Popular CBS crime-based science-fiction series, CSI:NY aired last night across North America, featuring Second Life as a major feature of a two-part story, the second part of which is due to air in February 2008.
I hate spoilers, so we'll skip talking about the story. Second Life, as it is portrayed, is given a pretty reasonable treatment - the skepticism of many of the core characters is not unusual - however, this is not the Second Life you know, just as CSI is not the forensics department you'll find if you go downtown.
Taking place in some unspecified future, perhaps 10 to 15 years (or more!) on, the Second Life you see is the Second Life of the future. Faster, smoother, with altered basic mechanics. CSI:NY isn't a series about the present-day, and the Second Life they visit isn't one you'd have access to for at least a decade.
Once you've got that down, you can relax and enjoy the show. Second Life gets some grudging respect, and you can see at least one imagining of the future of your favourite virtual world.
1. Oh, being fair, Tateru... there are more similarities to the "real" Second Life than what I have expected.
First, everybody laughed at the "no lag" on what CSI:NY shows. It's not true. Take a close look at the scene where they fight on the arena. On several shots you'll see the supersmooth 30-FPS-rendering dropping down to 12-15. Pretty honest of Zuiker & the Sheep.
Then, the images are crystal-clear and always very high-quality, no missing images, no things seen rezzing, etc., and, yes, most of the times with 30 FPS. So what? A friend of mine just bought a Toshiba laptop yesterday, and he gets *200* FPS out of SL, except on extra-laggy zones. He didn't even bother to tweak his Performance settings. Most people don't. To get a SL as good-looking as CSI:NY shows it, you just need a) a good computer; b) know how to use it *properly*; and c) know how to tweak your performance in SL. Granted, you won't get that from the average user. But the SL console used by the detectives on the show is supposed to have been tweaked by a *computer geek* who is also a detective... and the episode even goes on to show SL running on a "regular" laptop somewhere on a garage. Sure, it runs smoothly, but as smoothly as you can expect from a high-end, recently-bought laptop.
For narrative effect, the setup process of SL was much simplified on TV — but the key elements are there: logging to a web site, picking an avatar name, selecting an avatar, changing appearance. Sure, changing appearance looks WAY faster on TV, but... on a 40-minute-episode, you can't show your audience someone carefully tweaking an avatar for half an hour, it's pointless and doesn't help the narrative (people also check-in on airports in 15 seconds on TV...).
Ok, sure, so you don't get those gorgeous skins that are shown on the episode... again, for fairness, although the whole scene takes *seconds*, you get to know the essentials: 1) A newbie look won't get you any credibility in SL (very true), so it honestly tells the audience that you'll start with a newbie look (which is *shown*). 2) you can get custom skins (in fact, if you log in through the CSI:NY website, you WILL get a custom skin — granted, not as nice as the one on the movie). 3) To be even more honest, the "quick avatar makeover" is done on a *shop*, where it's *expected* that people buy whole outfits that *look great*.
All in all... this takes perhaps a 10 second scene on TV... but it depicts things pretty accurately and honestly, taking into account that it doesn't matter a lot for the narrative — still, you get your infodump, and it's educational. Zuiker could have gotten rid of all that if he wished, for the purpose of getting the action rolling.
Sure, some effects are cuter on TV — like teleporting (the ugliest effect that LL ever came up with!). Sure, we know we can't yet hold hands with other avatars without an attachment — but the "physical avatars" are in development since June 2006, it's only a question of months (not decades!) until they become available, and things will, indeed, look like what we saw on the episode.
But there is more. You get to learn about the economy with Linden dollars, and how not only products are sold, but information and access to private clubs. You get to learn that there are lots of undercultures, subcultures, and communities in SL. You even learn *some* jargon (like "tp", or what calling cards are worth for) — not the whole dictionary, of course, but a handful of things.
The biggest "reality distortion" comes from tracking down people iRL through their IP addresses. Although a recently revealed exploit has, indeed, made this tracking down possible, I'm pretty sure that nobody at the Sheep was aware of it when those scenes were shot. Also, the only way to infect your computer with a virus through Second Life is by targetting the QuickTime subsystem (the only "hole" where anything from the "outside world" can enter your computer through Second Life). But "infecting" your SL client using that method is hardly possible, so these are the only points where "fiction" has displaced reality on the show.
They didn't even bother to do lipsyncing on the avatars when they use voice chat! I was actually *expecting* that — it's easy to do on post-production — but although they clearly overestimate the use of voice chat (no one on the episode uses the keyboard except for moving around, which is not yet so commonplace in SL — although, granted, the new users on the CSI:NY islands take voice chat for granted), they didn't "distort" reality to make avatars lip-sync...
All in all, as I've said elsewhere (on my blog :) ), the CSI:NY episode is more "fair" and "closer to reality" on depicting Second Life, than, say, the way operating systems work — or how their "magic forensic lab" takes and analyses samples. SL, on CSI:NY, is not "decades in the future" — they just happen to have good computers, well-tuned Preferences, and overuse voice chat :)
Posted at 10:52PM on Oct 26th 2007 by Gwyneth Llewelyn