Not Too Soon

Not Too Soon

I have a friend in Second Life whom I haven't heard from in weeks. I'm sure she's fine, but there's always a little worry in the back of your head when someone goes quiet for a while that maybe everything isn't fine. There's a kind of arrogance that goes with the it-won't-happen-to-me assumption that none of us want to be found guilty of, and it feels too much like tempting fate to be something most of us are comfortable with anyway. I've written before about this strange missing-persons problem, and - don't worry - I don't have any real intention of repeating myself. I wanted to focus instead upon another, equally strange, idea involving people that go missing in SL.

Half of the time, we're not sure we want them to come back. 

As I have said on more than one occasion (oh hush), there are a myriad reasons why people sign up to and engage with Second Life, and since many of them are rather on the negative side, it is very difficult not to worry about the quality of first life your friends might be languishing in when not plugged into SL. However, it's also impossible not to hope that their absence might mean that whatever they came to the virtual world in search of might have materialised for them in the real world, and thus their need to log in has been diminished dramatically if not altogether.

The second friend I made in SL was sian pearl, back in the days before she fell out with capital letters, and at the end of one of our first proper conversations, she said to me something along the lines of 'I hope to speak to you again soon - but not too soon'. It's impossible to ignore the idea that spending too much time online and in the virtual world can be unhealthy and detrimental to what may already be a difficult circumstance to exist within IRL. With that in mind, it's easy to see why we might not always want to log in to SL and find our friends online.

I'm not saying that this is the case for my friend. I think she's a pretty well-rounded person and her priorities seem to be in what I would think of, at least, as a good order. Her absence just gave me cause to talk about this. 

I bet she's off somewhere skiing in a bikini and Trent Reznor 'Closer' -esque goggles doing super stunt tricks (safely) and quoting, I don't know, e.e.cummings, to a line of adoring fans. 'Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go'.

The Red Pill

Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes

Because I'm as mad as a hatter, I logged onto Facebook, and then Tumblr, this morning and invited questions from non-SL users about Second Life. I thought I might get a little variety in the questions, maybe get asked how something worked, or if such-and-such was true, but the four - I know, I know, I need to sit down, it's so many - responses I received were all to the tune of one question: What is Second Life, and why would you ever 'go' there?

Deep breath. 'What is Second Life' has got to be up there with the great unexplainable mysteries of life. God, the Big Bang, dark matters, why washing machines make widows of socks, why toast always lands butter-side down: we may never know the answer to these, nor may we ever come up with a completely satisfactory answer to What Second Life Is, but - take another deep breath - I am going to try and answer it nonetheless. I am going to bravely go where a thousand pink-haired rabbits have probably gone before me (we are talking about the Internet, after all). 

We're going to take the red pill. Fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy.

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a virtual world that exists somewhere within the Internet. When you download SL, what you are really doing is downloading what we call a 'viewer' - software with which to open a portal to allow you to see into, and create an avatar within, Second Life. The language of this suggests the opening of a window - literally - to view something which is already in existence just, usually, beyond your line of sight. When you log out and the window closes, the world carries on without you.

The easiest thing to do is to liken SL to a game - preferably, an MMO like World of Warcraft, except with more possibilities when it comes to character creation and customisation. Whilst this analogy works to explain how SL exists in the first place, it doesn't take into account that SL has no predefined objectives, no scoring system, no health or experience bars. In WoW, you can create characters that all exist in the same world, from the same lore, and all learn and level-up based on the same markers for advancement. In SL, not only do you not 'level-up', but the people you are meeting and interacting with may be pulling ideas and information from entirely different worlds and lores from you. The basis for the creation of their characters might be wildly different from yours, and you cannot even rely on the idea that the person before you comes from the same society as you in the real world, because that person could be from a country on the other side of the world from you. 

It's impossible not to draw similarities between SL and The Matrix. A whole virtual simulated world, a replica of the real world, which you reach by plugging yourself into a computer. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world - not the case with SL, but then that's because you cannot really die in SL. If someone upsets you in the virtual world, however, it's not so easy to let that emotion go when you go back to the real world. Whether you like it or not, just as your mind travels into the Matrix, so your mind travels with you into SL. And as Morpheus says and as I have repeated here ad nauseam, 'the mind makes it real'.

It's not all nearly as scary as I have made it sound there. Most of the characters I have come across have been 'normal' humans, so to speak, and because of time differences, and because of the social circles I have fallen in with, most of the people I meet are British or American. Those contexts are not, exactly, worlds apart. The only people I have come close to offending with my foreign-lore-ways were the Tolkien elves, and they turned out to be more laid back than I had been warned they would be. Usually, if you say please and thank you, and know how to take turns in a conversation, you'll be just fine.

In fact, SL seems to thrive on a kind of honesty not found, at least in my social circles, in real life. Anonymity can be a great bolster to confidence, but people in SL are often very forthright and open about things as personal as mental health, and sex. Sometimes, they can be a little too forthright, and as such, a lot of 'drama' takes place. Drama is a major issue for SL, and it's something that has been known to drive people away from engaging with the virtual world. 

Because of the drama, and because there is no specific law (that I am aware of) for SL, SL is populated with vigilantes. On forums, personal blogs, and social media networks such as Plurk, vigilantes launch attacks, rightly or wrongly, against those they deem to be wrongdoers, accusing them of everything from copyright infringement to child pornography. Charity fundraisers that didn't give the money they raised to charity, people that think it's O.K. to sell clothes featuring swastikas or dressed inspired by the Columbine school shooting, insensitive remarks about rape - it's all happened in SL, and it's all been pointed out and dealt with by vigilantes. In terms of social and individual empowerment, it's fantastic; but, with any good vigilante film, there's always the fear that people see and accuse first, and ask questions later. Butchering one person doesn't change a general attitude.  

In terms of physicality, SL looks like...well...a whole lot of different things. There is no one aesthetic, and no rhyme or reason to how the virtual world is arranged. If you owned the land and the building skills, you could place Australia beside, say, Sweden, and have one foot in each replica-country, except SL is usually more diverse than that. Instead of building two countries next to each other, more often than not I find I could have one foot in a boxing ring a la Fight Club, and the other in a meadow which is home to a race of fairies with mermaid fins. 

Because there are so many individual creators and designers, the lands (sims) you can walk through can change as often and as quickly as the English weather. Since there is no are-you-any-good-at-this test, the quality of the builds can vary dramatically, too, and they will only exist as long as you keep paying for the land you are renting from Linden Labs. If you stop paying, you lose your right to build there. If you choose to rent land through a middle man, and someone offers you a better deal, you can move your building to another virtually-physical location. In that way, you can never wholly be sure that the place you are trying to visit is still going to be there. I tried to teleport (main method of transportation, after walking) to the World's End Garden earlier (see what that looks like here - here!), and instead ended up on a sim full of everyday-looking houses and great big palm trees.

Why Second Life? What is the point?
Second Life means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and what drives them to the virtual world in the first place is not necessarily what keeps them there. There's no way I can account for everyone's motives, but here are some thoughts.

SL is, potentially, a fantastic platform for design, creation, and money-making. Designing avatars and building houses in SL has the same appeal as designing avatars and building houses does on programmes such as the Sims. In SL, however, whilst you can get a limited about of clothes and items for free, things cost money, and land to build on costs money, and so many people turn to creating and selling their owns items or clothing in order to make SL pay for itself. For creatives, it's a great way to make a bit of pocket money, and also another forum for you to spread your artwork. I know of more than one real life artist who uses SL to sell artwork in various forms and to build up another fan-base. SL also offers access, thusly, to a wide range of other creatives with which you can bounce ideas and collaborate. That's exciting, no?

Some people with anxiety and/or depression also find solace in the virtual world. Being able to hide behind a different face can be a confidence booster, and it allows greater control over who you interact with, and when - especially since there are a thousand legitimate and familiar excuses you can employ to soften the I-don't-want-to-speak-to-you blow. There is one person I call friend who uses SL to get out and socialise because he is a full-time carer and cannot leave his house for personal time very often. 

It is also, alternatively, a place in which to hide - just as people hide from real life in books, games, and TV shows - , a place where the thing you are running from doesn't have to exist for a while. There's a danger there, in that a lot of expectation is made of what the virtual world is capable of, and sometimes it is all too easy to hide within its virtual boundaries and not to deal with the issues that originally drove us there. Alternatively, it offers a sanctuary in which to gather strength and support until you are ready to confront the real world. SL can't give you any answers that the real world can't, but perhaps the performance of life, the framing of it - and the performance and framing of yourself - can help lead you to the answers we can only get from ourselves.

Other people use SL as a place for self-experimentation, whether that be on a shall-I-dye-my-hair-purple level, or a am-I-into-BDSM-sex level. This ties (ha ha) into roleplay, but goes beyond just sexual roleplay - SL presents another medium in which to roleplay, listing itself beside the tabletop and forums. People in SL take RP very seriously, and the creation of collaborative stories like this is a wonderful thing in my opinion.

As I have written about here (- here!), there is no obligation to be the person you are in real life in your Second Life. If you want to log on and act like a chauvinist, off you go (it happens more than you might imagine). You can use your avatar to pretend to be confident, to pretend to be a rogue - to pretend to be whatever you like. As I've suggested, you don't even have to be human. You could be an animal, real or mythological, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a robot. The limits are the building skills of the virtual community.

The point, truly, is that Second Life has no point other than the point you give it, and many people stop engaging with Second Life when their original motive finds some real-life conclusion. If you get passed the difficult interface and utterly unintuitive avatar customisation, as well as the idiots that line up to flash their fake penises at newbies, there are some fantastic things to see in Second Life. Virtual coastlines, beautiful dream-worlds, spaceships, dragons, diners plucked straight out of the 1950s; if you can think of it, it probably exists, and if not, you can create it for yourself. 

Of course, there are an awful lot of fake penises kicking around, too.

Does that even begin to answer either question? There seems to be so much to say, but I think that is enough for now. I'm late for a very important date.

Turned

Vampires love knitted jumpers. Didn't you know?

sian pearl teleported to my skybox yesterday and found me on the roof, taking photos of Kitti posed with crystal tears and pointed white teeth. She said, 'Kitti has been a Creature of the Night a lot lately. Has she been Turned?' 'No,' I replied. 'Kitti is everything and nothing.' 

And then I giggled to myself (as I do) because I felt a little bit like Kohta Hirano's Warrant Officer Schroedinger, who likes to state often, courtesy of his maker's sense of humour, that he is 'everywhere and nowhere'.

I couldn't find any 'about' links that didn't lead to massive Hellsing spoilers, so I'm settling for this picture of him. Google his name at your own risk.

It's that line again, though, isn't it? - the making and breaking of Second Life, the reason to sign up and the reason never to sign in ever again. An avatar has the capacity to be everything and anything, but also to be absolutely nothing. Not everybody sees nothingness as a positive, nor as an opportunity. Freedom isn't necessarily the absence of all rules, regulations and obligations, but instead the ability to have decisions to make, and to make them for yourself. In nothingness, decisions have questionable use and importance, and if we cannot find a use or importance within ourselves, we flounder. I have said this a thousand times here, although I think that might be the most succinctly I have ever written it out.

It was kind of funny that sian made this observation, however, since all I think Kitti has consistently been lately is half-naked, and a little bit, well...of a fairy. This is new for me, as a lover of fantasy, because fairies have never been a creature I was especially interested in. And let's be fair here, Kitti doesn't look like the sort of fairy who is going to go around sprinkling magical dust or making flowers bloom, or collecting teeth - unless she'd knocked them out in the first place.

Mean Mischief

The naked-and-fey thing is courtesy of Monica Outlander and her BlackLabel collection. I haven't stopped wearing it for any real length of time since the Golden Thread show two weeks ago. It isn't that Kitti doesn't have other beautiful clothes - because she does - but I just keep switching back to the Miamai outfits. I'm addicted. And Monica Outlander is not a fan of t-shirts. We'll have the self-confidence conversation later.

I like the opportunity to play with Kitti's appearance, to dress her up sometimes as a vampire or a mean-looking fairy or anything else I can imagine. There are a few basic elements that I like to keep the same - her face and body shape, her hair colour (between two shades), her eye colour, etc - but everything else is up for grabs. And I enjoy that I can do it with such ease, and that the consequences of each change can be as significant or insignificant as I allow them to be. I am a whimsical shaper of nothingness. Let's go and play.

And on the subject of playing, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that the new year brings you what you need to (or to continue to) be happy. I will see you on the other side of the sea of wrapping paper.

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!

Be Quiet, Kevin

"Okay, it's like this. 

You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. 

You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. 

Nothing is really happening. 

You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, 

it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? 

Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? 

All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. 

"What are they watching?"

After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."

"People like me."

- Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Be quiet, Kevin, Big Brother XIII is on.

This kind of idea has been articulated before - most notably, I might suggest, by Fight Club, though, I confess, Fight Club did absolutely nothing for me. I haven't yet read the book, though it's been suggested that I do.  Kevin Khatchadourian, both in the pages of the novel and portrayed so beautifully on screen by Ezra Miller, creeps me out.

But the point here isn't Kevin: the point is this idea of the television. A simultaneously wonderful and awful invention, I don't think I would be going too far to suggest that there is a struggle to fill the clock with wonderful and interesting programming. We've probably only enough for maybe a couple of days. What Kevin says here is both completely right and completely wrong - though, in case some of my readers aren't familiar with his story, I shall put no spoilers here. We do watch the world go wrong. It's bound up in vicariousness, yes, but also in a strange and almost indescribable sense of morality of witnessing, in a need to witness. It's also exciting, and because it's not happening in our living room, directly endangering our lives, we are free to be excited and horrified and saddened and relieved without a great deal of real consequence. That is, perhaps, another essay altogether.

However: how often do we find ourselves watching other people watching TV? How often do we find ourselves flicking through channel after channel of reality TV shows during which we can watch other people living? (Just to clarify: that isn't a value judgement. People are really very interesting, though I personally don't really want to watch them living through a TV screen). Kevin is wrong because we can actually press the button at pretty much any time of the day and see people going to work and listening to the radio and watching the TV. Whilst we spend a lot of time watching people like Kevin, we also spend a lot of time watching people like ourselves (that is assuming that we aren't like Kevin, of course). Perhaps that is partially as a comfort measure, a ward against the sense of the need to witness - or even an extension of it, representing a need to reassure ourselves that whilst That is happening There, People Like Us are living Normally, thank you very much, Here. But again, I think that is another essay. Susan Sontag covers some of it in her volume Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, I believe).

Here's the crux: How much is Second Life an example of these ideas? How much of Second Life is watching reality? How much of Second Life (and its washing machines and sinks and toilets and houses and beds and showers) is a reproduction of reality? How much of Second Life is an awareness of this reality, these ideas of Kevin's, and an attempt to enliven them all? How much of Second Life is a platform for people to carry out desires and ideas and actions that people like Kevin carry out (that is to say, things we consider extreme and unnecessary in the extreme) without having the consequences? Are we watching our avatars? - and if we are, does that make them people like Kevin? Do we wish they were people like Kevin? - people of interest and import, worth interviewing on the TV?

I'm going to stop now.

[If you'd like to see Ezra Miller deliver that strange, horrible, and utterly on-it speech as Kevin in We Need To Talk About Kevin, please click this link here - here!. If you haven't see the film, I would advise that you stop watching the clip once he has said the words "an A in Geometry" (about one minute in), though there are actually few spoilers in the rest of the clip.]

Introductions - Why SL?

My mother would kill me if I went out with that much skin on show!

So here is the virtual me - a pale redhead that I unwittingly called "Kitti" (if I'd thought it through, I'd have steered clear of the name) Wytchwood. I signed up for Second Life and downloaded the viewer in October/November last year (2010) and off I went into the land of spaceships and bite requests, whatever the Hell they are.

As avatars go, I don't think I look too bad. I have been asked several times by other SL users if this was my "alt" - an alternative character, as opposed to a "main" character, as I don't "look like a newbie". What does a newbie look like, I hear you ask? Well, I'm afraid that I'm perhaps still too new to be able to answer that, but I know that one of the first things my friends helped me do when I logged into SL was lose the default duck-waddle walk I had been assigned, and send me some hair that did not look like it had been painted onto my scalp. Maybe the fact that I now walk like a supermodel and have hair that waves around in non-existent breezes means I have been accepted into the fold as it were.

Upon logging into Second Life for the first time, you are put through perhaps the most useless tutorial ever, and then dumped into a pretty random place called "Welcome Island" that serves only to teach you that somebody at Linden Labs has a fantasy about being able to ride bees. I kid you not - a giant bee will give you a very boring tour of the island, and when you are done, you'll wonder why you bothered signing up at all.

Please don't mention the hair.

 The only way, at least that I am aware of, to get off the island is to teleport - which requires you to be familiar with the Destination Guide and the teleportation system that the tutorial utterly fails to tell you how to use. It also fails to inform you of how to access the library of skins, hairstyles and outfits in your inventory so that you can dress yourself. Many of my classmates gave up trying to find things (though it's not actually that difficult) and decided to be bald. Well, whatever works for you, my friend.

But to return to that all-important question: why bother using SL? In an article I read when researching for my essay about finding love on Second Life, the author Marion Cox says that when his friend suggested that he turned to the virtual world, he felt that he was ‘"possibly insinuating that I was a giant failure in real life". It would appear that this is a general consensus amongst those who don’t like or don’t understand Second Life – that you must have failed miserably at life in general and thus need a place to begin again. For some people, Second Life offers a chance to try again, but for others it is merely an extension of the Real World, simply something else to ‘give a go’. It is a form of escapism, offering another world for your exploration on a rainy afternoon when you’re feeling particularly poor. But what you are expect from Second Life will undoubtedly shape what you get out of it, and reflecting upon yourself to understand your expectations gives you clues as to what you want to do within the virtual world. In my experience, if you want nothing out of it, you’ll probably find nothing to do within it - though I would suggest that a rollercoaster ride in SL doesn't quite get your adrenalin going like being on Oblivion at Alton Towers.

A new venture for adrenalin-junkies? I think not.

As said in the previous post, I signed up to SL because my lecturer advised us too, saying that it was the only way we could really begin to understand the topic in hand. I entered the realm in the mode of ethnographer, I suppose, wanting to see and understand and document, but at the same time staying somewhat detached. I was not expecting to get much out of SL other than understanding, and thus had little emotional attachment. I wanted to see what SL had to offer, and I have undoubtedly been treated to some odd sights.