The story of my first Bot or ‘Voorst: a forest trapped in a crow!’

November 27th, 2008 • MUVEs

This is the story of Voorst Turbo and how he became a Second Life Bot. I created Voorst because I wanted an ALT to live again, with new eyes, the experience of my first steps in Second Life. I wanted to be a male avatar and for name I’ve taken Voorst, for my son Forest, and Turbo for the speed of my life.

My motivations come from the difficulties of setting up a group subscriber, for closed groups in SL, that sends automatic invites to people who ask for membership. Actually, what I wanted was a procedure to send out group invites to verified Moodle users, so as to recreate somehow Moodle groups inside Second Life groups. I contacted Daniel Livingstone who introduced me to Paul Preibish (Fire Centaur) who suggested me the use of a Bot:

‘I too use a Bot to accomplish automatic group inviting (You’ll find her on my Island English Village, her name is EnglishVillage Robonaught). I programmed her using the basic examples from libsecondlife.org. (using Mono), and she lives on my server (and in SL). When someone clicks on a “join group” button in SL, the prim sends a specially formatted message to my Bot, and my Bot (who is an officer in the in-world group) sends a group invite to that person automatically. In addition, I could theoretically program her to automatically insert the users name into the mysql db at the same time, so you could display the Inworld group membership on your website. There are several scripts on SLexchange that already offer this sort of service’

So a Bot? It looked quite challenging, but I decided to give it a try. Here is what I’ve learnt:

• What is a Bot? a Bot is a Second Life citizen that is used by his or her owner to perform machine tasks inworld. Or better: A Bot is a SL citizen who is driven by a machine and not by an human being. Some call them ‘non-human players’. A Bot is an avatar: looks like any other avatar inworld, has an avatar name, has an avatar profile, can participate in a conversations and perform several kind of tasks like sending IMs, TPs, inventory items, invitations for a group…

• What are they for? A Bot can be used for several things: for maintaining presence inworld, increasing traffic statistics, appealing audience (pole dancers)… But also to perform automatic tasks inworld, like, in our case, sending invites for closed groups after a membership request.

• How can we make a Bot? This is a two steps process. First you need to create an account for the Bot, then you need to buy the little piece of software that will control the Bot. In my case a bought The JVA multi-purpose Bot for sending group invites to MUVEnation participants for 7 groups at the same time. When I installed the Bot manager in my computer, Paz went inworld for rezzing the Bot base and its utilities like the group subscription and the mailing list. Paz made Voorst officer of all her MUVEnation groups and positioned the Bot base where she wanted. Once the initial set up finished, Voorst went inworld to decide about his appearance. And after all the coming in and going out necessary for final tweaks, I connected the Bot software and Voorst appeared at the same time that Paz, inworld. Magic!

Setting Voorst has been finally easy. I was prepared for a very complicated procedure, but no. The only tricky thing was the logs in and out between Paz and Voorst. For example, Paz had to log in for making him officer of the groups. Then he had to log in for accepting. Then Paz had to log in for giving him money to buy an avatar. Then Voorst logged in for trying out. Phew! I have never launched my viewer so many times during the same day! And forcing SL to close via the task manager. And restarting the computer as well!

On the anecdote side, I can tell that Voorst wanted to become a non-human avatar, a wolf for instance, and forced Paz to buy him a new brand skin for 4000l$, in Lost Ferals. After expending all the money, he wasn’t happy with his new skin and started to beg for money again: to StevenW, to Daffodil and also to Daf. StevenW gave him 20l$. But it wasn’t enough. So Paz had to return for another 1000l$. And again Voorst for trying out the new skin. And then Paz for setting the base. And then Both!

Some spare thoughts:

• Becoming a non-human avatar with a robot, machine or feral animal skin appears like an appropriate solution for Bots, so people get less disrupted and don’t start speaking with them as if they had an human player behind them.

• Now that I know that Voorst lives 24/7 inworld, because my computer is acting like a server, I feel the pressure and struggle when shutting down my computer.

Finally some useful links about Bots in education: [SLED] What kind of Bots do you want for education? initiated by Fire Centaur as well.

Last but not least a stolen story from the MUVEnation forum, written by Sus Nyrop about Voorst, Paz and me:

The raven Voorst is now helping Marga with certain registration tasks. I saw the two of them, Marga and Voorst late yesterday night, but apparently they were very busy and logged out before I could learn more about how this Bot was created and set up.

I looked up the name, Voorst, and the ethymology is Prince in Ducth (a village named Voorst, as well as a musician).

Perhaps Dutch princes have this power over their owner, but I was puzzled about Marga’s report from setting this up (see this in another thread written today), as she explains how the Bot was demanding a very costly skin - the creature was described in rather independent terms.

I did not get any closer to understand more in detail, about what it takes to set up súch automated systems. The Bot appears to be a real avatar, so naively I was offering my friendship, as a usual procedure whenever I bump into MUVEnation inhabitants.

Marga, Lawrence, I think ”setting up a Bot” would be an eye opening training session either as a witness to the process, or hands on doing it –  maybe as group work, and others have given sign of interest. Perhaps later in our course, if not soon?

I am looking forward Sus!

Tags: Bots, MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08, Second Life

Trackback URI.