Textual Poaching of Digital Texts: Hacking and Griefing as Performative Narratives of Second Life
MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, 2007
Second Life, a rapidly growing massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), provides one of the most attractive Web 2.0 platforms for content creation. The open-source environment provided by Second Life, which allows the metaverse to be built by its users, not only attracts a considerable amount of hackers who are able to appropriate and poach the textual space by creating hacks that make the world behave in unforeseen ways, but also provides an environment ripe for second-hand textual poaching in which these legitimate hacks are appropriated for other purposes such as griefing. While most griefing (activities that make the game less enjoyable for other residents) is possible within the parameters of the system, and does not require hacking, it sometimes includes activities that require appropriating the scripts created by legitimate hackers. Using the arguments made by textual critics (such as Anna Gunder and Katherine Hayles), I will argue in my presentation that the activities of these groups become performative acts that alter the textual space to form the text and that ultimately elicit different meanings of Second Life.
Moreover, these activities instigate other acts that are equally performative, such as generating narratives created by other residents who actively participate in blogs and forums to discuss these events. Some of these events become the subject of machinima movies and spoof stories that are collectively created and published in prank sites like Second Life Safari. Hence, in-world poaching generates more poaching in other electronic platforms that are outside of Second Life, and, as such, they give birth to multi-platform narratives in tune with the era of media convergence.
Following Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins's models of reading, my paper will investigate the latest hack of libsecondlife, the CopyBot, a tool which is able to temporarily copy textures and avatars and thus became a source of griefing for content creators and elicited multi-platform narratives created by other residents.
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