Dream Girl: Kiana Writer

...that's about levels after levels after levels of puzzles and monsters

Kiana Writer

It's 2007. At La Cittadella, two newbs observe the line of people waiting to camp at the Discoteca.
Newb One: What this place needs is something to do, kinda like WoW-lite, an hour-long mini quest, along the lines of a disaster movie. Like The Poseidon Adventure. Look at all these people queuing to camp! Suppose 10 of them paid, idk, 20L to play. They'd be the cast of the story facing hazards and obstacles; along the way, 8 of them 'die'. The two who make it out alive get 50L. They meet new friends, have fun, and we make some money.
Newb Two: It's an idea. Do you know anyone who could script something like that? Or build it? Or find the land to do it on? Or deal with the complaints from disgruntled players?
Newb One: Um, no, no, no and no.
New Two: I thought not. Let's go dancing.
         He was right. I hadn't got any of those skills. But around the same time, across the grid and in Finland, Kiana Writer was taking a broadly similar notion and turning it into a dream come true. Not the Poseidon Adventure, but the Harvey Hunt.
Kiana Writer: It took me a while to figure out this place and what was possible here. I was a cop at a race track, then a host at Dance Island. It used to crash nonstop and you'd have to wait a long time to get back online but people would still do it and not whine so much. I started writing for magazines and exploring a lot, and I wondered why there weren't things to do that I enjoy. Point and click adventure games for example. I wanted to try something. A friend and I brought out Where the Hell is Harvey Wayne on Feb 22nd, 2008. I used the connections of the sim owners I had written about and placed a lot of posters around.

          They funded the cypher-driven hunt by charging the venues involved, so they didn't put RL money into the game at all. On the back of that success they then set up a Survivor-type game with two tribes competing for a prize. After a while, though, Kiana's partner got fed up with all the whining and quit, after ejecting all the members and flattening the land. Even that setback didn't dampen Kiana's spirit. She determined to carry on alone. Alone, up to a point. She set up a hunt by herself, but soon others were volunteering themselves and their friends to get involved. The Zodiac Killer was the next venture, and soon it was called MadPea, and Kiana found herself surrounded by a team, many of whom who have come to be like family. So many personalities, so many ideas. Does she have to be tough?

The Excellent I

What, then, shall we do?

John Cage

          What, then, does Machinima in Second Life do?

          Iono Allen makes machinima. He gained fame as a noob, with A Question Of Honour, in which long-time friend and colleague Larkworthy Antfarm also appears. It was shortlisted for an exhibition at MOMA, no less. The cinematic power of the film's unspoken story is even more remarkable since Allen had never made machinima before coming into Second Life. You will find 44 original uploads on his YouTube channel, with his latest short, Passion, notably available in full only on Vimeo, but more of that later.

Second Life Machinima is not fan-mod or art-mod, to borrow Rebecca Cannon's terms; it doesn't sit with the taxonomy of mainstream machinima with its professionally built sets and scripted or meta-scripted quests. It's quite easy to make a slick looking short when you have a game like Halo as a backdrop, and quite another thing with the homegrown props and lag of Second Life.

Singularity

This post was written and photographed entirely on location at Immersiva

What viewer do you use?

This laptop has LL3, Exodus, Kokua, Cool, Phoenix, Imprudence, and Singularity. Imprudence was such a great viewer for visiting open sim, very stable, comfortingly familiar UI, but of course like Phoenix, it can't see mesh. Anyone who loved Imprudence naturally gravitated to Kokua, but that bloody UI is exhausting.

The Art of Blogging ... Art

Writing about art in Second Life can be a lot of fun. You get to have proper conversations with interesting. passionate people... also quite a few twits, but you knew that already. What makes for a better blog, when it comes to blogging art in Second Life? Here are the reactions of a handful of people who know a bit about it, from different perspectives.
Apmel posts notices, reviews, and (what he probably would hate to see called) understated social comment. His blog is regularly updated, sometimes several times a day, often in Swedish, never without purpose. What would be his philosophy on blogging about art - well, not just the art but the people who make it, buy  it, and blether about it? Appropriately, his answer was a link to his blog.

Apmel: his blog is scary good.

          Let's get this out of the way before we go any further: the 'Dear Diary' style: "I got an IM, and..." "I always think...", "I was invited by my good friend Kewlkid Namedrop..." I, I, I....unless you're describing your illness or your solo trek up Everest, mentioning yourself 10 times in the first paragraph makes you sound like a raging egomaniac, not a hip young thing, or the voice of authority. We know that you were IM'd/invited/present at an event, and heck, we kind of guessed that your blog contains things you think and opine. Be warm and personal, but get straight down to the bit we care about, the art and the events.

Method and Madness

Kenya's Feed A Smile is a great charity and Kiana the maddest pea of them all is trying to raise money for them in Second Life. The MadPea crew have set up a charity auction in a park at  Mad City among the wildly beautiful New York sims. The auction starts February 15th and runs through February 23rd.

The idea is that you bid on people offering goods or services or, in the case of the celebs, maybe just 'to spend time' with them. And there are some pretty well-known names up there, all the way from Bryn Oh to Drax. (OK you're expecting some comment like :"I would pay good money to have Drax pass 24 hours without spamming about himself and that bloody Fluffee", right? You're out of luck. This is 'don't mention the Drax' week. Thank God it's Thursday.)

The Great Divide

Well, I'm among the 99% who come into SL and then remember they don't have a mesh-enabled viewer and, at the end of an already long day, don't really have the time or inclination to go faffing about downloading Firestorm or (Lord help us) Viewer 3 - actually, wait, I do have Viewer 3, but no amount of wild horses or wicked art is going to make me open SL in that finger-fumbling, screen-blocking, fake-namery piece of shite.

Which is a bit ironic, as Eupalinos Ugajin's build at Split Screen is a meditation on the whole Occupy and 99% thingy. You miss out on the video, but you can get away with a normal viewer for most of the install, and it's a lot of fun. Keep the notecard open, you'll want to refer to it later. Here's the artist with Bryn Oh, and Split Screen owner and part time grouch, Dividni Shostakovich.

Eupa has a brilliantly weird avie, and isn't having any of it, with the whole 'I'm a fancy-ass artist' bs - this is all just an extension of long hours playing with Lego. Love it. I got this lucky action shot of Bryn trying out the rideable blocks being fired noisily into the atmosphere. Her avatar blended so well into the build I thought she was a bot to start with!

Truth or Derryth

Shockwaves continue to bounce off the walls in Second Life as Residents wake to the news that Art Historian, journalist and hitherto apparently Prim and Perfect Rowan Derryth  was caught on camera necking a newbie. The newbie, who cannot be named for mnemonic reasons, appeared unhurt after the incident, although his jeans did appear to have been stapled to the viewer.
Allegedly one in a series of recent incidents, Derryth is said to lure roaming weeklings into her new gallery (SLURL suppressed to prevent you freaks from making an alt and stalking the place) by offering to let them 'peruse her Ekphrases', an offer even hardened veterans of the SL art world find hard to resist. The actual noobication took place on her burnished leather steampunk sofa. This photograph, taken by myself at great personal risk, reveals the full horror of the sofa stage of the attack. Those of a childish disposition are discouraged from clicking on the photo.

Derryth's behaviour provoked reaction across the Grid. P Linden woke from his mid-morning nap and looked ruefully at his golf clubs, at the Blue Angel Poet's Dive a candelight vigil slash non-rhyming limerick competition was hastily organized, ColeMarie Soleil reminded her public that she knows Bryn Oh, while Torley released a Tutorial titled: "How to Avoid Being Derrythed". An unnamed Dutch blogger said: 'I am all for crappy and offensive performance art, that's my schtick, but this crosses the line.'
Ms Derryth was available for comment.