Thoughts on Second Life and Micronationalism

[Shyriath]

Introduction

Behold, I have returned from the strange lands that are Second Life, and with me I bring visions of wonder. For I have seen soaring towers that pierce the clouds, and great cavern-cities beneath the earth, and other creations, born of dreams, hitherto unknown in meatspace. But in all that great realm I have seen but few entities that call themselves micronations, and it was this thought that caused me to remember Shireroth and return home.

…Not that I’m giving up Second Life entirely, because it’s still a very interesting place and I’ve come to love it. But it has stirred up some thoughts in my brain about the parallels between Second Life and micronationalism, and how they might relate to one another.

Second Life: A Crash Course

For those not aware, Second Life is an online, three-dimensional virtual world, and is among the most popular of its kind. Users can roam the world through customizable avatars, create and modify items in-world for their own personal amusement or to sell to others, use in-world currency to purchase such items, rent or own land, construct homes, businesses and other buildings, and more. Tools and modifications made available by users also allow the implementation of roleplaying and battle schemes on a large scale.
The Second Life world is split up into square Regions, informally called “sims”, 256 meters on each side. Depending on the resources available to a user or group of users, they may own a portion of a Region, a whole Region, or even multiple Regions, which they may alter and govern more or less as they see fit. Users can belong to formally created Groups, each with different levels of membership, on which basis members can receive different levels of access to various features within a portion of land.

Micronations, Now in 3D!

One would think, therefore, that Second Life would be a perfect environment for the development of micronations, and for the implementation of features that forum-based micronations have either struggled with or have no simple way of using. A Second Life-based micronation would have territory defined, not by a map, but by boundaries that can be observed and crossed and which have real effect. It could have a landscape and architecture that could be designed, seen in situ, and interacted with, rather than reflected merely in art. It could have a real and functioning economy, one of the great holy grails of micronationalism, thanks to the in-world monetary system and the ability to make or acquire desirable goods. Its presence in Second Life would also bring with it the prospect of visits from the millions of other Second Life residents, along with the possible citizenships of those with enough interest.
It is therefore surprising to find that micronations, at least by that name, seem to have very little presence in Second Life; a few have created embassies or other public relations facilities, and even fewer are primarily Second Life-based. The reasons for this are likely difficult to establish short of a formal sociological study, but I suspect that each of the following plays some part:

-Culture. It has been remarked that residents of Second Life tend towards a strong individualism, which is not surprising given the unrestrained environment; it is possible that people would not see the point of an online country with its own government. Certainly not much government is actually needed, since property owners handle most local affairs.

-Lack of Territorial Ties. Second Life does not offer many opportunities to become tied to a particular place as part of a territorial nation. Although it is possible under certain circumstances to set a location as “Home”, in which a resident will automatically appear when entering Second Life, this can only be done in a place where the resident already owns the land (I do not yet know whether this extends to land owned by a group to which a resident belongs). Therefore, residents are more likely to feel attachment to their own property; and because, unlike real life, there is no physical requirement for a place to sleep or eat, even property is a convenience rather than a necessity.

-Critical Mass. Unless (or even if) the citizens of a micronation primarily resided on that nation’s territory, the nation could not rely on more than a fraction of its citizens being present at any one time, a problem made worse by the more usual issues of differing time zones and customary Internet access times; most citizens would likely be offline or out-of-world, or busy traveling elsewhere in Second Life, or living offsite. Although in-world meetings could be arranged in advance, there might otherwise be periods when the territory in question was mostly or entirely empty. For a micronation for whom acquiring citizens and maintaining activity is paramount, appearing to be inactive would be a disadvantage in such a real-time environment. This might be alleviated by continuing to maintain a forum for non-real-time communication (and indeed, regional management groups in general tend to do so), but the most reliable defense would be a very large number of active citizens.

-Expense. Owning and maintaining land in Second Life is not cheap, particularly not the whole-Region or Private Region plots that would almost certainly be necessary for a large functioning micronation. Because it is possible to exchange in-world currency for real-life currency and vice-versa, many landowners try to relieve the cost by founding or hosting businesses on their land to generate revenue; in the event that this was insufficient, donations from a micronation’s citizens or other benefactors might be required to make up the shortfall.

-Recognition and Nomenclature. Micronationalism, in the everyday, person-on-the-street sense, tends not to be a widely-known hobby, and regarded as (at best) eccentric by many who do know of it. Second Life residents to whom it might occur to try to found their own countries in-world might be discouraged by this knowledge, or might never have heard of micronations at all. Perhaps as importantly, it may mean that there are groups within Second Life that, although we might think of them as successful micronations, do not apply that label to themselves and cannot be found in a conventional search for “micronations”.

-Evolution. Following from the above point, it may be that there are nation-like entities native to Second Life that are sufficiently different from ours that they represent a separate path of evolution, but could still be defined in a micronational context. The same social phenomena that produced the micronations of our type and generation may no longer be at work (or are greatly changed), and given the context of Second Life, the same functional environment certainly is not at work. Although community bonds seem to be weak compared to those that would form the basis of a national identity, many residents nonetheless feel more drawn to certain places and the other residents that congregate there, and these sometimes form associated governmental structures. It could be argued that the lack of a certain focus around government and nation excludes them from the micronational family, but they may nevertheless fulfill the same impulses that micronations of our sector fulfill for us.

As for how existing forum-based micronations might interact with Second Life, I’ll come up with some deranged ideas on three possible paths: the use of Second Life to promote traffic to and participation in the forum, an expansion of the micronation to encompass both Second Life and forum life, and a more complete migration to Second Life with forums remaining as a non-real-time communications system. But I'll do it in a future post.

[Al'Magroth]

A nation as big as Shireroth might be able to pull it off; but most, I think, would run into considerable problems precisely because of the time zone difference.

Also, on a purely practical level, I don't know about those of you in other countries, but here in Australia we have download limits, and some of us don't have enough broadband to spend hours a day on Second Life ....

There was definitely one nation that made a big thing of moving to Second Life. I think it was Hanover ...

[Shyriath]

Ah, I hadn't considered the problem of bandwidth. (Considering how long I was stuck with dial-up, you'd think I'd be more sensitive to that...)

By download limits, you just talking about speed limitations, or an imposed cap on bandwidth usage?

[Malliki Tosha]

Hanover founded a colony in Second Life, which later broke off and formed a separate nation. But Hanover is retarded anyway...

I can't begin to tell you how much I dislike everything about this, except perhaps the first suggestion by Shy, namely using a Second Life colony as a gateway to the forum.

[Jess]

I've always dreamed about something like this.

[Shyriath]

*Admits to liking the idea of at least, say, Shirekeep being there and open to exploration*

Imagine Raynor's Keep towering above the city... the stately halls of the Landsraad, and the protest-choked square outside the front gate... the rotunda of the B0O0/\/\ist Temple, and the statues of the Gods, and the bas-reliefs of great and holy explosions throughout the ages... the Statue of Malarborty, its torch lifted high, bellowing at passersby... the crater-pocked landscape of the Lukedu Center for Exploding Arts...

[Harvey Steffke]

I already said my brief say in the chat tonight. If used purely as an advanced art program, I do not see the harm. But these would be empty buildings, devoid of purpose, much like Second Life would be an unnecessary and distracting facet likely to draw citizens away.

[Andreas the Wise]

Ah, I hadn't considered the problem of bandwidth. (Considering how long I was stuck with dial-up, you'd think I'd be more sensitive to that...)

By download limits, you just talking about speed limitations, or an imposed cap on bandwidth usage?

Like, if we use beyond whatever the download amount is for our plan, we either have to pay for the extra usage, or drop down to dial up speed.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Imagine Raynor's Keep towering above the city... the stately halls of the Landsraad, and the protest-choked square outside the front gate... the rotunda of the B0O0/\/\ist Temple, and the statues of the Gods, and the bas-reliefs of great and holy explosions throughout the ages... the Statue of Malarborty, its torch lifted high, bellowing at passersby... the crater-pocked landscape of the Lukedu Center for Exploding Arts...

Would we be allowed to just do that? Or would we have to earn enough in-game money to pay construction costs for all those palaces and statues and such?

[Bill3000]

I'm going to say no just because the main way to earn in game money in Second Life is stripping and cyber sex.

[Shyriath]

Would we be allowed to just do that? Or would we have to earn enough in-game money to pay construction costs for all those palaces and statues and such?

Construction, if done by oneself, is approximately free; the costly part is having land to put it on (we're talking actual dollars there, though). A small embassy wouldn't be too bad, maybe even one suitably grand building might be possible without too much of a strain; but putting together a whole city center would be serious money. That's where the whole thing kinda falls down. (There's also the learning curve of creating objects in-world, which I personally haven't mastered yet.)

Mind you, I've heard that it's possible to set up and host your own sims based on the same technology; it wouldn't be connected to the Second Life grid, but you should be able to do the same stuff without paying Linden Labs or having to subscribe to their rules, and you wouldn't worry about losing traffic to other locales. The downsides, of course, would likely be that you wouldn't gain much traffic either, and that you'd have to worry about server operation and maintenance and whatever costs are associated with those.

Incidentally, I would like to state unambiguously at this point that I have not had to resort to stripping or cybersex.

[Ryan]

I, personally, would find absolutely no use to this Second Life thing and think it's a waste of time and money.

No offense to Shyriath. But all I hear about is how people disappear into these virtual worlds and let this thing overtake their real lives. Very bad impression. Not to mention I don't like the thought of investing so much time into something where you have to pay for further upgrades and what-not.

I don't see why we can't bring back the concept of creating a virtual tour as part of the website. That wouldn't cost a penny.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

When Max finishes his big map of Shirekeep, I want to plug it into Bryce to try to make something 3D out of it.

[Harvey Steffke]

Ryan, for many years I had considered making something akin to my own FIoJ virtual tour for Shireroth, but one thing or another prevented me from doing so. I maintain however that it is an inherently good idea.

[Ryan]

I'll put that on my to-do list for MinInfo. Just as soon as I finish up the story for Lac Glacei (which is running behind...).

[Shyriath]

When Max finishes his big map of Shirekeep, I want to plug it into Bryce to try to make something 3D out of it.

YES.

[dr-spangle]

Boooo

Hanover using second life was apparently more deserving of best idea in 2008 than the forumlist was... (FNORDs)

[Malliki Tosha]

Nothing Hanover does is ever worthy of anything.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Yeah, but just you watch, five years from now some shmuck is going to be trying to resurrect it

[Malliki Tosha]

Is Hanover dead? I thought the band uniform bros. are still at it?

[Shyriath]

(Finishing up the amateur analysis... I don't imagine it'll make a huge difference, but I did say I'd finish it, so here it is.)

A Micronational Embassy

The use of Second Life as a platform for promoting an out-of-world cause, entity, or activity is not new. Utterly aside from the fact that several other micronations have apparently had the idea of a virtual embassy, the same is true of a number of macronations, most famously Sweden. Real-world schools and universities have Second Life campuses; businesses hold seminars in-world. Despite a considerable amount of overhyping the prospects of this, the possibility nonetheless remains that a small presence in Second Life could prove beneficial as a way of increasing visibility to the public.

Since advertising in frequently-traveled areas tends to be prohibited, restricted, or otherwise controlled by various landowners or regional rules (and possibly Linden Labs guidelines as well), the tactic of advertising solely in public areas would probably be of limited success.. Like others with the same idea, the cause of a micronation would be best served by the founding of at least a small permanent facility showcasing that nation’s symbols and achievements: a virtual embassy.

The first thing required for this is at least one citizen or agent of the micronation in question to be a resident of Second Life, with a paid premium account, and to be willing to do the work of building and maintaining the embassy. It is possible to get a basic Second Life account for free, but the second requirement for an embassy is land; and because an individual cannot own land (with the possible exception of Private Regions) without having a premium account, one will be required. Premium accounts come with a small amount of free land, which may be sufficient for the embassy’s purposes if the citizen in question is not already using it for zir purposes; if not, the purchase of additional land may be required, and both citizen and micronation must decide how to handle this.
Assuming that sufficient land has been obtained, a facility must then be constructed. This can be done from scratch, if desired, with the citizen assembling basic building-block shapes, or “prims”, into a structure and its contents. There are advantages here in cost and customization, as the resulting building costs little or nothing to construct (the main cost would be in obtaining textures: all objects in SL have a default wooden appearance when created) and is limited more or less only by imagination, skill at building, and prim count. (For technical reasons, each Region can contain a limited number of prims, and it is considered appropriate to limit oneself to a number of prims proportional to one’s land.) On the other hand, it is also possible to buy premade buildings; going this route is generally quicker, easier, and somewhat more predictable, but generally more expensive and not as customizable.

Given land and a building, it would then be possible to set up a display for the micronation. Images can be imported and placed as posters or billboards; three-dimensional sculptures of various artifacts could be created (again, some skill will be needed here). Objects can be modified to dispense “notecards”, plaintext documents often used for informational purposes in SL.

The remaining obstacle to publicity would be the drawing of attention to the embassy. Depending on the siting of the land parcel, foot traffic may not be common nearby, and therefore obtaining some kind of advertising may be necessary. The specifics of classifieds are still uncertain to me, but it may be that it is not necessary to pay for them. Another form of advertising, which is entirely free, is the ability for a resident to choose “picks” for their profile: a list of places they deem important or favorable. It is common for business owners to include their own business locations as picks as a form of advertising, because it not only means that other residents investigating their profiles will see the listing, but makes any keywords placed in the associated comments available to Second Life’s search function.

Astride the Boundaries

One could also conceive of the possibility of a forum-based micronation whose presence in Second Life was more substantial than for advertising purposes. Having a virtual subdivision to participate in might prove more of a draw to Second Life residents than a forum would, and a successful one could make an enormous impact on total citizenship. An influx of citizens already well-versed in the skills of working with the virtual world, too, would make it easier to create more impressive buildings and landscapes, in a possible feedback effect on citizenship. Such a dual mode of existence, however, would open up a number of possible stress points on a micronation.
One of the most obvious would be cost; small amounts of land, enough for a few buildings, can be obtained for a reasonable price, but to support a substantial number of citizens it would probably be necessary to obtain a full Region. Regions can be obtained in two forms: one is essentially a scaled-up version of obtaining smaller parcels, and would comprise a 256m x 256m Region on the Mainland, while the other, termed a Private Region, would be isolated from the Mainland by stretches of impassable ocean areas; these have advantages in terms of control over the land and access to it. Both kinds have monthly fees in the region of hundreds of US dollars; the Private Regions are not only more expensive in this respect, but also require a setup fee of US$1000. This would be entirely separate from considerations of any building costs. As previously mentioned, Region owners have devised various ways of dealing with this reality, especially the hosting of business and shopping areas on their land, but regional self-support could not be guaranteed.

A second stress point would be the technical disconnect between the forum and the virtual subdivision. Second Life’s default viewer contains a built-in web browser, so a user wishing to keep track of SL and the forum at the same time would be capable of doing so; nonetheless, the average user would have to maintain separate accounts for each, with usernames and passwords being harmonized only if the user makes a point of doing so zirself. (Some SL-associated fora make a point of having users indicate their Second Life name. Also related to this difficulty is the fact that while a Second Life user may choose nearly any first name zie wants, last names must be chosen from a periodically changing list; forum users wishing to migrate to SL would be faced with possibility of not carrying over the name they are most associated with.)

For administrators, the task might become even more complicated. The forum and the land would have to be administered as separate units, and maintaining a continuity between them would require extensive efforts on the parts of the administrators (someone banned in the forum, for example, would not automatically be banned from the Second Life subdivision).

A third point of stress would result from any demographic imbalances between the forum and the SL subdivision. On the one hand, the subdivision might attract few residents, or else attract them directly to the forum without inducing anyone to spend time in the subdivision itself; then the subdivision becomes a waste of effort and money. On the other hand, the subdivision might attract many people; but if they draw too many from the forum, the forum would cease to be a productive part of the micronation. Otherwise, even if the forum maintained its own population, it might become vastly outnumbered by the population in Second Life. It is worth asking, especially if mobility was low between the two halves, whether the population in Second Life would remain satisfied with the center of their micronation being outside the virtual world, and whether their influence might either turn the micronation into a primarily Second Life-based one, or pull the in-world population toward a declaration of independence. It is worth noting that in the latter situation, especially if the population had the support of the owner of the region, little could be done to prevent secession.

A micronation choosing to go this route while maintaining the forum as its cultural center, therefore, would require as high a mobility and integration between the forum and Second Life as technology will allow, including close cooperation between forum and SL administrators, the encouragement of citizens from each portion to visit the other, and possibly an official policy limiting immigration levels to maintain parity between the two halves. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that the situation would be too unstable to maintain, and that the micronation in question would either split or default to a mostly-forum or mostly-virtual form.

Full Virtual

The transition to a mostly or fully virtual micronation offers both greater rewards and greater risks than only a partial entry into Second Life. Unlike a micronation or micronational subdivision started in the virtual world, an existing micronation entering in fully formed has the advantage of beginning there with a dedicated population with the motivation to remain on the micronation’s land and participate in its life. With attention focused mostly on the micronation’s holdings in Second Life, the population would also not be required to divide its attention between two environments (though the forum would nonetheless remain useful as an alternate communications system), with all the problems that would entail, and new immigrants would be encouraged by the knowledge that they would not be required to divide their attention either. Micronational government and social cohesion would be easily handled with the creation of in-world groups, and the organization of events at which citizens and others could be “physically” present. Nonetheless, there would be significant issues to be considered.

The first, of course, would be that of managing the transition in the first place. All citizens would be required to obtain Second Life accounts, and would have to deal with the transition to a name that they may not find ideal and cannot change at will; and once present, citizens would have to be taught the basics of existence within the virtual world; as mentioned previously, at least one Region’s worth of land would be required, and its terrain and buildings laid out and constructed, and the land kept maintained, and a method for paying for all of it devised; the specifics of how to translate the existing government to the Second Life group structures would have to be finalized. And there would be the question of those who, for whatever reason, cannot use Second Life. If the option to remain entirely in the forum was permitted, would it nonetheless degenerate into second-class citizenship? Would such citizens become cut off from events?

The second category of challenges would be those of the environment of Second Life itself. Existing in a world where anyone can visit nearly anywhere easily means that many people could find and choose to join a successful micronation; but it also means that an unsuccessful one is capable of hemorrhaging population at a frightening rate. Like other entities, a micronation in Second Life would no longer be competing solely with other micronations for attention in the relatively protected environment of a myriad of messageboards, but with a whole variety of attractions and events. The existence of large and thriving communities of various kinds in the virtual world suggests that it is possible to persist against the odds, but in order to do so it would be essential for the nation to be successfully competitive for peoples’ attention.

For it to continue as more than a miniscule gathering, it would have to make its mark in the world as an entity worth investigating; it would have to excel in one way or another, to be interesting and entertaining. With a large enough following, a micronation could attract merchants and a local economy, or money in the form of donations, to be self-sustaining on a large piece of land; it could attract skilled in-world builders, or sculptors, or artists, to help build the nation to glorious expectations. Other entities have, in fact, done this. But in the event of a micronational failure, something to cause support to drop off, or the local economy to slip, the situation could worsen rapidly if there were no longer sufficient money to maintain the nation’s territory, sending the entire enterprise intoa death spiral. In a forum, mediocrity and obscurity are merely serious; for a micronation aspiring to any kind of size in Second Life, they would be catastrophic.

Epilogue

My own interest in this, I think, has more to do with visualization than anything. Imagination is a fine thing, but being in Second Life has given me an opportunity to see things that I'd always wanted to see but had known they would never actually happen; much of it consists of dreams made real, or at least as close to real as you're ever going to get with a lot of dreams. And there are a lot of things in Shireroth that I would love to see realized in that way.

But, of course, as others have said, there are other ways of doing that; and as I think I have indicated above, there are indeed likely to be considerable risks involved with more complete participation in Second Life. This is NOT to say that I think it is impossible; if it were, any number of entities in-world would not exist as they do. But it does demand of a micronation a rate of success and a number of habits and ways of dealing with issues that they are not currently equipped to deal with.

I think I will spend some of my time in-world investigating whether Hanover has made any traces in Second Life. But it may be instructive to note that in my searches on the general subject of micronations, I don't remember them popping up in passing.