Baba Sucks

This is a copy of the text at http://feem.net/~logan5/article.txt written by Marc Uchniat 

I am Marc Robert Uchniat. I am Feem Lomax. For three years I have lived two lives: one real, my first life; one false, my second life.

One of these men is no more.

Thankfully it was Feem, my avatar for the past two years in Linden Lab's successful online game Second Life, who got the axe. Since the game's beta period, I have spent an unhealthy amount of my time as Feem and other avatars, living and working in this dynamic, growing environment where literally anything can happen. I have made friends, I have made enemies, I have talked about my real life with people I never would have met otherwise, and I have taken out my frustrations through bizarre and often inscrutable manipulations of my Second Life.

This is a brief story about how I met my end.

I will do my best to draw no comparisons here and I will try to make no accusations which cannot be supported by facts. I will own up to my crimes. I would often be rude to others in this world, calling them names or chuckling aloud at their choice of avatar or speech patterns. To be honest, I criticized practically everyone I met.

I built offensive items, such as a sewage treatment plant on the shoreline of a new continent, and enormous sky-scraping towers of shiny black stone. I built an art deco toilet which defiled every aspect of feng shui; I built an avatar with a vagina for a face, sores all over her back, a penis for a nose and an American Flag as decoupage.

I would say that almost all of the people whom I encountered in Second Life were confused thoroughly by me within a few minutes of our having met. Some were infuriated, others disgusted. As for me, well…

I had a damn good time of it.

I wasn't the only one, and this leads to my final and most unforgivable crime: association. I am a Something Awful Forum Goon. A W-Hatter; a Voter Five.

A crime punishable, it seems, by summary termination. Along with fifty-something other individuals, nearly all of whom were members of Voted 5, my intellectual property was seized, my access revoked, and my holdings liquidated without compensation.

For some of my fellow goons, the punishment probably fit the crime. Certain others who certainly SHOULD have been banned remain unmolested, continuing to live in the Linden Lab-owned world and still freely roaming its wide circuits of offshore tax shelters, unregulated gambling, rife and well-documented cyber-prostitution, and the occasional legitimate coders or builders who simply enjoy creating content.

Those of us affected who actually enjoyed our Second Lives and wished no harm upon the game have been left confused.

Perhaps I should have seen this coming. About a year ago, and I forget exactly when, a schism occurred in the Something Awful (dis)organization between those who wanted to hang out and have fun (W-Hat), and those who wanted to hang out, have fun, and push the boundaries of acceptable behavior (Voted 5). I stayed in W-Hat and also joined Voted 5. My thoughts on this at the time were that I didn't agree with the schism, I didn't particularly want to grief people, but that there was some definite (building and coding) talent in both organizations and I wanted to be close to them both.

Voted 5 turned out to be more or less the same as W-Hat, with different people at the helm. While their restrictions on continued membership were certainly more lax than those of W-Hat, they didn't seem to push destruction so much as they merely pushed the envelope. The few events I took part in seemed to be virtual flashmobs in which the group would suddenly appear, do something surprising or bizarre, and then quickly get bored and wander elsewhere. If there was ever any explicit order to this, or a chosen direction or plan, I certainly wasn't aware of it. No horrible hacker plans, no naughty griefer secrets.

While this was all very entertaining, I never quite fit in with Voted 5. I was always more interested in the psychological aspects of an act and they were always more interested in pooping on each other or staging a play in which everyone squirted blood for ten minutes before promptly turning into a limousine.

As the acts grew more and more degenerate I took less and less part in them. It was never the group that bothered me, but specific individuals. As there were just as many individuals outside of the group who equally irritated the hell out of me, I didn't think of this as being a trend.

When the attacks on the grid started, I was no more precognizant of them than was Linden Lab. It came as an irritating surprise, quickly degenerating to an inevitable 'not again' as the attacks came more frequently. I found myself being just as upset, as a member of Voted 5 and W-Hat, as those who publically decried these groups as being the source of the attacks.

For a variety of reasons over the past year, my activity in SL has been steadily declining. I always /want/ to build things, but the time I have and the time I'm able to spend are largely at odds with the time that such activities require. Especially in the past six months I have logged in almost exclusively to talk to my friends — whom, I might add, are mostly not members of Voted 5 — and see what new features LL has been adding. Waiting, always waiting, for some creative urge to spike and drive me to action again.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to log into my account and noticed that it had been disabled by Linden Lab. I connected to the website and saw a notification that all passwords had been deactivated due to a recent security breach. This had happened about a week prior, and I'd gone ahead and changed the passwords on all three of my accounts for my own protection. What I thought, this time, was that they'd simply gone a step further and invalidated the passwords unilaterally, and that I would need to update my password again before I could proceed into the game world.

I was wrong.

I quickly learned that I was not alone; and while many of the names showing up in IRC and lamenting their bans were familiar, many others were not. Not only was I not the only person who was banned, I was also not the only person who thought it was a bit odd that they had been banned.

It is September 20th as I write this. The account closures occurred September 18th. I have received no contact from Linden Lab suggesting the reason for my sudden departure from the world.

Obviously, I am a griefer. A criminal. An individual charged with not releasing facts and measures related to attacks on the game grid which I was not privy to. A man whose list of crimes is so great and so numerous that explanation of his procedural extermination is not required. My actions, thoroughly though certainly not completely documented in this article, are the worst of the worst. Counted among the dozens of individuals temporarily banned each week for offenses such as racial slurs, sexual harrassment of unwilling participants, pedophilia, hacking, Denial of Service attacks, and various other transgressions of the company's Terms of Service or even common decency, my crimes rank supreme.

My account has been closed. My assets seized. My creations, projects, and friends locked away from me lest I use them to further propagate my evil. Clearly no reason need be given. My actions speak louder than their words ever could.

…

Don't they?

( marc r. uchniat 09-18-2006 )