For the uninitiated, Hair Fair is a charity event, whose proceeds go towards Locks of Love, which is a charity which works towards providing hair replacements for those who are in need. Hair designers in Second Life come together to offer a number of styles exclusively for the duration of the event, and a portion of their profits go to the charity. This year, four sims were set aside for the event, featuring over 90 designers, and everything was geared towards a Mayan ruin theme.
Fairly straightforward, right?
Well, unfortunately, as with any fashion related event, there will always be drama.
I should disclose that a week before the event, one of the vendors was participating in a ‘content creator show and tell’ party. She’d been scratching her head wondering just how to make her bland, ultra basic booth, more interesting and enticing for the event. I happened to be around and suggested a few options – which as it turns out many people thought of as well – involving vegetation, which might fit in with the Mayan theme. Little did I know that spiffing up of booths would be such a point of contention for those who had a finger to point.
I’m writing about this fairly long after the fact, however there have been a number of discussions in regards to lag and its causes. The general design of the booths was the biggest bit of drama though, wherein some felt vendors were particularly at fault for causing lag in the sims, citing whole hairstyles rezzed out on display, scripted animated display pieces, sculpts and plants.
While I won’t dispute the fact that this may be in part true, I believe by far the main problem lies in the folks who go to these events.
It’s quite well known that events such as these will attract a huge crowd. Hand the average avatar access to hundreds of hairstyles at the same time, and you will have a veritable stampede of shoppers – and consequently a *wall* of lag. This comes from high numbers of prims, sculpts, textures on those prims, whether they have transparencies or not, whether the av is wearing an animation overrider, or any other sort of scripted gadgetry.
When you then allow a maximum of 55 avatars per sim, through 4 connected sims, to view the area, you can certainly expect major difficulties for everyone, especially since everyone has different draw distances, connection speeds and bandwidth settings, and this can in turn affect everyone else’s viewing experience.
So… one or two rezzed hairstyles? (And of the vendors I did see doing this, both styles were below 50 prims each, with few to no transparent textures) A couple trees? some prim grass? Not so bad, compared to all of the avatars in the sim.
It’s not even really about the runners of the event either – I’m sure they did their part in trying to keep lag to a minimum, using minimal resources and spacing booths out as much as they could. In fact, the default message a visitor will receive is the request to remove all attachments and animation overrides so as to minimize the impact on the sim.
So what does one see upon complying and touring the sim?
Well, I was there more than a few times, yet i think i saw a grand total of maybe 2, maybe three avatars who complied. Obviously, at a Hair Fair, people will want to try on the demos – so allowances should be made for those instances, but in most cases, people didn’t bother taking off their bling-encrusted high prim jewellry, shoes, capes, feather boas, wings, animated sculpt-changing should pets, AOs, etc etc etc. All the while, these same ~150ish people could be seen struggling through a heavily time dilated sim, complaining over voice about how ‘goddamned lagged to shit’ it was. One could really throw one’s hands up in disgust.
So really to me, the bigger problem is people who feel so self possessed so as to insist that their own presentation come first, and as a result making the whole experience worse for everyone including themselves.
I’ll admit that a part of me feels like the vendors are justified for trying to beautify and make their booths look unique from eachother, and perhaps also a bit defensive based on my small involvement with the one vendor’s booth design. A part of my thought process in this regard also has to do with my background as an artist and designer, with a particular background in thinking about how one ought to market one’s products. It just seemed to me people were insisting that content creators toss all of that out the window because the percieved problem was that *any* prim use beyond the vendor boxes was excessive. In my opinion, the greater excess was the avs who went there and simply refused to comply with the request to detach all attachments. *shrug*
Anyhow, this being the first Hair Fair I’d been to, initially I was under the impression that *all* proceeds would go to Locks of Love, and upon finding that only one hairstyle was ‘required’ to donate 50%, was sort of dissappointed, but understood that the vendors should also benefit from the event for donating their time and exclusive work. Still, I did find quite a number of vendors who generously applied the donation to many or all of their styles, so in that sense, I applaud their generosity and fine work.
A lot of the vendors also went a bit crazy with giving out demos. Quality ranged from poor to fine, but most of them were pretty good, and very welcome, particularly for those who might want to outfit their avatar on the cheapcheap 😉
My only real complaint about the content would be that there really weren’t that many good styles for guys… and unfortunately this seems to be a consistent problem with the market in SL, wherein a lot of content creators simply opt to design for women, or are designing for men in a manner that would be attractive only to women, rather than thinking about what is useful and necessary for men. I guess, had I the time, I might give it a try for next year. If only I had the time to give it a go on a serious basis 😛
Anyhow, this was a pretty interesting experience for me… being on a slower computer until recently, I had never before considered putting my computer and connection to the test in this manner, and found my experience mostly good. Here’s hoping next year will be better 🙂