Don't Go Into The Corn Field

Via GameSetWatch, Clickable Culture's look at the Second Life version of purgatory - The Corn Field. A player explores an off-grid prison that misbehaving avatars are sent too for infractions. From the article: "Yaffle tested the limits of the prison, finding that communication to Second Life's 'Main Grid' was cut off. He even came up with a scheme to crash the server The Corn Field was running on in order to be teleported to the nearest safe simulator by default, but creating objects in The Corn Field appears to be impossible. Having exhausted his options, Yaffle merely waited around to see if anyone else would show up. A Linden Lab employee did stop by, but was incommunicado. 'If I was them, I would have been watching me and laughing,' Yaffle told me. 'I know I was laughing even though it was a punishment.'"

Comments

Re:Not my thing

[ClamIAm]

It's not much better in the game. I have a pretty beefy system (P4 2.5 ghz, 128mb radeon 9700), but that game was still choppy, even with the graphics turned down. While their engine allows for you to build stuff and have it visible right away, this translates into huge bandwidth problems (and I played on a Uni LAN).

But even aside from the purely technical issues with the game, I really didn't like the feeling it gave me. The community seems to be focused on creating porn-star avatars and virtual penises. And to buy these oh-so-attractive items, you have to convert real cash to ingame cash or start some sort of similar business yourself. Or you could whore yourself out to a richer player. Seriously. The game has tons of potential, but the tech problems along with the culture they seem to foster turned me completely off from it.

Re:Dealing with rule breakers is a chore

[jungd]

>Secondly, you don't even know what he did.

He repeatedly took down the entire second life grid, disrupting thousands of players and disrupting the many real businesses and other activities (classes etc.) that go on in SL.
SL allows scripts to be written and attached to objects. He created physics objects that self-replicated and spread over the entire geographic area of SL (which is huge). The replicating objects themselves usually had nasty images or racist taunts attached to them.
The load of simulating so many physical objects (Newtonian mechanics, collisions etc.) slowed everything to a crawl on each simulator. Due to a bug in the SL Havok code many simulators would crash.
In addition, the thousands of objects created would use up the object quota of most private land and cause devices that need to dynamically create objects to malfunction (e.g. holographic vendors, games, etc.)
In the last instance of his attack the SL Grid was taken off-line by Linden Labs for most of a day.
(it was apparent that they'd implemented some 'fire-lane' like automatic system to take out strips of simulators to try to isolate the objects, but it didn't appear to work)

Um. Second Life is FREE to play. FREE.

[Jtoxification]

Um. It's easy to make fun of a game like this if you're expected to pay for it, but the fact of the matter is that you can play the game free of charge without any hindrances - the only reason to pay is to own land and get a larger weekly in-game allowance (land ownership is overrated unless you're using it to sell something or are renting it out like Anshe Chung does, ;-D - there's even a two-way exchange rate of currency. Evil? Probably. ) Besides, rules are rules in any game; if you break 'em, you suffer the consequences, right? In this one, the Linden Corporation could just limit the power they've given users, but instead they still offer enough control to allow a user to potentially bring a server to its knees (and quite easily at that) - for that, their "purgatory" is pretty nice.