More about SL and WoW

I've noticed another great and I think significant difference between Second Life and World of Warcraft: Connectivity and the context of my identity.

SL is a single, continuous, large world which is distributed in small pieces across many hundreds of servers. Each server holds a unique portion of the world, and all avatars can move freely between all servers. IM communication works across servers, you can speak to your friends regardless of where you or they are.

WoW is more like a set of parallel universes: it is a relatively small world which is duplicated identically on many hundreds of servers. Each shard contains exactly the same physical world and the same storylines, with the same monsters lurking in the same places and the same NPCs giving out the same quests. An avatar is restricted forever to one single shard, and can only interact with avatars who reside there. ("Forever" is a relative term: you can apply to have your avatar moved permanently to another server, but it's a one-way process that takes a week and costs a month's subscription fees.)

Because the WoW servers are discrete (unconnected), it suffers from the same disadvantage as OpenSim: your character and your identity exist only on a single server, and nothing prevents a malicious person from creating an identically-named character on any other server. This has obvious consequences for your reputation: how would you explain that the person creating havoc under your name in a sim you've never visited is not you? Why should you need to explain this?

RL deals with the problem of non-unique names by creating artificial identifiers (passports, drivers' licenses and the like). Websites like Avatars Online represent an attempt to achieve this by letting people declare all their identities in one location. Perhaps OpenSim needs a similar kind of central registry?

This isolation of avatars from each other has always struck me as the great weakness of OpenSim. Why would I leave SL, where my friends are, where (as a builder or musician or maker of clothing) my possible audience and visitors and customers are — to move to a place which has none of those? I don't believe that people enter online virtual worlds in order to be alone; certainly the majority doesn't, and the evidence of SL is that those who remain alone usually drop out fairly quickly.

That is different in WoW because the game environment keeps you busy: at lower levels, most races and classes don't need other players to interact with. You can't get far into the game without joining a guild and taking part in group battles, but there is no other need or reason for sociability there. And indeed there is no sociability to be had.

In other news I picked up a WoW special-issue gaming magazine in the airport on the way to Canada, and read some more background about the various races and classes, and have made yet another character: a human paladin. From the description, they can play the healing role that appealed to me, but also have combat abilities that the priests are lacking. I'm currently trying them both, and will decide soon which character will be my "prime."

Not-human avatars

I was surprised and amused by the amount of difficulty I had in breaking this topic down into categories that made sense. It started out as a short discussion of furry, but I realized I had to explain that, and then to explain the difference between a furry and a realistic animal av, and soon found myself accelerating backwards at great speed.

There's a distinction to be made between several overlapping kinds of not-human representations in Second Life. (In my taxonomy, nekos and vampires and others of that ilk are differently-human rather than not-human, and are a separate topic for another day.)

It is easy to tell the difference between a representation of a black-and-white alleycat and a representation of Sylvester, the would-be nemesis of Tweetiepie. It is rather harder to explain the difference between that representation of Sylvester and a representation of a gryphon: neither of them has a biological existence in RL, but Sylvester is a caricature of a well-known RL type whereas the image we have of the gryphon is a serious attempt to make sense of the descriptions handed down through explorers' tall tales. And what then to make of the distinction between an avatar based on the canonical cartoon images of Sylvester, and a home-made furry cat avatar? Is the attempt at realism (in replicating the well-known cartoon image) to be considered differently from the furry-av-builder's act of imaginative invention (which may result in a figure that would pass muster alongside Sylvester in a TV cartoon)? Very tricky.

Nonetheless, on we go. This needs to be posted before I go to work today, but I'll come back and polish it on the weekend. Comments, suggestions and counter-examples are welcome.

I want to suggest that there are two basic classes of avatars: realistic representations (human avs that look human, four-legged tigers, faithful recreations of mythological beings or characters from popular culture) on the one hand and abstracted, anthroporphized figures on the other. This is not to suggest any kind of valuation between the classes or their subtypes.

RL animal avatars are biologically realistic*: they are quads (or have two legs and wings), their body shapes and faces are realistic in shape and size, and they usually can perform the RL-appropriate sounds and animations.

Mythological animal avatars are mythologically realistic, as it were: fauns stand upright on cloven hooves and have little horns, werewolves howl bloodchillingly and can stand upright or run on all fours at will, gryphons are quads with extra wings, dragons have scales and enormously long necks, etc etc.

The distinction between these types and those that follow is in the avatar builder's intention: the first two attempt to reproduce faithfully a well-known image, whereas the next types are imaginative and abstract.

Furry avatars are not biologically or historical-mythologically realistic (though they may be pop-culturally realistic as in the case of Sylvester). They can be thought of as cartoons or as caricatures of animals: like cartoon figures, they stand upright and have mobile hands, their heads are set atop their necks and usually have human attributes (e.g. binocular vision, whereas most animals' eyes are set on opposite sides of their heads).

Tiny avatars can been seen as a sub-class of furries (though both communities would probably disagree) in that they are specifically very small cartoon or anthropomorphized animals.

Practically speaking however, the most significant distinction between these types is this: that there are flourishing self-organized communities of furries and tinies (and a community of dragons in Wyrms) but natural-humans and quad animals don't seem to organize in this way. Natural-human avs are so common and so close to RL that it hardly seems worth celebrating our shared biology: "Look, I too have five toes on each foot!"

* within the limits of the SL body mesh and prim and texture technologies, obviously.