this year, with­out any­one sug­gest­ing I might be homeless.
• There are numer­ous pho­tos of me cir­cu­lat­ing around the inter­net, with clean clothes and skin, my hair cut and styled, in an apart­ment I claim to be mine.
• Home­less peo­ple tend to be home­less for a rea­son. Peo­ple home­less for more than a cou­ple weeks tend to be home­less for a very good rea­son, that fre­quently pre­cludes their ever escap­ing poverty. Soci­ety sucks.

* I am not on crack. I was not on crack. After four years on the streets? The odds are pretty good I would be.

LSL Wiki relocating

Due to the recent secu­rity issues affect­ing Sec­ond Life, the LSL Wiki will no longer be hosted on the Sec­ond Life web­site I’ll post addi­tional updates here next week when it relo­cates to its new home at LSLwiki.com.

In the mean­time, a few users have a backup avail­able here.