One of the more colorful and contentious figures in SL's three and a half year history is Plastic Duck, later known as Gene Replacement. While it took a little doing, I was able to sit down with him and have a bit of a talk about himself and about Second Life.
He took the third-place prize of Avatar of the Year (2005), bestowed by the Second Life Herald. He's been flamboyant, artistic and edgy. He and some 59 others were famously purged from SL. Some consider him to be a rampaging rakehell, some a leader of a griefing army, some a sort of renaissance technojester, a dark god of ornithophobia.
Truly a lot has been said, done, understood and misunderstood, rumored and misconstrued. So...I didn't ask him about any of that sensationalist nonsense directly. Instead, I wanted to find out more about the man behind the duck.
SLI: So, introduction first. You're known as - or were known as Gene Replacement (and once as Griefer Overlord, with delicious irony). That your preferred identity?
Plastic Duck: My preferred identity is Plastic Duck because of the notoriety. I've never made it clear but now I've decided that I might as well just make it public because at the end of the day it's just the Internet. If people want to freak out about it online that is cool with me, griefers get off to that, right?
SLI: Well, that's the leading theory. I think I've put that forward myself, actually. :)
Plastic Duck: Or maybe my devious plan involves claiming that I'm all the "deceased" griefers of the past in order to gain complete and utter control of SL gangstas.
SLI: *laugh* Well, as a member of the SA-Goons, being a 'leader' is sort of like people calling you the leader of all left-handed people. But I gather that among your group you have a certain amount of respect and street cred.
Plastic Duck: We used to joke around on various forums and IRC channels that Plastic Duck is not a person, but an idea, a group of people striving to achieve something. Funnily enough, that's very true now. Aside from a few close SL friends I keep in contact with, most goons don't know who Plastic Duck is on the forums and those who do I've mostly lost contact with a long time ago. 
SLI: Plastic Duck is something of a legend...at least among the older residents - the new folks don't know anything much about W-hat or Plastic Duck at all. That's all in the past, and they have enough trouble with the present.
Plastic Duck: I like to think that the main reason anyone knows about "Plastic Duck" is because of the amount of time I spent in SL, I used to keep that account logged in almost 24/7 because, well, why not? I'd usually idle in Baku or the welcome area and received lots of complains about other goons' griefing and received many suspensions on that account for being a bystander when someone else was harassing people. That and my sweet collection of negative ratings. Most people collected positive ratings, in the end they were meaningless so I figured I'd collect negative ratings as it seemed like an easier task.
SLI: So I understand. Depending on the neg-rater, you didn't necessarily have to work all that hard for them :)
Plastic Duck: I was competing to collect the most negative ratings given :) After that account was banned, I was beaten by a fair amount by a friend who was later also banned for negative ratings.
SLI: Guess the ratings had some meaning after all, then. If not necessarily the obvious meaning. Most folks really don't know what Something Awful actually is. There's a lot of conflicting descriptions. How would you describe it to someone?
Plastic Duck: SomethingAwful is a comedy/satire website. To be honest, I don't read the SA frontpage or care much for it. I was introduced to the SA forums community a few years ago by a friend who told me it is full of some pretty damn smart people. I bought an account, and since then have been a member. What I like about the community is that it is pretty strict. There are specific forums for posting bullshit spam and there are specific forums for other discussion. If you want to read up on cars or computers, you don't have to scroll through 1 word replies and other garbage that is common with every other Internet forum.
SLI: A pleasant change from a lot of Internet forums, truly. So how did you hear about SL? And what brought you in?
Plastic Duck: There was a thread in the SA games forum detailing SL. I don't browse that forum much, because unfortunately I feel I've grown out of gaming, which I used to enjoy a lot. What I've always enjoyed doing though is being a nerdy engineer. I've always enjoyed designing game levels more than I enjoyed playing the games themselves, and I've had fun doing simple programming and graphics design. SL offered all of that, in multiplayer form. What could be more fun than a multiplayer level editor, but with custom avatars, textures, sounds, scripting, etc! 
SLI: Sounds like projects like 'Cube' would appeal to you too.
Plastic Duck: I was really impressed with the SL Cube project, and enjoyed talking about it with a few of the people collaborating on that. I can't wait until it's in a working state.
SLI: I suppose a lot of SA folks came for similar reasons that you did (creating, technical interest, collaborative artistry)? I know those were the reasons I came to SL.
Plastic Duck: The SA folk that continued logging in came for those reasons. I would say at least half of the people who applied for w-hat never logged on again after they realized that SL is not a real game. Very few of the SA goons stayed as non productive "residents", the creative ones stay and most of the other ones seem to move onto the next game thread.
SLI: Still, there were enough SA Goons about to form a functional community of sorts - or a dysfunctional community, depending on your perspective, I guess :)
Plastic Duck: As for a dysfunctional community, I agree completely. It's the most functional dysfunctional community in SL. The drama, the ARs, the warnings, the suspensions, all the things that appear to be tearing our community apart are really the reason it's so great. In the end it's a second life so why not be your polar opposite in a virtual world for some cheap laughs and fun. I would never get involved in drama like this in real life, and am constantly told that I'm the most passive person people have known, but online it's such an innocent crime that most people get over quickly. Those that spend days dwelling on cyber griefing have much bigger problems than cyber griefing :)
SLI: Quite possibly. Of course, for some, the polar opposite of their RL is a quiet and calm SL - one without obstructive people or events :) One that's fairly hard to achieve, in my experience :) You stuck around for a long time, until you were finally booted.
Plastic Duck: I like to think they'll never get rid of me, but I do get bored of the drama from time to time. You can't spell Second Life without drama though, and that is why me and most other people enjoy SL. A lot of people deny their love for drama, and they continue denying it, for hours, making it a point to bring up how much they hate drama wherever they can, in conversation, their profile, etc. That's just their way of subconsciously loving drama.
SLI: I've never been terribly big on drama myself, honestly. I like calm, and reason, and don't care for surprises. But I'm also atypical.
Plastic Duck: Clearly you're on a drama dry spell :)
SLI: "And... loving it!" ;) I've gotten the impression that a lot of the SA Goons came to SL with the impression that SL was pretty much populated by bored housewives, basement-dwellers and generally vapid blingtards. Do you think that's the case?
Plastic Duck: Most of the SA threads about SL pretty much describe SL as it should be, a collaborative tool. But the threads also make it a point to warn people about some of the miserable secrets found in SL too. Some take this as a warning to stay away from all of the fetish/sexual deviant communities while others take it as an invitation to harass them.
SLI: SA is free of fetishists?
Plastic Duck: There are probably more than most people think, but the community did originate from the SA front page which originated from some guy's little corner of the Internet which he used to make fun of all the sick little things found on the Internet that you wouldn't tell your mother about.
SLI: Fair enough :) I suppose I should ask what's up with 4chan. One resident described them to me as "Like SA, only talentless, slightly retarded and with a predilection towards gay furry porn" - they seem to have taken particular pleasure in giving credit to the goons for assorted mass griefing. Any idea why? I also don't know if the description is correct.
Plastic Duck: 4chan is just another forum. The few SL related threads I've seen on 4chan have mostly been for organizing raids/griefing.
SLI: You've had a bit of an awkward relationship with Linden Lab. Setting that aside for a moment - are they doing okay by SL do you think? Or are they making a mess of it in your opinion?
Plastic Duck: I think they're trying too hard. They should take a close look at other profiting MMOs and learn a lesson in community management. And by that I mean stop entertaining the whiners and morons because it's a waste of money. No other game makes it so easy to waste the time and money of the developers, but in SL it's less than a few clicks away and usually pretty "live" if you get what I'm saying and I think you do.
SLI: I do, yes :)
Plastic Duck: I've noticed with Linden Lab telling them to fix something isn't enough. You need to exploit it to hell and cause half of the SL population to freak out before anything is done. It took them almost a year to fix a permissions exploit me and a few people were sitting on that we quietly reported. And after they finally fixed that in 1.12, they didn't fix the other way of exploiting it. In regards to developer:support ratio, LL's numbers are pretty much the opposite of any other companies. They need more developers to make a robust and easy to use program rather than paying hundreds of members of the community $9 an hour to play Internet employee
SLI: I guess hiring staff is a sore point for a startup company that's operating at a loss, though I understand they recently hired a bunch more devs.
Plastic Duck: They had liaisons since beta. Why on earth would you need employees to police a closed beta system. Since day one they've been hiring babysitters to look after the rapidly expanding population when they could've just hired developers to make SL less abusable and offering residents personal protection from things like push weapons or sound spamming (like they're starting to do now, 3 years later).
SLI: Well, liaisons are a lot cheaper :) But yes. Heck, even things like the new group tools. Those are long overdue. You're not in SL at all currently, that's right?
Plastic Duck: I have an alt but I've been to busy to log on for more than a few minutes a week. That, and all my friends were banned.
SLI: That would have sucked quite a bit. Anything you'd like to say or you'd like people to know?
Plastic Duck: Anyone can get shot. It takes a real nigga to pull da trigga.
SLI: Thanks very much for this. I'm sure it'll make for interesting reading :)
Plastic Duck: aite
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