Unobviously Obvious

Ha-rumph

A conversation with Norah Vespers in-world yesterday made me realise something unobviously obvious. No, I don't care if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now - it will by the end of the post. I hope, anyway.

When I wrote about the effect SL could have on RL for my essay two years ago, I didn't realise that I had not taken into account a whole vague and difficult-to-fathom relationship between the two worlds and those of us that skip between them. This relationship, as I have said, is vague and difficult-to-fathom, and is based mainly on discontentment. 

An awful lot of time and energy goes into the creation of an avatar, and in my experience, one of the most deterring things about SL to new users is the enormity of such a task. The controls for customising your avatar are not the most intuitive, and though it becomes incredibly simple once you have got the hang of it, I have no doubt that had I not received help from various mentors and friends along the way, I'd have given up trying to make Kitti look good, and would have left SL a long time ago. Your avatar, and the time and energy put into it, represents a kind of stake in the virtual world, especially early-on when you might not have a strong base of friends or a long list of sims you enjoy spending time in.

The problem with this - one amongst many, I'm sure - is that avatar customisation never really stops. I know I have had particularly bad influences in this department since I was effective brought up by fashion bloggers, but I think it's true across the board. Fairs selling new hair styles, new skins, new shapes, new clothes, new furniture in SL remain immensely popular to the point of stupidity, and there are Flickr streams and blogs and in-world groups designed with the specific purpose of informing fanbases when the latest items are going to be on sale. Clothing in the virtual world falls prey to fashion seasons just as it does in the real world - it is a perfectly replicated copy of the capitalist system. And why shouldn't it be? But what it represents is the continual desire to better ourselves physically even in the face of the expanded choices available to us in Second Life. 

Like I said, unobviously obvious.

So were am I going with this? Here: our relationship and continual renewal of time and energy and thus our stake with/in SL is predicated on our continual discontentment. If we feel like we have seen and done everything, as if there is nothing about our avatars we can improve, what would we do? We'd probably log out.  When we begin to feel the malaise written about in my blog post, 'Sick and Tired', the 'cure' is often a partial, if not total, revamp of our avatars. 

Told you Kitti was going to be barefoot forever...except when she's wearing roller skates...

The cynicism of this is not lost on me, nor do I really think that the only reason anybody logs into SL is to buy new things to make their avatar prettier. That doesn't always mean buying new things - sometimes, finding things we had forgotten about in our inevitably extensive inventories can breathe life back into an avatar, too. For example, I'd completely forgotten about my roller skates from the Secret Store. And although I logged in yesterday with the expressed purpose of going to Glam Affair and buying the new 'Lucy' skin in the palest shade, then hung around in-world to decorate my largely-empty skybox, what I got the most enjoyment out of was finding that Norah had logged in and talking with her for a while. Then, when she logged out, I proceeded to roller skate around said skybox (which is shaped like a rectangular doughnut) as fast as I could make Kitti go until she spontaneously tripped up over nothing and went somersaulting through the air and into a wall. Hilarious.

Norah has since inadvertently suggested that my skybox could be used for a roller derby, and I reckon that could be really cool! Anybody want to join us? I'm deadly serious. IM me. But that's beside the point.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that whilst I enjoy dressing Kitti and making her look good, that is only a portion of what I enjoy about SL. But it is still a portion.

Sick and Tired

If you have to be sick and tired, being sick and tired with Norah is the BEST.

There is a sickness in SL, a kind of malaise that affects avatars right to the core of their invisible mesh bones. There's no telling when it will hit, nor how long it will linger, making the virtual world seem grim(mer) and dark(er than it already is). Sometimes, it begins as a restlessness, and it's only after you've spent a week sat in your skybox avoiding IMs and fiddling with outfits you don't even care about that you realise you've got it.

What is this sickness, Doctor Wytchwood? Well, I will tell you. It's a lack of meaning. A lack of purpose. A kind of mini-existential crisis of the virtual kind. It can effect different avatars in different ways, leading some to question only why they logged in, there and then,  and others to question why they don't just delete themselves altogether. The cures for it vary, too, and whilst some might respond to the discovery of a new sim or a new shop, or a new role-play writer, others are beyond help, and vanish from the virtual world altogether.

I think it would be fair to say that this malaise is most fatal amongst the newbies. Full of excitement at the possibilities Second Life promises, they log in and quickly realise that it isn't as easy as it seemed. New avatars have a natural magnetism to walls, and fiddling with prims and mesh and alphas and clothing layers can be a nightmare. Trawling the Marketplace for nice free items is hideously time-consuming, and with all the demos floating around, it's difficult to work out what is what. Then, when you do find something, it arrives in a box that you can't, for some alien reason no one has explained to you, just open. Very very quickly you arrive at the crucial question, the undeniable symptom of the strongest form of this existential sickness - WHAT AM I DOING HERE?!

And nobody can answer that for you. There's no virtual Linden Labs God holding all of the answers. Lacking the pre-written rules and structure of a game, there is no point to Second Life any more than one could palpably reach out and told hold of the point of the First Life. There is a wonderful scene in Queen of the Damned in which Akasha turns to Lestat and says 'we must make the meaning'. I think that's the truest damn thing I have ever read. For some, that's daunting. For others, well...the possibilities are endless.

Personally, I think I fall somewhere between the two, in both worlds. I have not, however, suffered this malaise too deeply. Occasionally I have found myself logged into SL, sitting in my skybox when none of my friends are online, wondering why I even signed in - but that was remedied quickly by simply logging out, and logging in again later and finding somewhere to explore or somebody to talk to. Several of my virtual friends, however, have been suffering deeply, and I'm wondering if maybe I just haven't been around long enough yet to be really, really vulnerable. I'm wondering, too, if it's infectious. And some of the people I knew when I first started 'visiting' SL don't sign in any more, and I find myself hoping that it was this sickness that took them and not something more tangible.

I think that it must have something to do with the reasons we signed up to SL in the first place. I came as an ethnographer-of-sorts, simply trying to see and investigate the virtual world and whatever it had to offer. I enjoy exploring and building nice things and taking screenshots and making little photo shoots and talking to people and just sitting around and chatting with friends. When I'm not in the mood to do those things, I simply don't sign in. But if your reason for logging in is less whimsical, more based on a need or a desire, what happens when the object of that need or desire vanishes? What happens when you realise you don't need SL to be your training ground for the real world any more? What happens when you realise you no longer need somewhere to escape to? I suppose that if you can adapt, you can survive, and if not, you don't - and that isn't always a bad thing.

For better or for worse, I have no intentions of quitting SL in the near future. I've just joined two really great communities, and made a new friend who doesn't find it remotely weird when I ask her to pose with me looking sick and tired and with a rain-cloud in a cage suspended above our heads. I have some good friends who are always up for a laugh or a hug, and I think that's gotta be worth gold.

You'll be sick and tired of my rambling before long, mind.

Click here - here! - to see the above picture on Flickr, and much more besides!