Not Possible IRL: Aley Arai

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Privateer Island - It's getting better all the time

Lauren Weyland, our own investigative journalist - and in-house comedienne - who landed the interview with Aley Arai, alerted me yesterday to the fact that Aley hasn't been resting on her laurels... There have been some significant developments at Privateer Island, which is nearly twice as complex and built out as it was back in mid-January. I won't spoil your enjoyment and discovery path by revealing more details. Go explore by teleporting directly from here.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Aley's Privateer Island - Part II

I welcome this two part story by guest author Lauren Weyland because it sheds new light on both the work and its creator, Aley Arai. In Part I, (see the previous blogpost) Lauren has not yet met Aley, and provides an interesting rationale for all that she sees and learns... Now, in Part II, Lauren has spoken extensively with Aley, which both confirms and dramatically alters her initial speculations. Since this was an entirely different take on Privateer, I thought the photography should be, too, so I appealed to Flickr-fave Stephen Venkman who produced these exceptional captures of the sim. Altogether, I think we have one helluva story. - Bettina

By Lauren Weyland
all photography by Stephen Venkman

"i developed this sim like a sci-fi disneyland. Everything must serve a usable purpose to visitors. Every prim has to earn the right to be here.”

Soon after drafting Aley's Privateer Island - Part I, I spent nearly three and a half hours talking with Aley Arai. The first of the two conversations started out of the blue with Aley stating, “Planet Bob is developing nicely.”

Although she had accomplished so much with the build - a work of art in progress - she was still dreaming of the challenges that lay ahead with completing this sim. She had determined that Privateer would be leveled “if i discover a new way to create a deep vast space; the whole sim will be ripped out and redeveloped from scratch.” (sic) Aley used the term ‘procrastinate’ in regards to her building out some of the unfinished parts of the sim, as well as her lack of knowledge in how to make a future industrialized city based on New Detroit.

“I live for sillies,” said Aley, referring to her idea of making the truck stop floor phantom (at 600m altitude)

I showed her my draft for the first blogpost and she laughed saying she has dozens of close friends at NCI. She felt that her leaving the sim open to the public during all stages of development indicated that she was hardly reclusive. However, “I'm old, slow and cautious with people… with building I'm faster than a whole army.” “Should I change the blogpiece?” I asked. She replied in the negative, because, “stories must evolve!’

“So what is Privateer about?” I asked. The sim gets its name from “Wing Commander: Privateer.” She enlightened me on some old game genre called, ‘Space Traders,’ which apparently started with Elite and moved on to BBS’s, Tradewars 2000, and finally became Privateer. Privateer got a big boost with freelancers leading to the “behemoth of Eve Online.”

“The sim exists as a kind of a honorarium to the old space trader games,” which she plans to fully script in time. “This sim is to *moon* other SL developers who just make crap to get payed and don’t care about the art” (sic), something she compared to static content on the Internet being death.

I think many of us in Second Life realize that SL is probably the browser of the future, which will both do away with static content and also produce some of the horrid builds. We talked about the corporate sims which Aley finds have done something right in hiring experienced in-world developers. But, “unfortunately those developers got greedy and gave them mostly crap product knowing they wouldn't know crap from good.”

Many times during our conversations I found myself laughing at her Aley-isms, such as ‘bling=stupid,” and, “i have a psychiatrist, but really go to my house-cat for meaningful life advice.” She dislikes the default plywood even more the bling.

I wish I could paraphrase what comes next so I will just recant what Aley said:

"What happens when you set the material definitions is the prim, or root prim in a connected object, takes on some properties of it, like sound on collision, and minor ways it behaves in physics. If you bump into any object and it's textured to NOT be wood, if it sounds like wood it means the builder is a lazy poohead :).

Yes I'm mean, but only about professional builders. When you create in a virtual world you control every aspect, every last atom, to a degree that will show you why God is now on a long vacation. You control the sounds and physics of all objects, you control the ambiance and energies that fill the virtual air. Lights and shadows, colors and motion, if you ignore any one of the details you have a kind of half finished feel. When you find a sim where all the details have carefully been catered too, you will have a strange instinctual reaction. The *something is missing* feeling will vanish."

She is also dismayed with the Lindens, saying they have now gone against all they once stood for. She said, “I openly challenged them several times over the fact that the whole entire reason for creating mainland sims was public access and transport, yet they don’t even make the gesture now of setting aside areas for roadways when earlier they actually did public works.” (sic)

According to Aley, a town is ‘official’ with a population of about 10,000 people (see my blog on civilization and society), and you need one civil employee for every 50 people, but SL has only 9 Lindens for 50,000 people on line. She feels the system itself can only really handle 30,000 regular users and that all the original developers of SL are now gone.

Aley further believes that “evolution only works when the animal needs to fit its environment. Mankind changes its environment to fit its need. This is a big reason why animals are inherently saner then any human.” It seems her cat is always happy, always cheerful and that anyone seeking true happiness must learn from her cat. I concur. In my opinion, humanity could gain a lot from napping-a-lot therapy, and chasing plastic bags around really can give you an adrenaline high.

Getting back to Privateer, I mentioned that the cave tunnels remind me of Myst and Star Wars and Doom... all games Aley has played. She cited Pot Healers Adventures as another source of inspiration. Mars on Privateer is Aley’s rendition of Robinson Crusoe, and she challenged me to look around and explain to her where the food, water, oxygen came from on such a planet as Mars.

Although I didn’t get the soap - Borax can be found on Mars - she did posit for me my idea that the earth had been destroyed and the spaceship was first marooned in space and then had crashed below. The oxygen came from the rusted iron ore… Mars being red because of the vast amounts of iron ore, and looking pink from earth because of the CO2 in the upper atmosphere which reflects back the ground colors. So, to get oxygen you select the most rust and heat it in the electric oven (see windmill generating electricity). This releases 02 and you bottle it. There’s plenty of wind on Mars to turn the windmill, and the water is in the air but you need to condense it out. “Mars is about survival and what happens if a civilization can’t make it,” said Aley.

Apparently Aley watched a half season of ‘Survivors’ and threw her TV out saying, “those guys are total morons.” We talked about global warming and the environment and she echoed the same beliefs I have on the subject saying, “global warming is big time scape goat. And forest fires and/or a single active volcano puts out many many many more times the Co2 then human industry does. It’s just more of the human need to sound like there bigger then the earth,” Aley quipped. Aley also stated that she has given up on the real world and makes her world in Second Life. Speaking for myself, I’ve often said that if Descartes were alive today, he would say, “I think, therefore I digitize.”

You may have noticed the green outlined box in several locations. One of these is in the racetrack area. This box is three dimensional showing where each person in the sim is. Aley watches the movement of the visitors and notes that so many never descend but instead congregate on about 10% of the overall sim, high up at the truck stop. Many leave never knowing, “there is a whole universe here.”

Another Aley-ism: “If you live and breathe only for the art, you’re happy and nothing else matters.”

If you have visited Privateer, in-depth, you know the upper part (the landing zone) is a “Truck Stop.” Below is the ‘Hotel California’ playing the Eagles song. There are Spaceships. There are the planets (Planet Bob, New Detroit, DaMoooon). The Borg station. An empty city, a satire on SL. Mars, the tunnels, the command center where the Jellyfish lives and so much more.

Aley reduces lag in the sim by using ‘distance and occlusion.’ Auto return has been set to 256 seconds since she ‘likes binary numbers.’ I mention this because in my prior piece I said I believed Aley doesn’t do or build without a purpose. This one act I can hang my hat on.

Some may have discovered another feature of Privateer, the SL Kessel Run. (See Millennium Falcon and Hans Solo). Aley has made the SL Kessel about 50 times in a ship she has built. Her fastest time was nineteen minutes. It’s the longest straight away (before the two new mainlands were connected) that you can possibly fly in a physics vehicle.

Per Aley, “It's fraught with terrible dangers and if your a stubborn pilot it's the biggest challenge you can get in SL. This sort of challenge is like walking along a fence post over a sewer, you will fall in and have to restart dozens of times. It's boring and frustrating. The challenge is in your self belief and self reliance that it has been done before and you can do now. People complain that there are no challenges in SL to make it give the fun interests of a game. But thats because they’re to lazy to try and make the games themselves in SL. And SL is what the users make of it. Sadly that means miles and miles of garbage and mediocrity.” (sic)

Aley's Privateer Island - Part I

There are umpteen posts already on the blogosphere about one of Second Life’s hottest builds, Privateer Island; no less than three, that I am aware of, that have been authored by NPIRLers. There's Hamlet Au of New World Notes' round-up, Hotspur O'Toole's thoughtful adventure and Lem Skall's appreciative and illustrated review. Why on earth - or Mars, in this case - would we add ourselves to the mix? I welcome this two part story by guest author Lauren Weyland because it sheds light on both the work and its creator, one of the newest builders on the grid. In Part I, Lauren has not yet met Aley, and provides an interesting rationale for all that she sees and learns... Later, in Part II (coming right up), Lauren has spoken extensively with Aley, which both confirms and dramatically alters her initial speculations.

By Lauren Weyland

Aley Arai is a reclusive woman who created a sim that narrates a story. Neither of these things are immediately apparent to the casual visitor. Like Emily Dickinson – one of the greatest American poets - Aley lives an “unusual life of self imposed social seclusion." And, like Dickinson, Aley's work "has an undeniable capacity to move and provoke."

Privateer Island – Aley’s place – seems to represent how she feels isolated and alone in her skin. Aptly named Privateer, the build is set in the future. The earth has been almost completely destroyed and there is just an outpost in the desert where one survivor lives with a twisting tornado swirling dust in the distance. Aley’s puzzle is here.

At the very highest point, we find ourselves in a space station. The detail throughout the sim and her extraordinary textures combine to form digital art and fundamental communication.

Fly off the upper deck into the galaxies and then down to the Hotel California. Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place…

Listen to the Eagle's entire song and what they are saying, "…and I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell." Aley's Hotel California sits empty waiting for guests (don't forget to ring the bell at the front desk).

Plenty of room at the Hotel California. Any time of year, you can find it here…

Down below the earth are portals which are not yet working but apparently will require an understanding of Aley's mind to navigate. And even though she is reclusive, she invites us to discover her world… even enticing us with a space suit which has a smiley face on it. "Aley doesn't do anything without a reason," my friend Sloan exclaimed as we explored.

There's a racetrack with a portal which leads to tunnels which lead to even more portals. Above the racetrack is an empty city with only a large work station… apparently both a satirical comment on Second Life and another life form. Walk into the miniature Second Life (Aley invites us without actually telling us) and see our metaverse with a macabre view.

Aley is brilliant. I'd be a fool not to wonder about her mind. As Sloan said, “to spend a day with her should be mandatory for sentient beings,” and I replied, “We are here spending time with her. So many clues she has left.”

And like Dickinson, although a recluse, she invites us into her mind. Emily Dickinson did it with words in the form of poetry. Aley does it with the poetry of the day, virtual reality telling.

Teleport directly from here.