IT'S LIKE SPAM, BUT THEN FROM ME!

The secret world of Coolz0r Courier, avatar – conqueror of a virtual world.

When I joined SecondLife back in 2006, I was a man on a mission. At that time I was working for the i-merge brandbreeding agency and I had been given the opportunity to explore the market possibilities in the virtual world, on a timeline juuuust ahead of the big popularity boom. It took me a couple of days and nights to blend in and get acquainted with the customs and skills needed to maneuver around, but I had luck meeting the right talented people to help me out. I bought my first piece of land and started building an office. After a short while I managed to get together some prospects too: the in-world launch of a clothing store and fashion collection, event promotion activities for a couple of popular venues and the advertising for a real estate office.

The virtual i-Merge agency was located in the center of SecondLife (SL) on the biggest main island, in a high-traffic region of the grid. I set up video streams with real-life client showcases, installed greeters and the likes and set up a meeting room in the sky for private business conversations. All things set and ready to kick off, I got pulled off the case by a creative director who didn’t see things the same way I did. But being a junior, all you can do is mumble a bit and move on. Two weeks later, Leo Burnett planted a stupid mystical tree with golden apples and they were headline news all over adverland for being the first agency to be present in Second Life. Present. Phuh. We were waaaaay past being present already. We were so ready the ‘being present’ was just a mere dot at the horizon. That’s how ready we were. But no.

Having gained some insights in the virtual world, it’s residents and economics, I quickly realized this was so much more than just a game. So I went looking for more land on nice locations. I sold the big plot near the central lake for four times the money I invested to purchase it and bought 7 other plots with the newly gained revenue, which I let rest for two weeks and then sold them with a 45% profit margin. I kept doing it for quite a while and got pretty virtually rich, since SL was hot news every on TV stations, in magazines online and offline. I started my Strawberry experiment, a place that would be totally free, no advertising and peace of mind. I place to call home for everyone. The first Strawberry was a 12K sqm plot, and at the time of the Vista event, it featured a big virtual Atomium. But I needed more. I still had enough money to buy a simulator and join the group of sim owners in SL, which is where most of the residents will never be. After all, translated to real money, a sim sets you back a cool $1900 USD for set up and an additional $295 USD a month for maintenance. Real money for virtual fun. And yes, admittedly, it gives you a great feeling to receive an empty world and start to shape it from scratch into a wonderful creation that comes close to paradise. I won’t say ‘god-like’, but it’s near ‘divine’ for sure.

So I bought my first sim, which is a big virtual surface of 65536 m² that can hold roughly 15K of objects, and I named it Strawberry. I divided the land in plots and attracted buyers with the tropically themed tiki islands and cosy bars and chat corners everywhere. For a long time, Second Life would actually be part of my real life for a large chunk of the day. Like 6 hours a day average. I’ve had popular (night) clubs where I streamed music that I mixed myself at home, live with Virtual DJ over a ShoutCast server, straight into a virtual club where staff was working for me while dancers chatted up the crowd and made tips. Avatars from all over the real world would drop by to party, to hang out virtually and chat up with people they met through the game. Theme nights, guest DJs, dancers, bartenders…

It’s amazing how real things become if you realize on a Sunday night you have an hour left before the party starts and 2 of the regular dancers haven’t logged on yet and the other 3 still need their custom made outfits for the night, the sim is still rebooting and the shoutcast server slot you rented is still occupied by a DJ who wanted to play some encores at his gig. And don’t make me tell you about all these times Linden Lab (owners of Second Life) decided to go all ’scheduled update’ on the entire server park, right on that Sunday. Choas! The horror!

After a while I bought a second sim, which I named Peachez, to match with Strawberry and I made islands for rent with very cool houses my -at that time- stunning associate decorated, patio furniture included. People came to live there, and cross sections of life would happen all over my islands. People would get virtual dream weddings, be virtual pregnant, adopt virtual kids, get virtual divorced and go shopping and partying all the time. Just like in real life, gossip and treason were as present as the people. As soon as someone logged off, all ducks were goose. (or loose, whatever) -

In the mean time, real life moved on and I got networked in the community well enough (apparently) to get contacted a couple of times for a lecture or keynote about the phenomenon ‘Second Life’ and the marketing opportunities it brought with it. After a couple of lectures I got contacted by a reporter and they made a documentary about it for a prime-time show on national tv (the clip is in Flemish), just shortly before I bought my first sim:

Meanwhile I started working for Microsoft and it was just at the spectacular launch of what back then promised to be a spectacular operating system. I got contacted to coordinate the Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch in Second Life. So I teamed up with 15 club owners from all over the grid and we streamed the concert of Lords of Acid, which was planned as the grand finale of the Belgian launch at the Brussels’ famous Atomium, live to all these clubs, reaching out to thousands of people, though only a few hundred really tuned in live (the branded media players and ad signs were placed a week in advance, and we did a re-broadcast a few weeks later). Rambla took care of the live-streaming, captured from the PA and converted into quicktime format so it could be sent to Second Life. Because I was working for Microsoft, One Agency got hired as ad agency for this particular campaign, to cover all the things I couldn’t and so much more. I was with a bunch of bloggers we invited at the event in the Atomium, plugged into a network, watching the stream in-world from the booth of the PA. I think we had a 20 second delay after converting and buffering. In any way, we were awesomely live. Here’s how the event looked like in real life:

Later on I got called in for Microsoft’s big Imagine Cup event in Second Life. When I was in Seattle I met up with the other Enthusiast Evangelists (my job title), and that’s where I learned that on10, the tech enthusiasts team – an offspring from Channel9, actually owned a sim already in SL, but they didn’t do anything with it. I got granted admin rights over the server and started shaping the sim to prep it for the big Imagine Cup. I needed some decent support in creating all the dedicated content, so I found some budget for an agency. This time I opted for Nazooka, at that time and now more than ever a very upcoming agency that specialized in 3D interactive avatars. I hired an in-world photgrapher named Looker Lumet, one of the few people I actually met in real life as well. You can check out the set of pics on his Flickr page. Not so much earlier, Visual Studio island launched. Another big moment in the virtual world, and another sign hat there must be ’something more’. I hooked up with Zain Naboulsi, Microsoft’s Virtual Worlds Evangelist, I kid you not.

Zain and I talked a lot, and we both felt strongly connected with the splintered dev groups in Second Life. People can join groups (clubs, tribes, however you want to call it), so they have group meetings and activities as well. We saw a great opportunity to team up with a bunch of wonderful and very motivated people and actually kicked-off structured in-world developer meetings with screencasts and speakers. That’s how the Second Life .Net User Group was born. Visual Studio island got rebooted as Microsoft island and today still serves as a meeting point for developers.

And then things fainted a little and I stepped back from SL. Real life consumed more and more of my time, I moved to a new jobrole within Microsoft. I sold my sims, cashed in for what they were worth and kind of abandoned my virtual little dude. Time passed, and I occasionally would dive into SL just to say hi to a couple of dear friends, but I was homeless – in theory. Something got messed up with my credit card and the emails for reminders would be sent to the gmail address I lost the password from, which sent the password reset email to another account that no longer existed either, but who thinks about that when they sign up for an email account? So my avatar got unplugged from the system because I didn’t pay, and I lost all my assets, friendslist, money, skins and clothing, objects, scripts… everything was gone. Tabula rasa. The only thing I had left was my name.

Then after a while I got contacted by this demoiselle from Switzerland who I’ve known for almost my entire Second Life and goes by the alias of Lena Wunderle. We owned adjacent land plots on my very first property and we’ve maintained a somewhat distant relationship. Until the day she wanted to talk about a job offer in Zurich. Things at Microsoft were going in the wrong direction (economical crisis and all that) and I was looking for other opportunities. All expenses paid I hopped on the plane to Zurich and after some business talks, she expressed how much she missed my old sims where she could reside ever so quietly. She offered me to contract me to design the ultimate sim for her that combined the best things from the best sims. The best sim ever, as technologically advanced as Second Life allowed it, as gorgeous as the best creators and builders around could build it. At first I refused, and I kept refusing for quite some time. But after another visit to Zurich and a splendid dinner in Sala Of Tokyo (in my opinion the best sushi restaurant in the world) I wholeheartedly agreed and signed up for the idea.

I tuned up Mr. Courier, my avatar, and became a roaming Samurai loner while shaping the sim, before I reconnected with old buddies, designers, builders, scripters and coders and gathered them all for this big plan. They delivered a respectable job and achieved unseen things, custom designed. An amazing experience both on land and under water, in the air and in space. And that’s where my Second Life ends. Today, I just live on one of the most beautiful sims I’ve ever resided at, roughly an hour a week, just to chat up with a few people. Pacific breezes push my vessel between tropical and oriental themed islands that bring me joy, while up in the sky I have a movie theatre that’s fully Star Trek themed, with an airport on top of it. And there’s dozens and dozens of fun things to do. But you’ll have to find that out for yourself when you ever decide to come explore Smilla(*), the paradise.

Below are some pictures from another really talented person I met, : Kynne Llewellyn. She made the official sim pictures that are posted in the welcome center. I’ve selected a couple of nice impressions from her work. This is how ‘Smilla’ looks like (some photographic altering has been applied):

If there is any other location I dare to suggest, one you definitely need to have seen if you’re into Second Life and walk around with a virtual you… it has to be my dear friend Harry’s ‘Leonard Cohen Club’
You can find it at Shadow Vale (136, 204, 24). If you had no home yet, you have one now.

So what is it about Second Life that makes you stick to it? For me it’s the few people I have left in my chatbox, the names I could remember after I hadn’t logged in for months. The people I started to care about and talked with, partied with, meditated with,… After the rebirth of my avatar, I looked at things differently. Being an experienced resident in a n00b body with an empty inventory is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I needed the fresh start, and it made me step back and realize how much ballast I was carrying along. It gave me a chance to maintain my inventory and refuse a lot of things. And I reconnected with my ‘new’ old friends. I might not be in-world much, but I know anytime I log in and one of them’s online, we can chill a bit and go explore some new sims while catching up. #

Before my visit to Linden Graveyard I had over 200 contacts, and really, about 90% were people I met somewhere, spent a bit of time with and then moved on. But we never spoke again. They’d just be there online, doing their thing and minding their business like I was mine. But apparently a short functional relationship was the only thing it ever was. Those are the people with whom you never really ‘connected’. I couldn’t keep up with all of them and it had been bothering me for quite a while already. So now I have a few dozen of contacts, and each and everyone of them are people I actually enjoy being with or talking to. It really made my Second Life better not having to care about so much troubles of other people I barely know. Yes, there are some people I still need to find again, but I guess whatever needs to happen will happen eventually, and no doubt we’ll hook up again. And I think that’s what it’s about for me. It’s my world. My Imagination. I decide what’s in it and what’s not. And if you find people you get along with, it can only make the experience more remarkable.
This way I just need to care about those who are dear to me, and most of them have connected on Facebook or other social channels as well. That’s when you merge the two worlds. At that point, your virtual life made sense.
Mine does.

(*) Smilla is the name of the cat from the Swiss demoiselle who’s also the proprietor of the virtual location.

Update: ..and even these things didn’t last. Weird how some people are so unpredictable. Well hey. It was fun while it lasted. I have my memories.