Membership in Second Life, the giant online game/community/virtual world that you’ve heard about but never used, is free. I didn’t know that until recently. When I learned that fact, an idea hit me:

Second Life is a free source of material for at least one post, and probably a series.

It is, after all, the place where all the scariest, most unpleasant motherfuckers on the internet come together to be totally uninhibited. A place where a man can say, “In my real life, I’m an accountant, but here I can by my true self: a panda with huge tits and both sets of genitals,” and be accepted and embraced by a whole huge-titted hermaphro-panda community. A place, in short, where I could find something to write about, whether or not those stereotypes turned out to be true.

My vision for this project was simple: I’d go undercover, knowing absolutely nothing about the game or its world. Once there, I’d investigate all the things you’ve heard about Second Life in the media. Would the other players be at least half-normal? Would they would look down on me for being a noob who didn’t own any in-game property? And (of course) is the game really a depraved 24/7 furry scat party like all the news reports say it is, or is it mostly just people walking around and chatting? This, I told myself, would be some funny shit.

I downloaded the necessary files from the Second Life website, I installed them, I set up my account, and I started playing.

And then I stopped playing, because it is fucking unplayable. My computer is old, and my internet connection isn’t as fast as it could be, but goddammit, it ran World of Warcraft just fine! This game, though, suffered from a fucking ridiculous level of slowness. Remember that first generation of 3D games, on the original Playstation and the Nintendo 64? How objects just appeared when you got close enough? How mountain ranges would just pop up out of nowhere?

Yeah. It’s like that, but with better graphics and about 1/10th of the speed. Oh, and sometimes you’ll see objects that aren’t supposed to be there at all! You’ll be standing around, and a cluster of weird-looking polygons will appear in the middle of the screen, and stay there until you adjust your camera.

I assumed this had to be a problem with my hardware — either the old computer, or the mediocre connection. To an extent, I was right. But then I watched a couple video tutorials put out by Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life, who I probably should’ve mentioned earlier), and the videos’ narrator wasn’t having much more luck. He clearly had a better system than I did, but the framerate was still choppy, and his avatar spent much of its time standing around, waiting for the scenery to load. The game even crashed on him while he was recording one of the tutorials, and he didn’t even bother cutting it out of the video. He knows how to edit — he’s making video tutorials, after all — and he decided to leave this in.

And that was the end of my undercover investigation of Second Life. Everything I learned, I got from articles and tutorials that are already freely available to anyone who wants to read them, whether or not they’ve played the game. I am able to bring absolutely nothing new to the table regarding this topic. I had some interesting points about the in-game economy, but it’s nothing you can’t find on your own. No, all I could come up with is some angry criticism of the game’s slowness.

Seriously, how fucking patient do you have to be to addicted to this game? At least with drugs, you have the instant gratification of getting high.

I didn’t actually see the following video until election day, and by then I was so burned out on polls and horse-race bullshit that I didn’t bother posting it. It stayed on my mind, though, even after the election reached its happy conclusion, and I think I can still wring a few points out of it. So here goes:

Yeah, someone had the idea to do a World of Warcraft election poll. I wish I’d thought of that, but now that this guy’s done it, I’m free to nitpick his work. For example, I doubt he conducted proper polls. Whatever; this is the data we’ve got, so let’s look at it.

To begin with, Obama took a clear lead among the Horde — that is to say, among orcs, trolls, undead, big-ass minotaur-looking dudes, etc. Meanwhile, the Alliance, consisting of your standard-issue fantasy races like humans, elves, and dwarves, had a much more divided vote, with large pro-McCain contingents among several groups.

During my own (admittedly brief) World of Warcraft experience*, I was less interested in the game itself than in the ways people interacted with each other. In other words, I was bad at the game, but I got pretty good at coming up with questions for a potential WoW survey. Which gamer stereotypes were true? Are female avatars all drooling male perverts in real life? Why were the gnomes so much nicer to me than my fellow humans? And why did the Horde kick our asses in PvP every single time?

I had my theories at the time, of course, and this election poll suggests a few of them were right. Specifically, if you’re playing a monstrous character — an orc or troll or whatever — you have to be mature enough to handle criticism. It’s hard to feel cool when you’re a orc; they’re ugly and green, with scraggly beards and crooked fangs, and their women are, in a word, butch. Trolls have tusks and goofy accents. The undead have chunks missing. These are not relatable characters. Joseph Campbell would never have considered them suitable heroes.

So if you’re playing a monster, and entering a situation that requires you to treat that monster as a sympathetic character, you have to be at least a little open-minded. Humans aren’t going to challenge you that way. Hell, you’re already a human! Elves, if anything, will do the exact opposite of challenging you — there is no way you’re a beautiful, graceful woodland-dweller in real life. I mean, maybe you’re kinda cute and enjoy hiking, but there’s just no way you’re elf-level hot.

And the results of the fake Azeroth election bear this out. Obama, who was willing to admit that maybe America could use some fixing, was heavily favored among the “monsters who just want to be loved” demographic. Blue-staters, or liberals, or America-haters, or whatever you want to call Obama’s base, are open-minded enough to present themselves as orcs, and pal around with minotaur-looking dudes. These are my crazy generalizations, and they are now internet law!

Honestly, I wish I could do more than just generalize. I’d love to see a full study of WoW, or any online game, to figure out which person plays what character once and for all. Come on, science, get on this! We can finally know what gamers have against female dwarves!

*I’ve played the 10-day WoW trial, and enjoyed it enough to play another 10-day trial a few months later, but not enough to actually subscribe. Quick review: a lot more fun than other online games for the first 10-15 levels. After that, it becomes the same old stand-in-one-place-and-fight crap we’ve seen a billion times before, but with crazier-looking armor. Also, I don’t care what anyone says, I liked the gnomes.

I won’t name names, but I once knew a guy who was the very definition of “rich asshole” — obsessed with his social standing, blind to his own privilege, and all too willing to offer bad advice to the little people. Nothing about the experience was terribly fun, until the day one of my friends made a simple comment:

“He’s the sort of person who would ride a horse until it died, just to see if he could.”

From this simple statement was born our favorite party game, in which we sat around trying to dream up the ultimate example of upper-upper-class depravity, conjuring a character who tortured servants, hunted pandas, and colonized the everloving shit out of India.

If I may change the subject for a moment, I’d like to once again point out that Sarah Palin supports using an airplane to chase down wolves until they can’t run anymore, and then shooting them.

Now then, who wants to play a game?

Because Sarah Palin would absolutely ride a horse until it died, and then mock the dead horse for being weak. Sarah Palin would wound a moose, but not kill it, and then leave it to bleed to death on an enemy’s front lawn. Sarah Palin would hire child-servants with the exact same birthdays as her own children, and then make them wait tables at her kids’ parties — and if you cry, you don’t get paid.

Seriously, make up your own, and convince your friends do it too. Post them to your own sites. Write a song and post a video for it, and then offer it as a downloadable ringtone. Turn them into a series of collectible action figures for all I care.

The point is, the Crimes of Sarah Palin are funnier and more horrible than that Chuck Norris bullshit, and I’m confident that you, the reader, can think of a few. I’m less confident that you’ll remember to link back to us, but stranger things have happened.

Remember yesterday, when I wrote about Spore? Well, I gushed too soon.

It’s not that I don’t like the game. I’ve yet to play the full version, but most of the reviews I’ve read have been generally positive. Except the Amazon ratings, that is. “What’s with all the one-star reviews?” I asked myself. “Could every professional reviewer have been bribed?”

Nope. Turns out Spore contains some truly nasty DRM, so DRM opponents have descended on its Amazon page to drive its rating down. Even though I’ll end up playing the game anyway, I can’t say I disagree with the cause.

I’m sorry, but if the game monitors my system to see how many times I’ve installed it, and then limits me to 3 installs even though I paid $49.99 for the game, that’s going to put something of a damper on the experience. If i buy a new computer, I don’t want to have to buy a fresh copy of the game to go with it — or worse, call EA and petition them for extra install privileges. If, a few years down the line, EA decides it’s no longer cost-effective to support the game, I may not be able to install it at all. And when people complain about that, they’ll release an Deluxe Special Edition of Spore which they totally promise to support.

At least until a couple years later, when they release the Ultra-Deluxe Platinum Special Edition box set of Spore 1 and 2, plus all ten expansion packs (I’m just guessing on that last one).

I sincerely hope the brutal DRM measures were EA’s idea, and did not come from the game’s developer, Maxis, or its designer, the legendary Will Wright. Wright and the Maxis crew come off as friendly, innovative geeks, and I will be pissed the fuck off if I find out they were requesting stricter DRM on their masterpiece. EA, on the other hand, is a soulless corporation that makes its money by dumping a new version of Madden on the public every year. Coming from them, draconian security measures are the opposite of surprising. But they’re just the distributor in this relationship, and with any luck, this backlash will convince Maxis to look elsewhere for distributors in the future.

Oh, and the punchline? People found a way around the DRM before the game was even released, and liberated copies of Spore have been bouncing around the major torrent sites for several days now. I can’t link to them, but you’re smart enough to find them without much trouble, so go nuts. Remember to seed to 100%, at least!

So apparently Spore was released today. Somehow, despite the months of hype, I never caught the actual release date. Plus, according to Wikipedia, Australia and Europe got it a couple days ago, and are probably bragging about it to all the other continents.

I don’t have the game yet, and may not get it at all, but I downloaded the free Creature Creator back when they announced it. Using only the free features offered in the trial version, I managed to put together a fairly cool little creature. Earlier today, I took some snapshots.

What’s that? Three eyes, three legs, and giant flailing arms would be impractical in nature? Not if I have anything to say about it!

The links above will tell you more than enough about the gameplay, but I still feel compelled to point out how cool the concept is. I mean, you get to take a bunch of random parts, distort and arrange them however you want, and assemble them into a creature. Nothing special, at least until you see it walking around the screen, perfectly animated, as though it had been made that way by the designers, and not just slapped together on your computer five minutes earlier.

Geeks will understand why this is awesome. Everyone else thinks computers are powered by magic, and are just surprised that no one thought to do this before. The reason they didn’t do it is because it was impossible. Sure, you could make a few minor changes to a character’s appearance, or its clothing (see basically every MMORPG ever made), but you couldn’t just slap on a third arm or decide its knees should bend the other way. I mean, you could, I guess, but it would have required you to go back and make the entire game over again.

I did not program it to point and go, “Heyyy!” as you see above. Some beautiful, god-like programmer figured out a way to make all the creatures to do that, regardless of what crazy-ass parts players decided to give them. Tentacles? Claws? Nothing? Doesn’t matter! It’ll find a way to point, or dance, or do a backflip.

Oh, and also there’s an entire game to go along with this stuff, but that would just get in the way of my nerding-out over the magic programming.