“ecoutee”-moi, s’il vous plaît?

Time to clean the dust off the keyboard and write about my favorite online program, Second Life! Yay!

Before I get into the progress of my project for the class, I want to acknowledge that it has been a while since I’ve done some serious blogging about SL. Yes, I did a post last week, but because I knew I have a few to catch up on and I didn’t want another on my list. I will be going into complete detail of my opinions of SL and my experiences there for my final blog entry with this class, but I just want to mention how my interest for SL has significantly decreased since the beginning of this semester. The blog posts haven’t been forgotten because of busy schedules, but mostly avoided because of my increasing dislike for SL.

It’s hard to force yourself to do something that causes so much aggravation.

With that said (leaving the topic open for my final blog entry later on), my progress on the final project has made me feel like I’ve learned a lot about SL in the past weeks. Unfortunately, what I learned was not what I was expecting. I’ve been in charge of developing the ecoutee double-t-shirt for the group. What this was supposed to be was a vehicle where two people could sit in it and appear to look like they were wearing a double-t-shirt (think Siamese twin shirt). The vehicle didn’t need to drive, which should have made things easier to work on.

And this is where Murphy lays down the law.

Since I wanted to learn some SL coding anyway, I decided to start with developing a car-like vehicle. My teammate, Naimya, sent me an object for an Ultimate Vehicle which had coding in it to work like a car. Unfortunately, it doesn’t move very cleanly (or when I went to work with it, not at all). So, getting an object from someone else to edit doesn’t work. I decided to do my own searching.

I came across, “A Speed Guide to Virtual Driving in Second Life,” which is an excellent source of information on what the code should look like, how every function works, and makes for a great car. I learned very quickly how painfully perfect this code really was.

Introducing my first experiment in the world of coding: The Egg-O-Matic! If you know the reference, you know what I was trying to go for. It was going to be a vehicle that “floated” above the ground and could be driven around, kind of like a car without wheels (which essentially is any car in SL – the wheels don’t make it move, but the whole object moves).

However, thanks to the physics involved with the egg, it completely flipped upside-down in operations. Looks more like a coconut-shell car, or a turtle shell. Couldn’t get that to work out, so the idea was scrapped. But, it gave me inspiration for the shirt idea. If I could make a shape like the “coconut shell” and make it look kind of like a shirt, then it would pass for a double-t-shirt!

Stage Two: The Double-T-Shirt concept. The funny thing about a concept is that it doesn’t always match the execution. A nice cone shape, add some sleeves, drop in some code, and presto! A working vehicle shirt… thing! With the example of the Egg-O-Matic, this should work perfectly.

Instead, I got the Shirt of Death. It’s actually booted me off SL in one occasion.

Since we didn’t exactly need the shirt to act as a vehicle, I decided to scrap the vehicle concept. After meeting with the group, they suggested making a stale picture of the double-t-shirt concept (which Gigii supplied), and make a stand-alone (or sit alone) version of the vehicle, one that does not drive, but one that still has two seats.

I tried to make the flat piece of shirt stay in one spot, while adding chairs for the vehicle script to attach to. However, I couldn’t get the script to allow where the two seats would be. Then I figured, why do a vehicle at all? I could just add blocks behind the shirt design and people can sit down easily.

And it worked!! Except for the fact that sitting in the proper direction was not simple. In order to be facing forward, a user would have to click on the seat while standing in front of the seat looking towards the shirt design… which makes clicking of the seat to sit in impossible, unless a user did a camera change and then clicked the seat. Too much work for the average user.

After a phone call with Gigii during the day, I met with the group last night to discuss our progress with the assignment. Naimya wasn’t there, but he did set up a suggestion. He placed a smaller version of the double-t-shirt icon in front of the couch that’s in the store. It needs to be tweaked, but it works.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.

It would have been nice to have learned something about coding in SL, and even using the proper sources didn’t assist me in understand it too much either, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe I wasn’t cut to do programming in SL. At least, I feel discouraged from wanting to try again.

Today, I’m going to try some advertising around some public locations to get people to come to the grand opening of ecoutee on Friday, November 30th at 7:00pm EST. I’m going to try a few experiments in the advertising, including “dressing up in costume” to get people to show up.

Maybe this will be easier than trying to create the shirt.

Come to ecoutee at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Etopia%20Island/146/62/22

What’s mine is mine… or yours?

The one thing I’ve always admired about the SL system is the fact that they’ve been devoted to the users. They want to make their cut of a profit somewhere, but at least they try to hook up the users with some benefits as well.

However, one thing still confuses me: The idea of intellectual property rights in SL. A quote from the reading, “Your Second Life?”:

…players of the game would be granted intellectual property rights in their creations both within the game space and in ‘real life’. This was a radical departure for the online gaming industry, where nearly all End User License Agreements (EULA) and Terms of Service (TOS) require Players to sign over their intellectual property rights in order to enter into the virtual space of the game.

Now, I understand completely about why there should be intellectual property rights given for something created in real life (that’s how our world works). So, someone in SL also has the ability to own their work that they create there. That’s fine, but wouldn’t that leave things open for a lawsuit to Linden Labs? The way I see it, SL exists because of the content that the users create, and the users own intellectual property rights on what they make. Hypothetically, if Linden Labs were to start publicly showing off their world in screenshots, and someone’s really awesome object or design for area is shown, and then copied in something real-world (like if another online program other than SL were to create the same thing), who can that user blame? Their intellectual property is only protected within SL, making sure that no one steals anyone else’s ideas in game.

The obvious solution to this problem would be to get the work set with a copyright ahead of time, protecting it against being copied out of SL. It doesn’t even have to be the SL object that’s protected, but the idea and blueprints (for the 3D model) for the object or whatnot protected. In the situation above, Linden Labs does not control the government, and therefore cannot protect everyone from everything. Even Linden Labs can’t protect themselves from everything! If they shut down someone’s account, and that user decides to sue, what’s going to stop them? If it was Linden Labs’ fault that a particular “intellectual property” gets copied, are they to blame? How is that idea protected then?

Maybe I’m just missing something, but there has got to be more to it than just, “We can protect you from other users stealing your stuff.” Even then, what protections are there? “We’ll delete the offending user’s account and hope we don’t get brought into court over it,” is the solution? I think they need to just take the easy route and say, “You make it, we own it.” Of course, Linden Labs will do anything they can to keep the content flowing. After all, if they didn’t have users creating the content, they’d have to do it all.

Like we need another “World of Warcraft meets Second Life” clone…

Resource:

Herman, Coombe, & Kaye. Your Second Life? Goodwill and the performativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming. Cultural Studies , Volume 20, Numbers 2-3, -3/March/May 2006.