September 11 in Second Life
By David Cassel
When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, Odin Wright was just three blocks away. Six years later, he’s constructed an amazing tribute to the victims — in the virtual world of Second Life.
“He lost family members and friends of friends,” Reuters notes. In the years that followed he visited monasteries, painted pictures, and learned how to construct buildings within the online world.
Now his memorial’s enormous black walls display the names of all 2,974 victims — engraved in gold, along with their age and city — next to a giant reflecting pool. One wall even displays hundreds of pictures of the victims, and every day, more than 1,500 Second Life visitors pay their respects, according to Reuters, leaving flowers and candles at the base of the walls.
But Second Life’s denizens observed the sixth anniversary of the attacks in a variety of ways. A surprise was waiting for Musa Ni when she held a discussion about September 11 in the in-world Second Life.
“Only two people showed up!”
One participant said he’d experienced people who were overloaded with 9/11 remembrances. But the other participant suggested “that the low turn out was a reflection of America’s state of mind.” Maybe they chose to remember the day in other ways, the host countered — outside of the Second Life world. Though she also joked that “we might have had a bigger turn out if the topic was ‘cute shoes in Second Life.’”
And then it got weird. “We had to move the 9/11 discussion to a different location because we were attacked by griefers.”
“The rest the of meeting took place in a bizarro SuperMario-like region that I recently discovered called ‘TokyoMainland.’”
Indeed, the September 11 edition of the Second Life Herald focused on everything but memories of the terrorist attack — judging from its headlines.
- Kinky Demographics of Second Life BDSM Community
- Dutch Politicians Furious With Prosecutor for Dropping Second Life
Ageplay Investigation
In perhaps the ultimate irony, Second Life has its own band of wacky virtual terrorists. So on September 11, the Herald also found themselves covering an attack on the virtual estate of Anshe Chung, which they said went unaddressed for at least an hour by the game’s administrators, Linden Labs. Chung’s estate and other Second Life regions were apparently attacked by hundreds of endlessly-replicating pictures of a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Ironically, Chung’s estate is called Dreamland, and they spent part of September 11 awaiting messages from their residents requesting cleanup procedures — for “any remaining objects still flying around your property….”
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September 14th, 2007
We had plenty of attendees at our 9/11 Memorial on Celestial Requiem NYC…and know of at least six similar ceremonies that had decent turnout.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Celestial%20Requiem%20NYC/143/122/21
All regards to all the builders of all the many memorials in Second Life, and to all the many, in all the worlds who have yet awakened from the fitful nightmare that shrounds their hearts, and seek some measure of comfort and hope.
If any memorial, if all of them combined, help but one heart rest easier, and look up again to hope, then our collective works are well worthwhile.
So, the two persons who showed up at the talk you mention…I hope they got something valuable out of it.
Had they been the only two out there, I’d say we builders of memorials served our purpose well.