Kind Readers~ This article was first published Dec. 26, 2006 on my old site. ~HB

HEY HEARTUN~ I am Spanish. I do not speak English. The people who speak here English are cruel. They say that “they speak English or they go.” She is that I leave the Second Life? ~VISTA GLOBAL (translated from Spanish using AltaVista’s Babelfish)

Photo Courtesy of FuelFandango Designs

DEAR VISTA~ I spoke briefly with Liaison Lizzy Linden and she said there is no “official language of Second Life.” While the majority of SL ‘citizens’ speak English it’s non-English speakers that are the hoped-for salvation for Linden Labs. After personnel expenses, server space and connectivity top the expenses that keep Second Life running. And they’re fairly fixed costs too. If you double the number of Americans playing SL, you have to boost server space and connectivity or service suffers more than players will tolerate.

However, if you pull in players who aren’t from he same time zone they end up playing at different times, effectively distributing the server and connectivity workload. More players, same capital costs. Venture capitalists love that, and Linden Labs is out hunting for more VC right now. The money they brought in last winter is running out — and while management can downsize customer service workers like Lizzy to boost the bottom line they can’t cut infrastructure.

“There are four fucking languages going on all at once in here and its pissing me off,” yelled one Welcome Area Regular in Ahern recently. “I’ve got a problem with all these foreigners — it didn’t used to be this way!”

Xenophobic sentiment like this is bound to increase in the Second Life Welcome Areas because while language-specific sims are on the increase the WAs are common ground. We Americans are going to have to admit to ourselves that we don’t travel the world much, we don’t speak any other languages and our world view is rather narrow. That kind of introspection makes us uncomfortable. Meanwhile the non-Americans get a chance to answer their favorite question: “Who are these Americans who keep electing bomb-flinging psychopaths.” And they’d better be nice about it too because America has a lot of bombs, and a lot of Bushes. (Jeb 08-16, Neil 16-24, Jenna 24-32, Barbara 32-40 and so on.)

Second Life is the opportunity we all have to find out about each other without actually going to war but it starts in the Welcome Area. So if someone gives you shit for speaking Spanish, Dear Vista, write up an abuse report because I’d hate to see Jenna send B-52s into Barcelona some day. And that cracker best learn some Spanish or learn to shut up because they probably don’t want to see that either.

~HEARTUN BREAKER