Linden Labs High School

If this hasn’t been said before, I’ll be highly astonished, but I’m saying it anyway. In the areas I move in, SL behaves a LOT like a giant high school. Especially if you think of high school as depicted in 80’s movies with stars like Molly Ringwald and Christian Slater.

Starting from the upper management down, seeing SL as a high school makes its own sense. We the membership are not privy to the backroom discussions, outside pressures and decision-making processes employed by Linden Labs. We find out after the bulk of the discussion is done. Fortunately, this is where the analogy is at its weakest, as high school principals don’t have to listen to their students. LL has to and sometimes does. This doesn’t prevent people from acting like they can’t get through or see reason, but that’s a human problem.

The real zone in which SL and high school are hard to tell apart is in the social interaction space. Rampant hormones, drama, gossip games, and cliques abound. The irony about the last is that SL is so large, there must be easily a dozen groups who think they own the place and can’t have more than a small piece of it. Think about how often designers that have existed for a few years only get noticed by someone who thinks they are one of the glitterati and then treated like the next big thing when said designer’s been paying their bills with SL since 2006. This also is due to the “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” effect. I think some designers have the keen eye of a naked mole rat at high noon. But said designers sometimes own their own sim and write it off as a business expense on their taxes.

We also have our freaks and weirdos. However, we can’t agree on a universal basis who qualifies for this with the exception of content thieves and pedophiles (and some exist who would defend the thieves). I flirted with the idea of a Second Life parallel to the science fiction fandom hierarchy flow chart, but I realized it’d be a maze of twisty little arrows, all alike. In the elven circles I move in, there’s anti-vampire sentiment. I’ve seen a furry SL member get haughty in a JIRA about how “anthrocentric” the avatar creation process is. Then there is the cavalcade of options presented to the folks at What the Fug?.

The hormones thing? Yeah, in spades with a large dose of fail on the side. Since the overwhelming majority of us are adults running around in what we think of as sexy avs, the desire to boink the av or avs of our choice is going to come up with variations high school only fails to possess because it’s populated with minors. However, that can often be only a matter of degree. The people whose inworld marriages only last two weeks, and they wind up having several of them in the course of a year. The random longtime relationship that could possibly withstand the death of Second Life. Pregnancy being 100% voluntary inworld keeps the parallels from being too close to reality, for which we are all most grateful. The women who use pregnancy as a means of getting attention are quite enough, thanks.

Is it possible for there to be a Big Av On Grid whose name doesn’t end in Linden? Most of us couldn’t name more than five Lindens without including Torley, Philip and M. And since they all count as administration, that’s hardly the same thing. There are the builds many of us get to in the course of time, such as Svarga and the Greenies’ Rezzable sims, but naming the people behind them isn’t easy and they have no real influence on most people’s daily inworld lives. This is where the fact the high school is so large really comes into play. You can’t be famous when there are a large percentage of people in your target market who don’t speak your language. And inworld, there is no shared media experience like television or film to drive anyone to ubiquity of awareness.

SL is, in the end, a hell of a lot of microcultures rubbing up against each other. Changing your group is as easy as dropping out of one space and going to another. Or creating an alt. This is why it feels like high school. In reality, past the small circle of close friends each of us tends to cultivate, what impact does what someone else’s close circle have unless you’re thrown together by circumstance?