As the “World Wide Web” sloughs forward into the privately-owned public spaces of apps and gated communities, old abandoned lots and seedy backrooms still flourish, somewhere, welcoming misfits whose vocabulary is still full of IRCs, GIFs, NIFOCs. At Vice, Deanna Havas pays a return visit to the Palace, a site that’s been running on abandonware for two decades, distributed among obscure servers from the U.S. to Turkey, and catering to a thousand-a-day userbase of “pixel perverts deriving sexual gratification from anonymous 16-bit color exchanges.” Imagine the nighttime pleasure dome of a hacker shantytown hanging on the pixelated margins of a Gorilla-Glass-slick future city.Each server has dedicated chat rooms for avatars and props, and lockable guest rooms with sensual interiors to help you get intimate. I "walked in" on some users in an unlocked bedroom chat and was quickly banned before I could catch the gist of the conversation. I visited a "Multiple Sclerosis awareness"-themed Palace, which, incidentally, had a decent collection of porn avatars. Another interesting note: Palace game rooms are scripted for interactivity, and for some reason virtual Yahtzee is really popular.
Adult Palace servers cater to many sex fetishes but most subscribe to a branch of BDSM that is loosely inspired by 1970s science-fiction writing. Server rules dictate the general guidelines of chat room behavior. Naturally, sex slaves have their own rules of conduct that span several pages. Flaming, which plagued the Palace during its prime, can now get you banned. This problem disappeared along with all the traffic so the rule is useless. In fact, there aren’t even moderators online to enforce any of this.
The Palace’s most redeeming aspect is its role as an artifact of our internet history. It’s a living archive of low-res graphics, cliché fantasy art, and some of the worst graphic design ever. For the remaining Users, that seems to make for an erotic virtual community ideal to spend decades in. I suspect that many of the other former Palace users have moved on to bigger and better things, such as making cash on Second Life or showing their genitals on Chatroulette.Read more at Vice.
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