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It's all in your head.

We can't replace our real lives with our second ones yet. It seems obvious, but I became aware of this in the past few weeks as RL work, RL deadlines, RL people, RL play, and RL drama kept me out of their SL counterparts. Even if I wanted to submerge into the virtual sea, I couldn't. SL doesn't put food in my mouth. The heat from the laptop isn't the same as the warmth of a lover's touch. I can't smell the rain or diesel exhaust.

A laggy sim and a nagging mother are about an even trade, however.

Anyway, the primary has taken over the secondary, and so I've been absent. Subsequently, my initial quest has ground to a halt, but it hasn't been fruitless. Just the other day, while sitting in a sim thinking about what to write for this blog I met another person on her own mission: she was photographing birds she found. I can't tell you how excited I was by this.

It's not that I'm interested in birds at all. In RL as well as SL, they are simply part of the landscape to me. Honestly, I pay more attention to rocks than I do birds. But this individual's self-imposed quest is beautiful because it defies the system. She's making her own rules. One might respond, "Well, that's the beauty of SL. You can make your own rules." That's true of life, too, but how many of us actually do that? The set rules of Second Life seem to be:
  1. Make an avatar
  2. Make some friends
  3. Buy some land
  4. Make/design something
These are the things you're supposed to do. As Kieres said in a comment to the previous post, if you are the sort of person who doesn't do these things, SL can be quite empty. Certainly there are friendships, but what grounds the self in such an ever-mutating world? What actually are you befriending? If there's no sense of purpose behind the avatar, then any relationship hardly seems substantive.

Real Life beckons, but this seems to part of a discussion taking place here, too. Who are we? More to the point, why are we?

And yes, mom, I'm okay, even though I haven't called in a week.

Comments

Coyote said…
Our hostess asks: "... what grounds the self in such an ever-mutating world? What actually are you befriending? If there's no sense of purpose behind the avatar, then any relationship hardly seems substantive." Suggestive, but turn it around to apply it to Real Life. Do we ask for the purpose behind our RL friends, or, really, ourselves? We may have goals, yes, and responsibilities, but how often are we really driven by purpose -- ours or others? It's an ideal that's rarely approached on a day-to-day basis, I suspect, for most people. Perhaps the bar should be raised higher for a Second Life, though.
Alyia's question, I think, suggests the crux of the argument that you cannot form a real friendship with the tabula rasa approach to Second Life: that you must tear away the Real Life veil, or there's no real basis for understanding and friendship.
March 7, 2007 at 2:52 PM
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