 | And you thought that WoW battlefields were intenseJanuary 16th, 2007 |
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| | And you thought that WoW battlefields were intenseJanuary 16th, 2007 |
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A nice case of Internet insanity… and kind of funny if you’re watching it from a safe distance 
By today, the headquarters of Front National has entirely disappeared from Porcupine; in its place, a tiny casino has sprung up overnight, and is already receiving customers.
Status quo ante in the metaverse.
It’s bound to happen. Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. The obvious ironies and contradictions non-withstanding, I’m not sure what I’m more saddened by in this whole mess – and really, it’s a mess regardless of who started what or how it escalated…
At the heart of the matter is racism, no matter how you mask it…pitted against the concepts of free speech on a truly global scale. In this particular case, it would seem that the only true “griefers” (if most accounts are to believed) are those who “protested” the FN. Indeed, what I found most amusing/saddening was that justifications by many who claimed it was a response to FN’s “violations” of Second Life’s policies.
I’d be quite curious to see how Linden handles this situation, but more curious still will be to see how this plays out in future political situations offline. After all, if these truly are actual official virtual representatives of very real French political entities, I can foresee nightly news casts referencing the game itself during election season, particularly if one side or the other claims some manner of perceived injuries within the game.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. Perhaps not, and it’s just quite possible that Linden is even secretly hoping that’s the case. After all, there’s no such thing as bad press, right?
I don’t like when real life thing/topics enter my gaming.
Kendricke is right, this is a case of when racism is pitted against the concepts of free speech. And here’s the problem. Everyone knows Le Pen’s party is racist. But for the avatars associated with it in Second Life, it has to specifically engage in racist actions *inside Second Life itself* to merit expulsion. Thus it’s easy for them to skirt the TOS. Its mere presence, as a referent to real life, isn’t enough of an offense.
There’s something a bit fake about the coverage of all this, of course. It’s not “war in Second Life,” because probably 98 percent of those logged on out of the 25,000 or so on at any given time a) don’t know about it or b) don’t care or c) don’t want RL to intrude them. But by blogging about it, Hamlet or whomever gives it an artificial profile it doesn’t really have.
The story is more complex than what Hamlet has presented, too, because there are other typical SL elements involved. For one, there’s just the ordinary people caught in the crossfire, including owners, clubs, and even a museum about autism. They didn’t realize that they’d be buying land next to Le Pen, or that Le Pen would buy land on the sim where they are, and thus ruin their FPS and cause griefing and lag to spill over on to their property. So they become a kind of force to say “a plague on both your houses,” except that when the anti-Le Pen people are the ones doing most of the shooting and caging and such, they begin inevitably to resent them more. Add to this mix that you have French, German, and Irish all rousting about there and adding in all kinds of ethnic and national hatreds unrelated to the Le Pen thing per se. The Herald has covered some of this here.
Amazing. Imagine what will happen when two fairly equally matched forces knock heads in there
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[...] WoW Guilds var network_dropdown = new Dropdown(‘network_dropdown’,{use_submenu:0}); //network_dropdown.display_submenu(‘warcrynetwork’); French Nazis get attacked in Second Life razor posted on 16 Jan 2007, 03:02 PM I had to break the glass that had “Break in case of surrealistic hypocrisy the likes of which you might never see in the real world” written on it. Thanks to Raph, I now know what the hellish nightmare of avant garde activists in action looks like: And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, “rez cages” (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids’ TV characters, and more. By California time, the battles often culminated at 2am, 3am, and even later into the small hours of the American clock, when Residents in Europe are most active. So amid the exchange of salvos, the chat log was choked over with pro and anti-Le Pen curses, most in French. And when the lag was not too overwhelming to stream audio, the whole fracas was accompanied by bursts of European techno. [...]