SL is hormonal these days. Content creators can’t wait for their word-of-mouth fan legions to throw trash at the competition anymore. Now they do it themselves, engaging in angry exchanges of accusations of thievery and IP infringement in every medium they sow and swell upon, while praising their prowess at taking too much inspiration from pictures they look over the internet to sustain their artistic, commercial or personal gains. I’m eagerly waiting –with pun intended– for that day when they start to shout at each other (if they haven’t done so yet) who doesn’t own legit copies of the expensive software they use to translate their derivative visions into mesh as they’ve been doing with their texture and model sources as of late.
But the quarreling doesn’t stop with content creators. It’s in the air it seems, and it’s highly contagious. The once brotherly and sisterly sailing groups have suddenly erupted with antics of pioneers vs. imitators, of who-did-what-first claims that have everyone else bitterly confused as to who’s telling the truth –or who’s not telling too many lies– or even where or when to set sails. As it seems, there isn’t a unified sailing community anymore, but groups of trespassing yacht clubs proclaiming supremacy over rights of ways and race lines, that simply overshadow any attempts at friendliness and camaraderie… if that was the aim.
All of these happenings can be summarized in one word: Distrust. After a while you don’t know who to trust, and even begin to suspect of every content creator because there’s no certainty as to the legitimacy of their artistry in creating their no longer so original products (though I really want to believe there must be some genuine exceptions, somewhere). Hesitation then leads to not buying from those involved in controversy as one questions if the money exchanged is well-deserved since suspicion suggests everyone is cheating at some stage of production.
When it comes to sailing, the best sound option is to start dropping inworld groups to avoid nonsense and childish behavior from adults whose apparent purpose seem to be to spam the community with outbursts of defiance or victimized and whining discourses through both group chats and note card at every chance. I have to admit, though, that I find it intriguing when the discussion gets to the point of proclaiming the meticulous application of real life rules to a platform that hardly performs as its own mechanical rules intend. Who knows, maybe this is the SL equivalent of MMOs PvP game-play, but for now I may restrict my incipient participation in sailing activities to those that are less polarized, in hopes of finding a more neutral atmospheric tone in the not so distant future.
I guess these situations happen when people socially immerse too much into virtual space as to forget they were here first, and even foremost, for the fun of it. If that’s still the case, then the best cure to most of these modern “indispositions” is usually to plunge back one, two, three times into the waves of reality to refresh both mind and circuits.