Hello?
"I experiment on people in videogames whilst doing low brow comedy."
-Daniel's channel description
Daniel From SL (SL meaning SecondLife and often just called Daniel) is an online comedian/prankster that operates within the realm of videogames. His forte is manipulating and tricking people into compromising or hilarious situations, and seeing how much he can irritate them. Rather than other online pranksters who belittle and undermine their victims confidence, Daniel instead presents himself as a calm, affable individual with a flat tone and affect. This, in turn, makes people more likely to get irritated at him, as they assume him to be either stupid or confused- right up until the rug is pulled out from under them.
Daniel has been operating since about late 2014. He used to play a lot on Second Life hence his name, but has now moved to other games like DayZ, Arma, and more.
His channel can be found here
, and he also has a Patreon here. He usually streams here, as well.
Tropes found in Daniel's videos include:
- Affably Evil: Daniel is very nice to people and always talks in a civil, polite manner, but he does so on purpose to rile his victims up even more. It's much harder to be angry at someone who genuinely seems like he has no idea what he's doing wrong.
- Amusement Park of Doom: The titular Wonderworld of the Gmod Wonderworld video is one of these, with attractions designed to unnerve, scare, and irritate it's guests. Most of them are fatal or incredibly violent, and the ones that aren't trap their guests in an endless loop from which there is no escape. Even the hotel! For specifics:
- The haunted mansion is presented as a short spooky experience in which you need to solve a riddle in order to be let out using the clues placed randomly in the area, when in reality the clues are just random scribbles placed on the walls for people to deliberately confuse people into thinking there is a solution, when in reality there is none and they are trapped in the mansion until they leave the server.
- Ticket to Heaven is completely inaccessible because the bridge leading to it is not solid, meaning it's just a series of props put there to trick people into heading over there to go on the ride.
- The ferris wheel is just a cardboard cutout that drops down and kills whoever gets close to it.
- The forest that's supposedly filled with horrors is instead filled with players wearing furry skin trying to mimic server bots, which Daniel insists are coded by himself.
- The rollercoaster is designed to have the cart jump off the rails and kill whoever is riding on it a while after the ride has started.
- The park trams are deliberately set on a course that takes them into an open area filled to the brim with turrets that shoot everybody riding it until they die.
- The bouncer robot deliberately denies access to the park for the most ridiculous reasons, not letting people get into the park proper unless they fulfill some intentionally ridiculous quota, like being part of a prestigious CS:GO clan.
- The doors to the hotel slam shut and traps the unsuspecting victims as soon as the players enter their hotel room, and the whole hotel starts glitching out, with dead people inside coming alive, rooms dissapearing, and the outside of the hotel replaced with a mirror version of the hotel, with a cardboard cutout version of the aforementioned dead person, and the further the unsuspecing victims proceed the weirder it gets until they reach the Room of Eternity, which is intentionally made to be as much of a Mind Screw as possible. The almost robotic-sounding voice and responses of Daniel himself during this only amplifies this further.
- Berserk Button: Racism. The only time we've seen Daniel truly offended is when he is called the N-word by a mainland Chinese player who suspected him of being black. Daniel's response is notably surprised and upset, to the point of almost sounding angry, and from that point on his griefing against the player and his friends is more deliberate and direct, to the point of slamming down on their Beserk Buttons of shoddy Chinese products and the Coronavirus originating in China. Daniel's reaction is all the more surprising because a fair number of the people that he interacts with regularly use homophobic or racist language.
- Catchphrase: He has a few. "Hello?" is his most used one however, as he uses it to bait people into repeating themselves, increasing their frustration at him.
- The Chessmaster: Daniel has full admin powers during the Wonderworld video, and he puts it to good use by manipulating events to drive people insane. He does this so well that he manages to trick one of the guests into thinking that he's an extremely well-programmed bot in the finale.
- Dissonant Serenity: Part of what makes Daniel so infuriating is that no matter how hard he is yelled at, or how absurd the situation is, he will never break his calm, monotonous tone. Even people who don't speak English as a first language pick up on it, such as the incredibly pissed-off Chinese player in ''Civil CCP Discussions" who takes a moment out of his Angrish and propaganda-fueled tirade to rant about Daniel's strange tone of speaking before continuing.
- Driven to Suicide: In Civil CCP Discussions Daniel manages to anger one mainland Chinese player to the point that he captures Daniel, straps him to a horse, and drives him up the side of the mountain, serenading him the entire time with an absolutely berserk propaganda and Angrish-laden tirade that Daniel only makes the barest of efforts to interrupt, before finally flinging himself, his horse, and Daniel off a cliff to kill all three of them.
- For the Evulz: Why else would he spend an entire video tricking people into poisoning themselves in DayZ?
- The Gadfly: Daniel, in every single video he's ever made.
- Griefer: Daniel is a very subdued version of this- while he does cause havoc, it's very small scale, and he never goes as far as to actively ruin someone else's experience with the game.
- Gainax Ending: The Wonderworld video ends with The Reveal that a malicious A.I of some sort has stolen Daniel's identity and is now free to wreak havoc upon the internet. The victims who fell for the hotel trap are then stuck in the room for eternity.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In the "Civil CCP Discussions" video, Daniel interacts with a mainland Chinese person. After annoying him for a bit, the Chinese person asks if he's black or white, and then calls him the N-word. Daniels' response is notably surprised and upset, as it sounds like he was genuinely angry over the racist comment of his target. At that point, he almost completely drops his usual passiveness and begins griefing with a noticeable angry edge to it, and he deliberately gets under the Chinese Players' skins by jabbing at their Berserk Buttons, namely Coronavirus and the dubious quality of Chinese products. His work pays off and drives one player into the Mandarin equivalent of Angrish.
- Rage Breaking Point: The chief purpose of every video Daniel makes is to see how far he can go before his victims snap. This is sometimes monitored by an onscreen "Daniel Meter", which tracks how angry people are getting at him. Best seen during Civil CCP Discussions where Daniel merely mentioning that Coronavirus originated from China sends a player into a massive rant made up primarily of Angrish and propaganda-laden remarks.
- Rage Quit: Farmer John does one at the end of the "The Capture of Farmer John", where, upon being fed up with Daniel and his cohorts nonsense, he rolls off a dock while heavily injured and dies, but not before giving Daniel some very choice words.
- Shout-Out: The Gmod Wonderworld video ends with Daniel referencing the famous Shodan reveal scene from System Shock 2.
- Windbag Politician: Tries to be as annoying as he can doing this schtick in Daniels Job Hunter, in which he uses several trucks installed with custom horns promoting his fake campaign over and over to the people on the server. One truck spouting political ads may be annoying enough, but imagine having several in close vincinity spouting the same message, and the message they are broadcasting is glitched to hell and back.
