Pose+Balls

=Pose Balls=

//Bend me, shape me Anyway you want me Long as you love me It's all right// -- The American Breed

toc Pose balls are set up throughout Second Life to create automated interaction between avatars. They allow avatars to move without their users directly controlling their actions. Almost every space in Second Life incorporates pose balls in some way.

Dancing
Distributed throughout Second Life, at times in the most unexpect places, are dance floors. Most areas contain some variation of the dance floor - even Second Life grid locations which exist to promote political campaigns. In my research such dance floors have rarely appeared to be in use, however this hasn't stopped them from being a major part of Second Life design.



On the dancefloor, as elsewhere, pose balls are found in groups of two or three alternating between pink and blue with the assumption that male avatars will click the blue pose balls and female avatars will click the pink ones.

Sitting/Cuddling
Also very common in Second Life are sitting and lounging areas. Sometimes these areas are found in commercial spaces and are used for camping. Other times they are used as a space for avatars to sit and meet while conversing. Like their dance floor counterparts, they are often left unused.

These poseballs offer some activity for avatars to engage in, whether it be normal conversational gestures, lying down, curling up (especially popular with furries) or smoking, so that they don't simply stand around and do the generic typing motion while their users are engaged in discussion.

A variation on this theme are cuddle pose-balls - like the sitting pose balls they will generally be found on furniture in public areas of Second Life, but they will normally be sectioned off like dance floor pose balls into male and female pairs. This allows friendly avatars to project an appearance of intimacy without the use of sex pose balls.

Sex
Perhaps the most commonly used pose balls are the ones for sex. Sex balls are always separated between male and female poses and either force an avatar into one specific action, like receptive or penitrative intercourse, or offer a menu of choices of different sexual positions.



In Second Life there are very popular clubs filled with these kinds of sex balls. Many times when a large meeting of avatars is indicated on the grid map it turns out to be such a club. These 'sex clubs' have a wide variety of graphical designs, some portraying the lavish luxury one would expect from an Ottoman harem, others portraying abject poverty and despair. Some individuals maintain private pleasure rooms where their avatars can engage in 'non-public' simulated sexual activity, for the most part, however, digital sex on Second Life seems to be a very non-private phenomena that oddly enough requires very little actual interaction between the users.

Intercourse on Second Life is simulated using a combination of sex pose balls and genitalia skins for avatars. This enables users to combine a representation of physical sexual activity with replicas of the biological mechanisms to acheive intercourse.

A variation on the sex pose ball is the sex bed or the sex shower. These are graphical textures which look like real beds and showers, but integrate the use of sex pose balls within them - or offer a menu of positions and activities when the user clicks on the bed.

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