Reel Expression

So much of my time in SL has a “serious” element to it. Friends complain to one another about their boyfriends, jobs, and woes. Some are working to sustain their in-world businesses and need time to work, or feedback on a prototype gown or ceiling. We discuss the deleterious effects of the rise of evil companies like Electric Sheep and their ongoing efforts to turn our beloved world into Wal-Mart.

It’s odd, because the perception of most people who don’t spend time in MMOs is that we’re just addicted to playing pointless games. We try to help them understand the value of spending time in MMOs, by describing the real friendships that develop, the opportunities for personal experimentation and expression, and the serious uses of these technologies by corporations, educators, and the military. They remain skeptical. But what’s really funny is actually just how much time we aren’t playing at all. We’re scripting and modeling, cooperating on a project, launching a business, or just sitting and chatting.

Last night in Second Life, I played. It was pure silly cathartic play. It served no purpose other than the jouisssance of the moment. It was that surprisingly uncommon SLiver of joy, razor-thin lunar happiness against a beautiful and mysterious, but altogether dark, sky.

Three of us, Luthie, Ceres, and myself put on our bathing suits (and in one extreme case, snake outfit), whipped out diving boards and twisty waterslides, cartoon character inner tubes, swimming anims, and just played in the water for an hour. It was a lot like the experience of a child hanging out in a real pool with family on a hot summer day. What a delight! Here are some pics:

0100101110101101.org recently published a list of Second Life’s 13 most beautiful avatars and the press release circulated throughout the blogosphere. Curious, I went to look at the list, and what I found disappointed me; not only were the selected avatars not among the best I had seen, but worse, they were hardly better than average.

How were they “average”? Both as avatars and photos. The avatars themselves were all beautiful in the usual SL ways: nice skins mapped onto nice shapes. That just about all of the photos were closeups or even extreme closeups didn’t help: so much of what makes an avatar a statement is her full appearance, including posture, clothing, hair, and accessories. It is very hard for most SL avatars to stand out when all you have is a face.

The best of the lot were the pictures of Aimee Weber, which showed her in a bit of a pose, giving some sense of her in-world personality. But Aimee Weber is Second Life’s Jennifer Aniston: her avatar is beautiful and distinctive, but how many covers of People, Us, and In Touch does she really need to be on? Picking Aimee is just too easy.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize something as subjective as a top-10 beauty list. I want to do something more useful than that. I want to explore the criteria of beauty the collection suggests. First a compliment: Kudos for not showcasing only white females (which would be all too easy in SL): both genders and different races were included. But there were no furries or non-human avatars, no fashion-extreme vamps. The notion of “beauty” was Benetton shop-window multiculturalism beauty: race is a fashion we put on–Look at me! I’m the African Jennifer Aniston!

But the most important questions remain unasked: What is the soul of beauty in Second Life? Does Second Life have its own standard of beauty? The people behind the beautiful avatars exhibit at least superficially address these issues:

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, “artificial” light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world.

Such a description applies to every MMOG I have ever seen and most video games in general since the NES. It isn’t Second Life’s aesthetics at all; it’s video games. So we are still left to ask what Second Life’s aesthetic is.

They continue:

Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds, and questions the impact such technologies have on art and society.

While this still doesn’t get at anything in Second Life in particular–it seems to apply equally to text-based worlds like LamdaMOO–at least it brings up an interesting question (albeit one that has been asked in media studies circles for over a decade): How do simulated worlds “allow the creation of alternate identities”? More interesting (but not asked here) is how these alternate identities reflexively shape (or nihilistically pull the rug out from under) our “real” identities? And anyway (this is my question), how do a dozen or so extreme closeups of Second Life pixel-faces help us get at these issues?

They continue:

Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars’ icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and “traditional” art forms, and between art and life itself.

Heavy rhetoric, but what does it mean? The analogy to portraiture is interesting, but what is the significance of portraiture in a world where our virtual faces are botoxxed into immobility by a technologically enforced lack of facial expression? Second Life avatars are profoundly expressive, but it is a misplaced real-life assumption that the expressiveness is centered in the face. This is a major flaw in the exhibit. (Another flaw is hosting it in a perfect reconstruction of the actual RL museum exhibit. Note to the organizers: in RL museums, we don’t look with virtual 3D cameras floating 20 feet behind our heads, and your SL exhibit is in fact frustratingly incompatible with the everyday experience of being an avatar.)

I would argue that our true SL expressiveness comes not through the face but instead through (a) the disposition of the body as a whole–including race and gender, pose, fashion, accessories; (b) the backstories we provide ourselves in our profiles; and above all, (c) the words we say as we interact with our friends and the world through chat boxes and IM windows.

If I, in my way, embody some part of this “Second Life aesthetic,” look for it in my words and look at my whole body (in where and what it is doing); look not at my face (which can tell you only the most rudimentary things: that I am Asian). And then forget about me: look for it in the words and bodies of those avatars not possible or practical in RL: the furries, mermaids, winged vampires, aliens. Their aesthetic goes far beyond their 3D-mesh cheekbones and pretty-texture eyes. What do these avatars tell us about how people live in Second Life, about where people find (and create) beauty in virtual reality?

As it stands, the exhibit “Second Life’s 13 Most Beautiful Avatars” seems like a publicity stunt. Superficial notions of Second Life beauty can be passed off as “hip” for a now-credulous press, currently enamored with all those “cutting edge” people who are “driving” Web 2.0.

Even if they are, in fact, strangers here themselves.

Note: This is cross-posted from my personal blog, diary of a tagalong.

I am a huge fan of machinima and obviously enamored of Second Life. But I am not at all a fan of SL machinima. The truth is, just about all of it that I have seen is weak. Worse, it is all weak in the same ways and seems to recapitulate the worst of SL: low quality graphics, minimal movement/action, and mind-numbingly slow pacing. And how often do we need to see someone scuba diving, someone sky diving, and a bunch of furries dancing in a night club? Rarely does it capture–or, better yet, build on–the strengths of Second Life, which is its “infinite variety” (borrowing Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra). Here’s a rare exception, but though its good, it is not exceptional by (non-Second Life) machinima standards.

Some of it is surely the fault of the machinima makers. The pace of Second Life machinima is often slow and edited in self-indulgent ways. Shot lengths often last for several seconds at a time, and yet what they show is deeply static (SL animations are, as a rule, primitive). Most SL machinima look like half-animated PowerPoint slides–no thank you! The overreliance on the medium-long shot doesn’t help; you can do wide shots (even though SL’s draw distance is poor), and you can do closeups (even though facial expressions are limited, to say the least). Mixing up shot lengths enables you to establish different relationships between viewers and the content, and viewers therefore interpret and experience it in different ways.

Some of it is also the fault of Second Life. Its graphics and gestures are, comparatively speaking, poor. Expressions, poses, and gestures are what actors do, so SL’s weaknesses in this area is no small handicap. Still, machinima from other games deal with these issues. Halo’s protagonist doesn’t even have a face, let alone facial expressions. That hasn’t stopped Halo from supporting some of the best machinima films in existence. Halo and World of Warcraft both have limited gestures, but their machinimators have at least found ways to make use of what’s there for interesting gestural expression (the famous Internet is for Porn uses the same small set of gestures over and over with great effect). And good storytelling can do a lot to compensate for weak visuals.

I thought I was just unlucky, having only seen crappy SL machinima at machinima.com and when friends email me URLs. But today I went to YouTube, searched on “SecondLife” and sorted by rating. Guess what? Most SL machinima have mediocre to low ratings. Those that were rated highly either weren’t really machinima (such as U2’s and Suzanne Vega’s SL performances or various tutorials) or would be considered mediocre by the standards of other games.

I’m no film director, but I’d love to see evidence that SL machinima directors are aware of the following points.

• Camera: The camera doesn’t just capture reality; it frames it, focuses the viewer’s eyes on some part of it; and establishes the viewer’s relationships to it. Think about what you want the viewer to focalize on, second by second, and use the camera to facilitate that focus.
• Production versus post-production: Many impressive machinima films use a lot of post-production. Post-production gives you the ability to shape your story, shape your viewer’s experience. Even free/cheap software, like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, gives you a decent set of capabilities to shape your story. (This is a call for smart cuts, not for cheesy transition effects.)
• Shot length: Keep the viewer’s eyes active; don’t let images go stale (hint to directors: no one likes looking at your avatar as much as you do, no matter how cool your skin is). That means either put something to look at in images (emotions, gestures, actions) or make quick cuts (MTV style, which creates its own action).
• Shot arrangement: The shot is the basic unit of the film and the way that two shots are connected is meaningful. One shot may give the lie to a previous shot, or further illustrate it, give the viewer an alternate perspective on it, or extend it in time and/or space. Don’t just stick one after the other, especially if the machinima is a narrative.
• Narrative: You don’t have to tell the story in order. Mix it up. Use frame tales. Narrate from the point of view of a minor character. In other words, not only is the story significant; so is its telling. Writing scripts in advance and storyboarding them may help people develop more compelling stories.
• Self-referentiality: Machinima is shot in games. Many of the best machinima films refer to the reality of the games, comment on it, and make players appreciate a new aspect of it. No SL machinima that I have seen (and I have seen many) cinematically captures the possibilities, the true soul, of Second Life, the way Red Vs. Blue or Warthog Jump: A Halo Physics Experiment capture the soul of Halo. This one at least captures the brains of Second Life.

Who the hell am I to say all this? I am no one. No one but a machinima fan who wishes Second Life machinima didn’t suck, didn’t make really amateur mistakes.

Final thought: Just about every non-Second Life machinima I linked to here is considered a classic for its system. What World of Warcraft player doesn’t know about Leeroy Jenkins? Which Half-Life fan hasn’t seen Still Seeing Breen? Are we going to let bland footage of a U2 performance stand as the best SL machinima has to offer? According to YouTube user ratings today, it is the best SL has to offer.

Luth has kindly invited me to post occasionally on her blog as a guest blogger. As some of you know, Luth is a dear friend of mine, and we both share a passion for improving the arts in Second Life. By “arts” I mean its fashion, builds, machinima, art communities, stories, and so on. Of course, Luth contributes directly with her beautiful poses and animations.

I have nothing of that sort to contribute: I am a technical writer by trade, with a background in literature, so my contributions will be limited more towards criticism. I hope to use this space to reflect on some of the arts I see in SL and hopefully provide food for thought for the creatives who make Second Life the great place that it is!