The recognition of Second Life as a “country” on Plurk, together with the online MMORPG World of Warcraft, has lead to a large amount of humorous speculations as to what these virtual countries’ diplomatic relationships would be, might we ever reach the title of “sovereign state”. Will SL & WoW be friendly, neighbouring states, or will this be a start of an endless feud, with many avatar casualties & PR damage on both sides?

Seeing that the nature of both “games” is totally opposite - they care about gold and conquest, Second Life is about land and settlement; they work together to slaughter enemies, we work together to build social networks - and WoW-players must be incredibly jealous and eager to conquer what Second Life players already possess: the powers of avatar sex, prim babies, 15,000 inventory items, land, snowball guns and an endless amount of free accounts, we can’t help but fear they’ll soon stand at our borders and storm governor Linden’s palace.

Rumours that that-what-shall-not-be-named aims for Second Life’s representational seat in the United Nations does not give us much ground for hope to a peaceful solution to this beginning conflict that will shock the whole metaverse. Luckily, on Plurk, we are already debating a general battle & emergency plan as to keep those gready WoW’ers of our grid. What should we do when the Horde attacks? What can YOU do?

1. Take all “rotate or slide open on click” scripts out of doors & windows.
2. Make sure all your weaponry & defence items are updated to the latest versions & keep them organised in one folder for easy access.
3. Contact your friends at LoTRO and beg them to send in reinforcements. (Don’t bother getting the dwarfs, when mistaken for child avatars, they will probably fall under friendly fire.)
4. Hand of freebie penises - ‘freenis’ - poisoned with damage-causing scripts. Change of strategy by Gereral Whimsy: BOX the Freenis’ first, to stall while we strike, they wont see us coming with a box on their heads.
5. Particle machine guns will lag them to death.
6. Plant mines, saying “click here to mine for gold”.
7. WoW characters take damage when falling. We do not. Rez a big prim under their feet, lift them 200m in the air then delete the prim.
8. Some WoW creatures are also able to be invisible. Keep CTRL+ALT+T handy at all times! (Strategist Piu)
9. Coordinating fighting outfits. All designers should step up and - for once - design practical clothing. Don’t wear high heels! Lara Croft-like boots are ok and even encouraged.
10. Reinstate the Cornfield, to send residents with dual citizenship if they refuse to cancel their WoW membership.
11. Cloaking: send in the bots! They’ll have a hard time - just like us - figuring out which green dot is real.
12. Use a vintage viewer or Nicholaz’, war is not a pretty picture, and little fluffy clouds will only distract you (and your CPU).
13. The fashion bloggers will be sent out as undercover spies to join WoW’s realms. In no time and without much effort, they will cause a massive amount of drama and internal conflict within the WoW characters’ ranks.

And if all this fails? I suggest we then drive them all to the Mainland and flood it. But in the mean while, any more great virtual defence strategy ideas to defend all what is dear to us? Leave a comment here or join the conversation on Plurk.

Tags: parody, second life, world of warcraft

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