MOTU

Posted by Richard at October 18th, 2007

Ru Weatherwax is a newbie avatar in Second Life, and rarely has more than a few Lindens to his name. He’s prone to changing clothes (and body) a lot.

Ru started out life like most other Avatars, navigating Orientation Island (where he had to retake several of the tutorials because he’s not good at following rules). And then spending a couple of hours running around, trying to get off of Help Island. He found most other newbies rather non-communicative, but he survived and got out into the world at large.

Ru eventually figured out that to get off Help Island, you had to teleport, and the only way he knew to teleport was to search. So, he started off treating Second Life like a brand new city and went to search for the Gay & Lesbian Community Center. Typing “gay” into the search box produced the sort of results you would have suspected from Infoseek back in 1996: lots and lots of porn. Ru tried a couple of the tamer-sounding locations but found them deserted. Slowly climbing the ladder of potential skeeviness in search of other people, he eventually ended up at a sex shop called “Bad@zz.”

Bad@zz, which it turned out was also some sort of sex club, drew a mixed crowd: people of both genders and a variety of orientations, all with the avatar bodies of porn stars (many of them anatomically accurate). None of them really wanted to talk either, or at least not to a shabbily dressed guy who looked like a cross between a gnome, a goth, and a ring-tailed lemur. Ru figured he could change shape, but why deny his gnome-lemur heritage just to fit in?

Ru gave up on socializing and came back the next day, ran the same search for “gay” again, and discovered a nice little virtual lesbian bar called Moody’s. The nice women there, who didn’t look very generic (most of them looked like the stepped out of an anime festival) showed Ru how to join their synchronized dance animation, though Ru was having bandwidth troubles and couldn’t hear the music feed.

However, several of the good folks at Moody’s seemed to want to converse privately about personal life issues, which can make any newbie feel like a bit of a third wheel. So Ru, who was broke, decided to try his hand at shopping at one of the free stores.

The free stores had a fairly nice variety of swag, though almost all of it was pretty heavily branded. Ru changed into his more comfy, chubby shape and tried on a good bit of what he found, much the understandable discomfort of some other shoppers. He eventually came away with a Ramones shirt, some leather pants, and a great lip piercing.

Ru wandered around, chatted with folks at bars (who seemed primarily interested in seeing their avatars dance and listen to music). He got a few leads on places that were beautifully designed. He relaxed for a bit in a beautiful treehouse in a perpetual state of dusk. He flew around a giant lava flow and explored a Jade cavern behind a waterfall. He looked for a few communities of interest: Thais Sapeur gave him a lead on an island where a number of non-profits maintained virtual offices, but there was no one there when he arrived. The same with the (very lovely and highly promoted) island of the New Media Consortium. From time to time, he’d even find his beloved Moody’s completely empty. The Second Life world seemed dominated by tall, slender, well-muscled folks with hair and expensive clothes, and outside of a Yiffy club (note: look up “yiffy” before you venture in), no one seemed to have a lemur tail (and even at the Yiffy club, lemurs were in short supply). What was with this place, where almost anything is possible, where more and more people lined up to look less and less like individuals?

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