Predators and Other Undesirables

Predators are an interesting phenomenon. Have seen it so many times in RL, usually to do with money and material possession, but also older men preying on young women.. In Second Life, it’s older avatars with newbies..

Most SL women I speak to have all been through variations of one of the three types mentioned below. The only defence is to identify it, sort it and move on. It’s not only women though, men are also vulnerable – it’s just that there aren’t quite so many women (and gay men) who play this game.

No matter who I’ve asked, I really don’t get a satisfactory answer as to why they do it. Those who are hardcore predators don’t come near me anymore (too old now) and those men that I do ask either change the subject or get outraged that I dare imply that that’s what they do…. *sigh* such a touchy subject.

There seems to be a few types in this genre – they seem to cross over characteristics depending on the personality flaws of the person behind the avatar.

A predator seems to just like fresh flesh, hangs around the newbie waiting areas trying to chat up those dewy eyed newbies. Quite prepared to help as long as they think there’s going to be sex at the end of it. Can be quite brutal when it turns out they’re wrong.

The truly serious and dangerous one is the player. http://www.alphavilleherald.com/archives/000296.html

These people are despicable; they really don’t even deserve the moniker of people.

My poor avatar was hit on by one of these in the first few hours of being in SL. My saviour turned out to be a player – and he got me big time… When I read the link above a few days ago I could put a tick beside each step bar one. Makes a lot of sense now.. I was thoroughly groomed and then he played me like a professional. If this guy does this to jailbait in RL, he should be locked up permanently. Yet, I have nothing but awe for his talent. Even weeks later, despite all the unpleasantness, my avatar would still drop everything to be with him and no-one she has met since comes even close to the enveloping desire and closeness she felt when with him. He groomed her, and to an extent me, to perfection.

Thankfully I’m too well adjusted to be particularly affected by the nastiness that rounds off the game.. I feel soooo sorry for those who aren’t strong personalities. This is a particularly nasty, cruel game to play. Destroying someone’s self esteem is a step into the unacceptable.

When my avatar was trying to flush out her beloved she went to the club where he hangs out. The club has a reputation for being just beyond the fringe of acceptable human behaviour – as I have since found out – but at that stage I had no idea. So, with best dress on and an attitude to match, she went in search. What I did find was he’d done step 13 well before step 12, and the comments made by the regulars were cryptic and I could see they were designed to be hurtful, but until I read the ‘how to’ I couldn’t get a handle on what was happening.. It was funny, one of the dancers there called her the equivalent of a ball breaker and all I could do was laugh – my poor little avatar is as helpless as a kitten. I have to keep her away from the gaming areas as I am too useless to use the weaponry she seems to have acquired. Except for one time I was in one and this guy came up and asked us where the action was – I told him it was us and we were just plotting how to kill him – I’ve never seen an avatar run so fast!

The most interesting bit of my time in the club was having a newbie dumped on me by some guy who has got sick of her… His story was that she was a friend and as a man he didn’t know where to take her to get kitted out.. He then vanished. When I finally managed to get her to speak to me, she was just a newborn with no idea what was going on – but he’d managed to destroy her SL self esteem completely, before he got impatient with waiting for her to come up to his level of ‘acceptability’. Welcome to SL.

The scariest thing about my adventure with the player was that I picked up some of the behaviour. It wasn’t until it was pointed out to me by someone I had become friends with that I realised what had happened. It is so easy to pick up bad habits.

To round of our visit to the various unpleasant characters in SL, there’s the stalker.

Stalkers are a funny lot. The most innocent ones are those who are on your friends list and follow you around in the hope that either they’ll see flesh as you are forced to change in public. The creepy ones just want to know what you are doing and who you are doing it with. Players will often do this too, as it gives them more of a handle on you the next time they meet with you.

Of the three types, the stalker is the easiest to deal with.. Primarily because there are radars your avatar can wear that will tell you who is in your vicinity. It is such a useful device – once I started wearing it, I was amazed at how many of my so called ‘friends’ lurked. A few sharp words usually sees them off…and deleting them from your friends list and their calling cards from your inventory..