Second Life Quadrille: Modders and Equestrians unite for Elaborate Dressage Performances
Since I’ve begun to research horse games and related communities for this website, I keep finding a common theme: Where the market does not serve horse-hungry audiences, passionate players try to find their own fun wherever they can make it. From organizing non-violent trail ride events in Red Dead Redemption 2, to the elaborate modding community around The Sims 3: Pets and its horses, to ARK: Survival Evolved and its dedicated horse-servers, many horse-gaming enthusiasts have learned to make content where there is none.
Second Life, the sandboxiest of sandboxes, is no exception to this rule.
In case this is your first time hearing of it: Second Life is a social online simulation, a virtual world where you can do just about anything. In Second Life, content is primarily user-generated.
This applies to its horses as well. Second Life horse model seller Teeglepet offers a wide variety of breeds, textures, mane and tail styles, along with a myriad of custom animations design to let users play out the horse fantasy of their choice. Thanks to active SL content producers and TMQ community members Teager and Monstaar, I get the occasional insight into this fascinating niche.
This is what it can look like when a group of motivated Second Life equestrians gets practicing:
What you see here is 8 players riding a coordinated routine in real time, with every participant steering their horses and switching to the proper animations in agreed-upon timing, using the interface in the screenshot on the right.
A similar trend – of people gathering in virtual space to perform Quadrille routines – exists in the Star Stable Online community. Find an example of a dressage routine with almost 100k views here. In the case of SSO, the horses and animations are not user-generated and the dressage animation variety a bit more limited, but the spirit is very much the same: getting together with friends online to create something cool with virtual horses.
In both cases, users work within the limitations of their virtual worlds by applying their drive and creativity.
There is no proper online dressage game, no game that actively features a mechanic as the one that people are patching together for themselves in these cases.
When active communities exist that create their very own Quadrille mechanics in games that only partially accomodate them, how many more people would be interested in something like this if it was an officially supported feature of a game?
One can only imagine.
Personally, I find it deeply inspiring to keep seeing these examples of horse-loving gamers creating their own fun within an industry that so often ignores them. And as always, it is a bittersweet pleasure because I am certain a lot more people would absolutely love this sort of “gameplay”, if only it was more easily accessible to them.
When the long hoped-for Sims 4: Horse Ranch expansion pack released in July 2023, I briefly thought I would be on time and relevant with a review for once. And then I got distracted and put on sick leave. My in-depth look at the Horse Ranch pack may no longer be timely, but it will be overly elaborate and familiarly pedantic about equine accuracy, because that’s what you all come to The Mane Quest for, isn’t it.