A ‘vast digital continent’: Personal reflections on my Second Life.
Amy Wilson
Second Life is a massively-multiplayer simulated online environment. Upon logging in, one designs an avatar to represent oneself and then goes off to explore the world, interacting along the way with other avatars created by other people who have just done the same thing. According to its official website , San Francisco-based Linden Lab describes its creation like this:
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 2,398,560 people from around the globe.
These avatars, all 2,398,560 of them, can be literally anything – a human being, a bug, an entirely imagined creature, a sofa – except most of the time they aren’t, with the majority of players opting for a variation on Paris Hilton/GI Joe. Once “in-world” (as playing SL is referred to), the “residents” (players) can build anything they want – a gigantic pink elephant that juggles, a schizophrenia simulator, a world featuring “unnameable things” - except that they most often don’t, choosing instead to simply frequent the many SL strip clubs, malls, and casinos, eager to spend their in-world currency (the Linden, with a fluctuating exchange rate on the USD) on whatever they can “purchase.”
From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
What is wonderful about Second Life is the endless potential – in a way, you can be anything, anywhere, limited only by your imagination. And what is so devastating about SL is realizing the limits of all of those things. In a world where death, illness, war, hunger, and environmental devastation absolutely do not exist (and money, power, and politics are of minimal importance), you might find yourself – as I often do – wandering the “vast digital continent,” wondering if any of those things are really the biggest problems facing us at all.
I have been a resident of Second Life since the summer of 2006; whining aside, it truly is an amazing environment to spend time in. What more could you ask for as an artist, then to have the opportunity to build things out of materials that don’t actually exist and that don’t have to conform to the laws of physics? But somehow, when granted all that freedom, I often find myself frozen and replicating work that I would like to do in real life but for whatever reason can’t, using SL as a kind of wish-fulfillment service rather than the unique environment it is.
Indeed, this is the trick with SL – it’s what lures in most players and what keeps most residents coming back: Wish fulfillment, a chance to live the life you can’t, an escape from the limitations of reality. The unstated rule of Second Life is that its amazing-ness is relative to how awful your real life is at the moment you are playing. I have taken refuge in SL during times when I was home sick with the flu; I have built things in SL for free when I’ve been too broke to buy art supplies for my real studio. And then, when things are going well for me, I have abandoned it for weeks on end, the temptations of real life quickly outpacing anything SL might offer. That’s just me, though; there are, of course, many people for whom SL becomes truly a second life
SL succeeds for me, personally, where it creates its own reality, bridging the gap between what I want yet cannot have, and what I would never imagine I’d want in the first place. Witness again, the example of the pink juggling elephant, or some of the more interesting relationships I’ve forged on SL. It would never occur to me that my life is missing the friendship of a 66 year old Gestalt therapist or that I might want to seek out the advice and opinions of a 40-ish transgendered male who works in the virtual sex industry – and yet, some of my most meaningful conversations have come from people whose lives and experiences are so radically different from my little myopic world that it wouldn’t even dawn on me to seek them out.
This is SL at its best: a space to go and blur your forgotten boundaries. Do I discriminate against people forty years older than I am? Oh, of course not. Would I feel odd hanging out with a man in his mid-60s in real life? If I’m being honest, then the answer is probably yes. How about hanging out online with his avatar, who looks about my age? Somehow, that’s okay, even though I know the person behind the avatar is not. Once I made the leap to enter into a 3-d simulated environment and created a representation of myself that immediately interacted with others, I started to realize just how impossible it is to ever truly try and pin myself down in that way. In re-creating yourself for an in-world identity, you inevitably create a fiction about who you are, carefully editing out certain parts that you wish weren’t there, and emphasizing those things you really would like to bring to the fore. This is true in real-life as well as in SL, but within SL the fiction that we create multiplies into an ever-expanding universe until it ceases to be important at all. There’s no reason to hide, because everyone is hiding. Everyone has a secret (who they are really) and so you start from there.
Where it fails miserably, and becomes a complete parody of itself, is its attempt to replicate what already exists, often succumbing to a version of reality at its blandest and most consumer-driven form. I suppose this is necessary for the overall financial wellbeing of Second Life as it attempts to define its role for itself in the marketplace – to distinguish itself from other virtual communities and simply turn a profit – but it is also to the detriment of everything positive an alternate reality can offer. The task of creating a whole new economic model may just be too taxing, too confusing, and too much of a risk for a for-profit venture like Linden Labs.
Instead of building something entirely new (which, in fact, I was lead to believe was the whole appeal of SL in the first place), Linden Labs has successfully convinced many corporations to invest in opening in-world versions of their real companies as a way of encouraging consumers to develop a “relationship” with their products. If an avatar buys a product in-world, the theory goes, then perhaps the person behind that avatar will want to buy the actual product in the real world – for real money – some day. But I have been to the SL American Apparel store and I sadly report that it is a complete sham, worth a one-time visit, but nothing more. In a place where I can fly and breathe underwater and build skyscrapers out of thin air, the thought of spending my time shopping for legwarmers depresses me. In a world where nothing is real, why would I ever want to cling to one of the silliest expression of (this) reality?
And yet, that’s what so much of SL culture comes down to. You would think that in a place where anyone can be buxom and blonde, no one would be – and yet, so many are. Or that in a place where you cannot get drunk, no one would have any reason to frequent bars – and yet, the bars are filled with avatars slurping down their virtual beers. Or the most salacious: That in a place where sex comes down to nothing more than a few clicks of your mouse to perform some pre-programmed moves, that no one would bother – and yet, the sex industry is booming in SL.
Is it that reality is simply too good, too reassuring, too stable for us to ever let go? Of course not; reality is nothing of the sort. But we cling to it all the same, perhaps out of the fear that abandoning it would be an acknowledgement that our real lives aren’t that great, reassuring or as stable as we have convinced ourselves they are. We create the in-world world to resemble what we wish our real lives could be like, but never will be. The difficulty with spending time in a world surrounded by “the creations of other residents” is that you realize just how limited the imaginations of those other residents are, and just how limited you are as well.
This is, in a nutshell, the greatest opportunity that SL offers: the ability to conceive of anything and to make it, in a sense, “real.” It’s just that doing that, following it through, and not being held by the constraints of what we take for granted to be reality, is difficult to the point of being an utterly maddening exercise I’m not even close to completing.
