Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Camping with the Bots

It’s no secret that many older Second Life® residents hate “bots,” the minimally customized, and often glaringly ugly, avatars, cranked out by the thousand, to earn a pittance at locations paying visitors to stay around.

Others have recently covered the “death of Ruth,” that default female avatar who lived under the skin of all of us.  With the upcoming release of the latest viewer, Ruth will vanish. 

Bots might soon join Ruth in oblivion. 

Tipped off by a friend who works for a camping site plagued by bots, I took a close look at the latest “release client” for Second Life.

I noticed, in the search feature, that something was missing: “Popular Places.”  This is a little “tweak” by Linden Lab® with far-reaching consequences.

This aspect of the in-world search engine measures popularity by time spent in a particular location.  The use of bots—by owners of property in some cases, by “gold farming” operations in others—drove places to be popular out of all proportion to any real interaction by visitors.  I’ve read, and I’ve lost the reference, that a gold farmer with three computers each running five bots could, in theory, rake in $200 every day.  That’s good money anywhere, and it may be pulling in the gold-farming operations in southern China that have been using World of Warcraft and other games to collect income (as reported last year in the New York Times).  These operations are also known as “game sweatshops” and Wikipedia provides some interesting background on this phenomenon.

One can see this in the lead photo, kindly provided by an unhappy camper who despises bots.  As the woman dances away on a camping-pad, the male avatar behind her—a bone-stock noob—slumps in “away mode.“  Note his dancing twin in the background. They are likely to be bots, and even when they do not earn money, they take up room that real avatars might use.

Camping rates have fallen lately, in part I’m sure because bots suck out money without doing the marketing surveys that many camping locations depend upon.  Advertisers and marketers pay the owners of the location a commission based upon surveys taken, and bots do not do surveys.

A bot-filled club seems straight out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” All of these silent dancers or loungers, many of them identical, go through a parody of interaction while no one chats.  It becomes pointless for any real resident to go there, if they can even get into the door.  Bots fill up all available space like a creeping fungus, to and past the 100-avatar maximum permitted in a region.

There’s a funny video of a frustrated shop-owner trying to get rid of camping bots…to no avail.

Perhaps Linden Lab will soon finish the job for those of us who hate bots.  And “gold farmers,” from Richmond to Shanghai, will weep and gnash their teeth as their income vanishes.

I suspect that the Lab has an economic motive in wanting to be rid of bots.  Second Life has trouble with its current peak “concurrency” of over 60,000. The central database has crashed several times. What if by getting rid of a few thousand bots who merely suck money out of the world, the Lindens want to get more residents in-world who will spend money? 

Just a thought, but it would be a shame to see all camping vanish; it provides good income for newcomers to Second Life.

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