Strange, though it may seem, there’s something of an allure to rooftops. Perhaps it’s the fact that being on a rooftop takes you away from the hustle and bustle of the world below, or maybe it’s the different perspective one gains from a vantage point that’s high above our normal field of view, or it could simply be that it’s a special place that not everyone can gain access to.
Whatever the reason, rooftop gardens, restaurants and viewpoints, even those that are just utilitarian spaces, seem to appeal to many. Certainly, I’ve always associated a certain romance with rooftops, perhaps inspired by movies and American sitcoms where the coolest parties and gatherings always took place on apartment block rooftops, or were the preferred location for chase scenes featuring desperate criminals leaping from roof to roof, doggedly pursued by determined cops; they can conjure up feelings of gothic intrigue and darkness, such as the Parisian roofops around Notre Dame, inhabited by the forbidding form of Quasimodo; and, let’s not forget Rutger Hauer’s iconic rooftop ‘tears in rain’ monologue from Bladerunner… Inspiring stuff!
Last night I threw an improptu rooftop gig. Normally, I’d open up one of the many purpose-built music venues I have secreted away in my inventory, but I’m a bit short on prims (nothing new there), and it means messing about with clearing things away and setting stuff up, and on this occasion I decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle to dig out a build for a couple of hours, only to pack it all away again afterwards. Besides which, what’s the point of having parcel space if you’re not going to put it to good use?
The space in question was the roof of the Neon Dreamz store. It’s a pretty cool setting anyway, surrounded by brightly-lit animated billboards, searchlights and an imposing military helicopter hovering directly overhead (just imagine if I was a real-life architect!). It struck me as the perfect spot to play some music, and I figured if a rooftop was good enough for The Beatles and U2, then it was blooming well good enough for Yours Truly! I think a good time was had by all!
If the truth be known, I’m a bit of a fan when it comes to virtual rooftops – so much so, that those with long memories, and who probably should get out a bit more if they do recall it, will know that it’s a topic I’ve written about in these pages, some 8 years previously. How time flies, when you’re having virtual fun! Even now, I can’t resist a good inworld rooftop exploration, particularly if it gives me an excuse to check out parts of cyberpunk and futuristic environments that may get missed by the casual explorer.
I am prone to wonder, at times, just how many casual explorers there are in SL these days? There are so many fascinating and compelling locations around the Grid, and yet wherever I go, I find they are almost always devoid of people. Those avatars that I do occasionally come across, tend to be of the ‘standing around, apparently doing nothing’ kind, or are clusters of green dots somewhere hidden in the sky, which has always seemed a bit odd to me – why build an amazing location, only to have events tucked away from the eye-candy, high in the sky (and probably in a boring, generic club that was bought off Marketplace)? Exploring SL just doesn’t seem to be the done thing any more, and when I talk to people inworld, I’m amazed at how many spend their time simply teleporting from store to store, or have never left the confines of their own home patch, which is often limited to 4 virtual walls.
Maybe exploring is a dying art, or perhaps my reputation precedes me and the minute I arrive on the scene, everybody else heads for the hills? Whatever the reason, I think that over the years – and I’m going to hate myself for saying this – SL has become more akin to a game than a virtual world. It hasn’t aged gracefully, in my opinion.
Before I get hunted down by virtual villagers wielding flaming torches and pitchforks, when I say SL has become more like a game, I mean a sort of ‘let’s go shopping, then dancing, followed trawling for hours around a massive, lag-ridden shopping event’ sort of game, which is honestly how I think many SL people, even a large number of even seasoned, old timers, have morphed into over time. Gone are the explorers, scripters, builders and dreamers, to be replaced by the shoppers and socialites, and much of the mystique, intrigue and fun of living and experiencing the virtual world seems to have gone with it. Regular readers will know that much of the blame for the lack of everyday avatars giving building and creating a try I tend to attribute to the advent of mesh, and the ever-more complex demands now being made in terms making things that people demand. That, along with the Lab constantly coming up with hairbrained ideas for ‘improving’ SL, which you need to be a rocket scientist to understand, let alone use, has pushed creativity to the margins of SL society, even to the extent that the majority of tools required to make decent items for inworld use are now firmly created within the realm of commercial applications outside of the viewer, necesitating skills, time and money, far beyond the means or interest of the casual SL user.
There was a time when, if you could rez a box, you could build and make cool stuff. That simply doesn’t come up to scratch any more, and the rollout of PBR materials will add another layer of complexity that most people can’t hope to grasp, or use. These days you need a technical dictionary just to explain the terminology for building for SL… How many of you, for example, have the slightest idea what a Blinn Phong reflection model is? Back in the day, you just bunged a texture on a prim, and it worked! And, now the Lab is bringing us client-side Lua scripting – which somewhere in the region of about 9 people, Grid-wide, will get really excited about, while the rest of us are still struggling to figure out how to make cool looking texture transitions in LSL! (Seriously, if you do know how to script texture transitions in pretty patterns, I’d love some pointers!)
This isn’t another of my doom and gloom rants about how SL has lost its way, (well, OK it is, a bit), but moreso an invitation to those who’ve lost some of their SL mojo to try to regain some of those lost arts of the good old days. Swap shopping for scripting, get into a silly gesture battle with a bunch of friends, drive a tank, or a unicycle or a unicornmobile around the roads of SL and see how many times you can crash! Dress up as a fish or a banana, fly for miles, go for a walk underwater… Do all those things that used to be such fun that have somehow been relegated to forgotten folders and never see the light of day any more. Have fun, have a blast and do all that stuff that you’d never do in the real world because the neighbours would complain!
Next time you log in, for a change why not TP off to a random spot on the map, find somewhere cool to look around, and get up on the rooftops to have a good old poke around?
Who knows?… You might bump into me up there!
s. x
Come meet me on the roof tonight, girl
Oh-ooh-oh-oh
How high is your low gonna go, girl?
Oh-ooh-oh-oh
Green Day – Meet Me On The Roof
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