/ Rob Beschizza / 12:55 pm Tue Jun 11, 2013

Second Life home invader

Video Link

Expert troll Esteban Winsmore invades private residences in Second Life, the virtual world you haven't been thinking about lately, but which has finally achieved an uncanny and thoroughly creepy degree of virtual reality. [NSWF language. Thanks, Heather!]

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    1. See that’s actually the thing; you totally can kick someone out of your personal space in SL – it only takes a single right-click of a mouse button if you have admin or moderator status. And yet  some people  still take the time to engage each other in verbal conversation, giving strangers the benefit of a doubt; not immediately assuming that the counterpart is deliberately  being a dick and just recording it all to put on Youtube for hipsters to snark at.
      It’s crazy, I know. Like if we were still living in midevial times or something.

    2. It’s just like the 2D web: Feeding the troll instead of hiding/mutin/ignoring/flagging them, as any slighter smarter person than the ‘victim’ in this video would do.

      @beschizza:disqus 
       “Second Life, […] which has finally achieved an uncanny and thoroughly creepy degree of virtual reality”

      Aren’t we being a bit generalist  here? As if there weren’t any uncanny, thoroughly creepy things on the rest of the internet.

    2.  I worked on SecondLife’s backend a couple years ago. There’s some weird shit in there: furries and uglies. I don’t get the whole fashion thing, or the dressup bit, but people pay for sex toys, sex furniture, elaborate costumes, and wacky toys and objects.

      Otherwise, they have a unique system that does not exist anywhere else, and I sure hope they keep it up. They worked this shit out a bunch of years ago, and are still cookin’.

    3. Same reason why people spend fortunes on useless pieces of plastic called Lego™, maybe? http://youtu.be/ga6M64JfCjA

  7. I’m curious as to why BoingBoing is helping boost the profile of a troll. Seriously, people who have nothing better to do than annoy and harass other people? They really deserve a RL punch in the mouth, let alone in SL.

    1. Much as I don’t have anything nice to say about Second Life and am therefore not saying it, I agree. They’re doing their thing and I don’t have to see it. So why would I support anyone trying to shit in their Cornflakes? 

      It’s probably the aim of BoingBoing to report things like this just for the sake of curiosity, but this is a special case because mere attention is the actual currency the troll feeds on. Ergo there isn’t any position of impartiality or uninvolvement.

      1. While I honestly just never got the SL thing (my FL is depressing enough, why have a second depressing life on top of it?) but I honestly think that the troll isn’t so funny here as the people he’s talking to. I mean, the lethargic horned guy lazily telling him to leave while some one coughs in the background really would be a nice movie scene. It strikes me as more Miike than Lynch, but maybe that’s just all the fetishy goth wear (which I love by the way).

          4. Cut me some slack. I have cancer.

            It was because the person I was replying to used the term “first life” and I thought it was funny.

            And also, why is everyone a “he” by default?

    2. Save your outrage for something a bit worse than someone being mildly annoying in a video game.

      1. Voicing an opinion about tact – in a comment section – is disproportionate “outrage” now? 
        What does that make you then? You are meta-rageing…

        2. Your comment about my comment about the other comment is disproportionately angry about my disproportionate anger. You are a meta-meta-rager.

          1. Jeebus. In my day, we only had to worry about lusers from aol snuffing
            out our flamewars. Augmented reality my ass! GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!!!!!! Shitth, where’s my bourbon…

      2. People can be outraged about different things.  We don’t lose our capacity for outrage about big, important things just because we can be peeved at someone pissing in the online pool we all swim in.  (Arguably, the opposite’s the case: a sense of decency in one sphere translates to others.)  

      3. It hardly matters how mildly they are annoying. My conscience gives me electric shocks at the mere thought of subsidizing their presumption to cleverness.

  9. I met this guy in SL too. He’s not that witty at all. Just play along with him and he’ll ignore you. He only feeds on people who take the bait and have no clue about estate- and parcel bans, or muting/blocking/derendering.

    1. I’m amazed this World Wide Web thing still looks as *ugly as it did in 1992 too: http://taxipoll.nl/

    2. There’s not much motivation for the heroin producer to make a better product, is there?

    3. The troll has a shitty viewer.  Not terribly surprising, when you get right down to it.

    1. Personally I don’t see the advantage of any game over First Life unless you get to have a battleaxe, but that’s not necessarily the point.

      Presumably it is easy and effective to block people from your private space in Second Life, or else it wouldn’t be private space. I infer that there must be many users who don’t know how it works, or at least enough to sustain this troll. So for the devs I smell an enhancement request, probably in the form of tooltips.

      1. Personally I don’t see the advantage of any game over First Life unless you get to have a battleaxe…

        Amen, Nacho, amen to that.

  12. The space he’s invaded is some kind of sex fetish thing, right?

    My only regret is that we can’t hear the vocal tone those people normally use to each other.

  13. So let me see.
    Disturbing another person’s internet privacy =bad
    Griefing an Xbox game=bad
    trolling a website =bad
    trolling newsgroups and YouTube= bad
    Being disruptive to people in a game on their private land (server space these people have paid real money for) just because you have arbitrarily decided that the people who play this game are somehow beneath you. Beneath you because you have formed a pre conceived idea of what goes on and you are not adult enough to either accept or understand it or even at the very least leave them alone to do it while you live your own life =GOOD???
    what a Douchbag!!!

  14. Thanks for the heads up.  I have preemptively banned this jerk from every bit of land I control in SL.

  15. Wish I had the software and skill to do some 3D rendering. It badly needs a  “The Cell: Esteban Winsmore vs. Carl Stargher” treatment.

  18. Why is this amusing to anyone? From the troll’s viewpoint, it seems incredibly dull and boring. From an uninterested viewer’s viewpoint, pretty much the same. From the subject’s viewpoint, it’s just vaguely annoying. I’d think at least a dedicated troll would be more outrageously annoying. I’m particularly wondering why this made it to the front page of BoingBoing. Wasn’t there something interesting to show?

  19. Wow, what a new and unique idea. Because idiots haven’t been doing this since 2006. Oh wait…

  20. While officially this guy’s a jerk for bothering people for no good reason I found the video very amusing and surreal.

  22. I found this entire thing to be hilarious, as in LOL hilarious. This is minor trolling, and pretty funny/harmless at that. Jesus, if you are going to take a game like SL seriously and you don’t know how to kick someone out of your own private space, well…. sheesh. It’s a right click, as someone said.

    Esteban, you rule. Rule, you do. Do you rule? Rule do you.

    1. I found this entire thing to be repetitive, as in people who lack imagination repetitive.

  23. Why doesn’t anyone troll the troll?
    Tell him he is late as soon as he pops in (he was expected, of course) and proceed to ask if he brought any number of arcane objects and gaslight him on passing him state secrets, just to see if you could make him freak out.

    1. Because it’s easier to just ban him, thus getting him out of our faces, and get back to what we were doing before his troll ass showed up to bother us.

  24. Second Life is a large digital social network that is full of a wide variety of users and community members that engage for different reasons.    There are non-profit educators with private builds that allow people to engage in classes.   There are literary communities, and innovative theater communities with writers, actors and poets from around the world.

    Like any virtual community or social network, it’s a mixed bundle of folks.  Twitter is full of bots and illicit accounts.  Google+ has it’s share of “strange and unusual” people.   The Internet is full of a variety of folks and motivations.

    When you own your parcel in Second Life you have the privilege of setting privacy to “guests only” and other options.   When you are a renter, you do not generally have those estate privileges (lower cost rental properties).  That means if you have an unwanted visitor, you have to rely on the estate owner to kick/ban the individual avatar.  

    Which is why most people own their own parcels :)

    Please don’t make assumptions unless you have spent time in the social network.  It has raised over one million for Relay for Life as well as other charities such as War Child and other natural disasters.   Is the whole Internet bad because of a few bad sites?  

    It’s a creative place.  It’s a place for business.  It’s a great place to conduct a seminar or host a training session interactively.  It’s a wonderful place to connect to businesses around the world.  And I know both personally and professionally, having been employed there by a non-profit agency since 2010.  

    It is innovative.  Accessible and a great place to meet people from around the world.   In 2009 I produced an original play in there with actors from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.  

    Check out the event calendar to get a better idea of the community and the things you can explore there: http://secondlife.com/ 

    And please don’t troll the trolls.  They like it. 

    Lori Sheppard
    (Skylar Smythe in Second Life)
    http://www.socialmemultimedia.com 

  25. Trying to figure out what “NSWF language.” means. My best guess so far is “No Stupid White Folks language.”.

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