The SLunkie Factor – Part III: Losses and Gains

(Continued from here.)

So it was time to take stock. What had my Second Life cost me? What had I received in return? Had it been worth it?

The most obvious loss was the financial one. 2007 was the year in which I felt the full impact of my addiction from beginning to end. When I tally up how much money I lost in that year alone by not working properly, the bottom line is a five-digit sum in Euros, and I’m afraid the first digit is not a one. Add to that the last three months of 2006 and about the first two or three of 2008, and I’m getting close to 30,000 € before taxes. Maybe more.

If someone had shown me that number in early October 2006 and told me that was what I was going to pay for that “free account” I was about to open, I would have thought only a madman could do something like that.

And that’s only a number. Hidden behind that number are some of the most humiliating and devastating moments of my life, starting with the moment I had to confess to my wife that there was no money coming in because I had been slacking for months. The moment I had to tell the people at the tax office that I couldn’t pay my taxes after their regular direct debit had been returned by my bank because of insufficient funds. The moment I had to explain to my children that we weren’t going to go on vacation in the summer of 2007. The moment I sat in my bank manager’s office telling him I had been going through some difficult times, but things were going to get better now. The moment things hadn’t gotten better after all and the tax office finally lost their patience with me and blocked my bank account. The moment I shook the hand of the bailiff on my doorstep. Then, in December 2007, came that final humiliating phone conversation with an insurance employee in which I had to insist that I really, really had no choice but to cancel my life insurance which was the centerpiece of my old age pension scheme while he was trying to be helpful and made all sorts of alternative suggestions which couldn’t work for me for reasons I didn’t want to explain to him.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t work, you see. I also didn’t open any letters if they looked like they might contain some official business or a bill or something. All my affairs were in a state of total chaos. And the worse it got, the more apathetic I became and the more I escaped to SL where I didn’t seem to have to feel all those negative emotions.

The second big loss was a little more than one year of my marriage. I was lucky enough not to lose it permanently in the end, but for about fourteen months or so, it wasn’t really a marriage. One side of it was that my wife was despairing over my lack of responsibility and the financial mess we were in and on the brink of giving up on me. For a time, she had given up, I think. And of course she couldn’t help noticing that my whole emotional life was happening elsewhere. She never knew any details of what I was doing in SL, but the outcome of it all was that I had withdrawn from her, and she knew that all too well. Sometimes she had hope that all this would change, other times she didn’t. What kept our marriage together during those times when she didn’t was just the thin thread of the circumstances. Had we been living in a rented flat without kids, I’m sure I would have found my suitcase on the landing one day outside the door equipped with a new lock.

The other side was that for a while, I didn’t feel any motivation to save my marriage. There were moments when I was secretly hoping she would throw me out. I mentioned earlier that I had buried inside myself a feeling of being trapped, and one of the things I felt trapped by, as grossly unfair as that sounds, was my marriage. That feeling broke loose from its hidden depth with the fury of a volcano when I came to SL. In her comment on Part II, my friend Riall hinted she was going through something similar and said SL was just an “accomplice” in that, which certainly was true in my case. I tended to use the word catalyst when I thought about it. Those destructive forces didn’t come from SL, they came from deep inside myself, and SL was just the tremor that shook the rock cover from the hidden magma chamber.

I say destructive. I had a friend in SL who tried her best to convince me that those forces were really liberating, not destructive. For a while I was really torn between those two ways of looking at it. From where I was, there seemed to be two roads into the future in terms of my marriage, breaking out or hanging in there and trying to make it work, and for a while I really couldn’t tell which would be the better one. Each one seemed to involve throwing away a whole world of possibilities. Today I think it probably was both – liberating and destructive. It was a good thing that these feelings broke loose, because otherwise I might never have been forced to face them and deal with them. But I’m really glad that their fury was contained. My choice in the end was not so much about which road seemed to promise more satisfaction for me as about what sort of person I wanted to be. Ironically, taking that road is proving to be a very satisfying thing.

That brings me to the third big loss – the way I felt about myself. The way things were, I couldn’t be good at anything in RL anymore. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t provide for my family, I couldn’t take care of my affairs, I couldn’t be a good husband, I couldn’t be a good father. I was a total failure. I felt dirty, powerless, worthless. I don’t think I was really suicidal, but I was thinking a lot about suicide in those days – I didn’t talk about it or make plans or even seriously wish for it or anything, but I thought about it. I saw possible scenarios in my mind. Meanwhile, old Dylan in SL was successful, charming, popular. True to my propensity to pursue good feelings and avoid negative ones, these feelings drove me more and more to prefer SL to RL. And so the spiral kept turning…

There were other losses, too. That summer vacation in 2007 that we had to cancel. I wasn’t reading books anymore. I wasn’t playing the guitar anymore. I wasn’t going to the movies anymore. I’d given up the volunteer work in my church, which I had been very committed to before I came to SL. My whole spiritual life took a major hit which it still hasn’t recovered from. As I wasn’t even doing my work, any thought of pursuing my own writing seemed ridiculously out of reach. It seemed as if my life was reduced to feeding this body, keeping it reasonably clean and grudgingly granting it a minimum of sleep, all in order to drop it in front of the computer again as soon as possible so I could let my soul be sucked into the colourful pixel world.

In view of this huge price I paid for my SL, you may be wondering why I would even ask the question whether it was worth it. How could anything be worth paying such a price? But it won’t do to act as if SL had given me nothing in return. After all, there are people who are paying a similar price for nothing but drunken stupor. Compared to that, I certainly got a better deal.

First of all I met a lot of wonderful people in SL, and with some of them I feel I have formed lasting friendships. You can’t put a price tag on that. Then, SL gave me opportunities to playfully pursue creative activities – like making animations, working with textures and pictures, building, scripting, writing this blog – that I would probably never have thought of without SL. And above all, SL taught me a lot about myself that I didn’t know. As I’ve said before, becoming Dylan brought things about myself to the surface that I never thought were in me. The impact of it could easily have been my undoing, but nevertheless, I couldn’t ever wish these things would have stayed buried inside me.

Maybe asking in hindsight whether it was worth it is the wrong question after all. It’s not as if I ever made a choice to pay that price, knowing what I would get in return. This is just how it played out. A lot of it was my doing, some of it wasn’t. Many things I do regret, some things I don’t. I had to grieve these losses like you grieve the loss of a loved one. Then my next task was to translate the question into the present moment: Is what I’m doing right now in SL worth “losing” what I could or should be doing in RL right now? And the task was to bring Dylan back into my RL. All the things about me he had brought to the surface – they weren’t going to be any use to me if they stayed sealed off in SL. In a nutshell, I had to find a way to make SL work for me instead of against me.

(To be continued in Part IV: A Quantum of Freedom.)

The SLunkie Factor – Part II: Staying Hooked

(Continued from here.)

So I sat down and wrote some goodbye notes to my closest friends in SL. I imagine writing a suicide note must feel a bit like that. I’d met some people during those few months who had become really good pals, and in some cases I became aware just how dear they had become to me only while I was writing those notes. It was a harrowing experience.

At that time, I was in a very close relationship with a lady. The particular nature of that relationship added greatly to my feeling that I wasn’t in control of things anymore (as if I had ever been!) and that I needed to break free.

She was living in Northern Europe, so we were both in the same time zone. She worked for a big IT company, but she called in sick quite frequently, often spending weeks off work, because she was suffering from severe stress symptoms at the time. So she was both going through a very vulnerable time in her life and often had plenty of time on her hands during the day. She also had some RL contact information, so she could reach me even when I wasn’t in SL for a change.

The result was that even on those days when I made some effort to stay out of SL and do my work instead, most of the time I would receive a message from her sooner or later, letting me know that she was feeling awful and needed my company. Usually I ended up logging on and spending time with her – way more time than I could afford of course. I didn’t feel like I had any choice in the matter.

When I told her I had decided to take a break from SL and didn’t know when I would be back, she was dissolving in a pool of tears. I felt awful for having to do that to her. I didn’t want to hurt her, but again, I felt as if I had no choice.

When I logged off to enter my hiatus, I did hope I would be able to come back one day, but I thought it was highly doubtful. I saw myself at the beginning of a long uphill hike to get my work habits back on track, to catch up on my deadlines and to regain some lost ground financially. Furthermore, I knew I shouldn’t go back unless I established some firm ground rules for keeping a better balance and could trust myself to stick to them. With all these provisos, I thought my return to SL was a long way off, if it ever happened at all.

Then a funny thing happened. On Yahoo, I still talked every day to my lady friend who had been so heartbroken over my departure. She stayed heartbroken for about three days. On the fourth day, I heard nothing from her. On the fifth day, she sent me a message to tell me she had found a new boyfriend.

I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t been in SL long enough yet to know that the lightning speed with which she had recuperated from her bottomless misery was nothing out of the ordinary in the virtual world. I thought it was just amazing.

The immediate effect the news had on me was that I thought I could go back without danger. I know now that I was kidding myself, but at the time I was all too ready to believe in the convenient fiction that all my troubles had been solely due to the nature of my relationship with that lady. Now that problem had taken care of itself, so I thought I was safe.

So I was back barely a week after I had pompously announced my departure. I’m not sure, but it may be that I even managed to work regularly for a few weeks or so, just long enough to lull me into believing I had the thing under control.

By February, though, the old pattern had taken over again. SL spread out more and more in my life, filling not only my days, but my head and my heart, too. I paid a perfunctory tribute of attention to my wife, my kids and, to a lesser degree, my work, but my thoughts and my passions were elsewhere. I had lost my taste for RL.

I’ve often wondered how this could happen to me. How was it possible that a virtual world could get such a hold on me? I wasn’t aware that my RL was so miserable that I had no choice but escaping from it. But why then had it lost all colour for me, so that I fled to the visual candy world of SL whenever I thought no one was watching me?

By and by, I found a few answers to these questions. One important clue was that a similar thing had happened to me a few years ago. At that time, my son, who was then nine years old, became very ill and had to have the sort of surgery that is covered in long articles in international medical journals afterwards. He spent several months in hospital.

That summer, I did hardly any work. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time; usually my wife visited my son during the day, leaving the evenings to me, so I didn’t really have an excuse. But I didn’t work. SL wasn’t around yet at the time, but I found all sorts of other things to do; I don’t even remember what I did. Play Tetris, most likely, and a variety of other mindless things. Afterwards, I told myself I was going through some sort of depression. Whatever it was, I couldn’t muster up the energy to do my work, and I basically anaesthetized myself every way I could, both against the fear for my son and the pangs of my conscience.

But that had been years ago. My son was fine now, and so was everyone else in my family. In fact, I thought I was a reasonably happy man when I first logged on to SL. So what was it that made the virtual world – and my own self in the virtual world – so much more attractive to me than my real everyday life?

When I thought about this, I came up with some clues. I don’t want to go into too many details lest this blog entry become even more interminable than it already is, but they have to do with exhaustion, with professional goals I had failed to achieve, and with a general feeling of being trapped, of not being the one who was in charge of the direction of my life. Maybe it all comes down to the fact that I was fourty-six years old when I first came to SL – just the right time for a nice little midlife crisis. Although I think you can feel exhausted and frustrated with things at any time of your life.

The point is, though, that by becoming Dylan, I felt as if I could get away from all that; literally slip into a new skin and a new life and be free to find out who I really was and what I really wanted to do. And that was, at that time in my life, an overwhelmingly attractive prospect.

Another clue I found was in the fall of 2007 when I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair. While I made my rounds there, I spotted a book called Handbook of Psychotherapy at one of the exhibition stands. When I browsed through it, I found a chapter on internet addiction. Naturally, I pulled up a chair and started to read.

It was a bit of an eye-opener. I had long suspected that my SL addiction had a chemical aspect because being in SL felt like a permanent high to me. Of course, it’s common knowledge that whenever you find pleasure in something, there’s a neurochemical correlation that makes the „pleasure center“ in your brain „light up“. Obviously, there’s also the sexual arousal aspect with its increased hormone levels that could conceivably lead to a chemical dependency. (Conventional wisdom has it that men are more prone to react in that way to visual stimuli than women, but judging from my experiences in SL, I have my doubts about that.)

The new thing Iearned from the Handbook of Psychotherapy was the conditioning that takes place in connection with these chemical processes. Conditioning basically means that the brain loves to associate things. So when you regularly do things with your computer that give you sexual pleasure, for example, such as logging on to SL and being surrounded by beautiful, scantily clad avatars, your brain sort of groups your computer in the same category as the sexual pleasure. The result is that even the sound of your computer booting up might be enough to kick your glands into gear and get the juices flowing, as it were.

That explained to me why SL always seemed to give me a kick, even when I was alone on my sky platform building things or scripting. That low-level arousal I felt all the time I spent in SL certainly produced a sort of substance addiction that was one of the factors that kept me hooked.

The good news is that this effect does wear off a bit when you become conscious of it. Some brain scientists try to tell us that our brain chemistry is all that we are, but ironically, it is precisely when we become aware of the chemical nature of a certain reaction we feel that we can rise above it, as it were, and discover that beyond our brain chemistry, there is such a thing as „I“ that can make itself master of that reaction. „I“ may not be able to turn it off, but I can decide what to do with it, and that makes the compulsion I feel suddenly much less compelling.

But let’s not rush ahead. For the time being, I was still a miserable SLunkie, and would remain so for a while. Still, it may be that it was this discovery that created in me that tiny space of self-determination that allowed me in the following months to take an honest look at what SL had done to me.

(Continuing in Part III: Losses and Gains.)

The SLunkie Factor – Part I: Getting Hooked

Here are some choice bits from my chat log:

DS: I need to get some rl back.

***

DS: just bored…thinking about doing RL today!
LE gasps in horror
DS: how about you?
RW1: Miss D, RL is severely over rated
RW1: And you run the Risk of a Blue Screen if you try to do to much in RL

***

CP: I’ve taken to pointing at doors in RL… nothing happens, though.

***

DR: so … you’ll be first in line when they finally find a way to upload yourself?
DP: yep……waiting to delete my RL…..lol
DR: keep a backup
EG: I already have D lol

***

RG: entering a building in rl ..takes off sunglasses and says ..’ Give me a minute to let things rez” …sighs.. I might be a addict

***

ER: RL? What’s that?
DR: some game I used to play.

***

RW2: I still think we’ll meet a TRON like person here
MH: what is TRON?
DR: great movie
RW2: 80s classic
RW2: the RL user gets sucked into the computer
MH: oooh…..pick me pick me!

***

AN: RL is a nice game, still got some bugs and isn’t fair sometimes but the graphics are cool xD

***

CN: I quit RL I stay here

And lastly, one of my favourites:

DR: RL isn’t running anymore on my machine… I must have borked the installation somehow.

***

Incidentally, to find these quotes, I imported my first chat log file, which ran for about 9 months, into Word. The resulting Word doc has more than 7500 pages, single-spaced. These quotes are collected from about the first 250 of those.

The point? Well, evidently jokes about RL and how we as SLers tend to lose touch with it are very much part of our conversational currency. I’m sure you’ve heard this kind of jokes before. SL is addictive, much more so than RL, it appears. Contrary to other kinds of addictions, though, SL addicts don’t live in denial. We freely admit that we’re addicts. We even joke about it. Or could it be that the joking itself is some strange form of denial? You be the judge.

Some of us at least know that behind all this banter, being addicted to SL is anything but a joke. Take the guy whose name I have abbreviated as “RW1″ in one of the above dialogues, for example. He has long since left SL after basically living in it for a year or so. He spent lots of time here, got deeply involved with a woman who was as addicted as he was and had lots of other problems of her own, suffered more than his fair share of drama and was, by the time he left, within a hair’s breadth of leaving RL too while he was at it. Thank God he decided to renew his RL subscription after all.

I don’t know a lot about his personal life outside of SL, so I have no idea how everything he experienced here affected him there. I do know, though, that in my own life, those moments when I was closer to being suicidal than at any other time in my life were connected with my SL addiction; so I can’t blame him.

It’s time to tell the story. I’ve procrastinated on this long enough. So here’s how I became a SLunkie.

We had some friends over on a Sunday in the fall of 2006, and one of them happened to mention a magazine article about Second Life he’d been reading. He said only a few words about it, but I knew instantly that I would have to check it out. What he said sounded like something I’d been waiting for since I didn’t know when, as I’ve told elsewhere.

I’m working from home as a freelancer. Many of my friends envy me that, and it sure has its perks; but there are some drawbacks, too. One of the major perks is that there is no boss around and you can work whenever you like. One of the major drawbacks is that there is no boss around and you can work whenever you like. It’s nice to be able to pace yourself, but it’s not always easy to do. Sometimes, when you don’t feel like working or when some other fancy strikes you, it’s dangerously easy to tell yourself, heck, one day off can’t hurt you, right?

I was tempted to do exactly that on that Monday after my friends’ visit. First thing in the morning, I found the SL web site and created an account. I was prevented from squandering the whole day though by a downtime. In those days, whenever there was a server update or anything to be fixed by the grid monkeys, all of SL was taken offline. They used to announce a six hour downtime, but usually they had to extend it a couple of times until things were running smoothly again (which of course they never did). For SL to be offline for eight hours or so was not uncommon.

That’s what happened on that Monday. I created my account in the morning, but SL gave me plenty of time to do my day’s work before I finally was able to log on for the first time in the late afternoon. That was the last day I did any work for quite a while.

Not that very much happened on that first evening. I found out how to move, how to dress, how to change my appearance, all the basic stuff that you need to master in the beginning. Still, it took me a few hours until I stopped bumping into walls and falling off cliffs and until my avatar looked sufficiently individualized to my untrained eye. It was way past midnight when I tiptoed into the dark bedroom.

The next morning, as soon as my wife and the kids were out of the house, I was back in SL. This new virtual world was far too fascinating to give it a rest yet. And I couldn’t wait to get back in, because there was some little detail about how to make a shirt look right or whatever that had been puzzling me while I was falling asleep, and I just had to figure it out before I did anything else. Why not dabble with it a bit while I sipped my last hot mug of tea? So I did that. Before I had finished my tea, however, I found a tutorial display on Help Island that walked you through the different kinds of prims there are and some of the stuff you could do with them. I didn’t even think about whether I wanted to take the day off or not. I just started reading those displays and fiddling with prims, and before I knew it, the rest of my tea was cold and the morning was gone.

Now I know from experience that when I don’t manage to do the bulk of my day’s work in the morning, it’s too late to try and save the day; so my conscience gave barely a twitch when I went back to SL right after lunch. Heck, it’s only a day, right? What’s a day in the great scheme of things? I made my first couple of friends during that afternoon on Help Island, one of them a very resourceful fellow who had already figured out how to make himself a huge pair of wings. I learned a thing or two about building and attachments from him. Again, the light in my room was the last to go out that night.

The next day I wasn’t even pretending to myself anymore that I was going to do any work. So many things to see, to learn, to explore! That was the day I crossed over from Help Island to the main grid. I couldn’t wait to finally see those cities, those landscapes I’d seen on the pictures. I landed at the Isabel Info Hub, made some friends there and went exploring with them. I discovered the Shelter, which is to this day my favourite haunt in SL. And I discovered that SL is a very sexy place. Something deeply biological was going on inside me when I looked at all those beautiful lady avatars in their low-cut tops and short skirts; something that kept me on a permanent high while I was in SL and made the prospect of taking the deep plunge back into RL increasingly unsavoury for me.

And indeed that plunge became deeper and deeper with every day that went by. I think I went for two weeks straight without doing any work at all. Now one day may not be much in the great scheme of things, but two weeks do make a notch. By now the end of October was near, and with it the deadline for the project I was supposed to be working on. I was in trouble, and I didn’t like the feeling. So I called my publishers and explained I couldn’t meet the deadline. They were very nice about it. Sweet relief! It was a Thursday evening.

Right! Friday morning! Now back to work. Two months to go until the end of the year; if you keep at it and discipline yourself, there’s still a good chance you’ll get all the projects done that have to be finished before the Christmas break. Just a quick look who’s around in the Shelter while I sip my last tea… well, unfortunately I’m in Germany, PST+9, and when I come downstairs to my office in the morning, the Shelter is brimming with cool people from California partying the night away. Ah well, I won’t turn the ship around on the last day of the week anyway, so let’s get a fresh start on Monday. One more day won’t make a difference after all, right?

Well, if you know anything about procrastination, you know that Mondays are the best days for it. Monday is the day to start on a diet, says Garfield. There’s this glorious feeling that you have the entire week ahead of you, so it won’t matter that much if you cut yourself some slack today, will it?

I’m staring at the truth of what I did during those weeks and months and feel like abandoning this whole blog thing, both because it’s so damn hard to face it myself and because it’s even harder to imagine what you all will be thinking of me when you read it. I did do some work in November and December, but not nearly enough to get myself out of the mess I was in. I would start working, but after half an hour or so I would start fidgeting and fighting the temptation to log on. A couple of times I fought it off by reading a few forum posts instead or taking a look at someone’s Flickr stream. But inevitably sooner or later I would log on, and once I did that, it would be hours before I even made an attempt to get back to work.

During those weeks, when I met half of my usual daily quota of pages, it was an exceptionally good day. Most days I managed less. Some days – at least once a week I think – I got no work done at all.

By December, things had gotten desperate. I had long since been obliged to ask for an extension of the extension of the extended deadline, and for extensions on the deadlines for the next projects which should have been finished by now and I couldn’t even tell when I would be starting on them. Of course, hardly any money was coming in. My wife was understandably alarmed when she noticed the strange depletion of our bank account, which was all the more inexplicable as I spent endless hours each day locked away in my office.

What made me despair was the knowledge that I didn’t have any control over what was happening. So many mornings, I had gotten out of bed with a firm resolution to turn things around that day; so many nights, I’d crawled back in, much too late, beating myself up inwardly for having failed again. Every one of those days, my belief that it was in my power to get this habit under control crumbled a little more.

Shortly before Christmas, the last remnant of that belief died. I had enough. I was ready to quit.

(Continuing in Part II: Staying Hooked)

The Sun Fairy

She sat on a low rise
Hidden somewhere in the valleys of the sun
Thinking back to days when stars were really hot
Before they settled in their paths
Before the great wheels started turning

(I wrote this a while back, inspired by this beautiful picture by Skycat Ranger. I decided to publish it here because it would be a pity to let it sink into oblivion. The same goes for the picture.)

If I Wait a Little Longer…

… that last blog entry will be true again. Yes, yes, ashes upon my head, the year has come nearly full circle since I went off to the island, and now it’s only a few weeks until I’ll load up the car and set off again… to the same island even.

Sometimes it’s hard to write something because you just don’t know what to say. Other times it’s equally hard because there’s so much to tell that the task seems overwhelming. The latter is true in my case. When I went off to that island last summer, I had a lot of things on my agenda. There were things I needed to heal from, things I needed to change in my life. One of them was my SL addiction. I didn’t want to leave SL, but I knew I had to grow less dependent on it and to achieve a better balance in my overall life. When I set off, I was quite confident that those three weeks away would help me do that, and indeed they did. I thought about a lot of things during that time and made some decisions that helped me to get my life back on a healthier track.

Of course my intention was to write about all that. I wanted to tell how I came to be so dependent on SL. I wanted to talk about the mechanisms and patterns that kept me hooked.  I wanted to describe how it affected my whole life and nearly undid me. And I wanted to talk about the comparatively small adjustments I made that helped me escape from the maelstrom.

It still is my intention. I think I mentioned elsewhere that I’m an expert procrastinator. And what could be better to procrastinate on than the self-set task of tackling a huge subject, and one that’s getting uncomfortably close to home, in a blog? So here I am, nearly a year down the road, and I still haven’t done it. Most people have probably given up on my blog altogether in the meantime.

But there, I’ve said it now. I am going to write that entry. I’ve even laid down a rough outline of what I am going to say in it. And I’m going to do it way before I set off to the island again. Watch this space. (And keep nagging me in-world!)

Off to the Island

Just a short note today to let everyone know that you won’t see me during the next three weeks. No SL, no email, no blogging, no Flickr. As of yesterday, I’m in the glorious position of not being behind on any deadline in my RL work for the first time in one and a half years or so. Maybe I’ll tell you another time about the reasons I was so far behind for so long, for they have a lot to do with SL. For now, I’m just very tired after a hard race to catch up and very happy that I’ve made it. In about eight hours, I’m going to close off my house, get in the car with my family and drive up to the North Sea coast to catch the early morning ferry to the beautiful island of Amrum.

Amrum Island

Yep, that wide white strip you see there along the shore is all sandy beach. About half a kilometer from the dunes to the water line.

For the next three weeks, my plans are as follows: sleep, read, ride my bike to the beach, swim, fly kites, maybe go for a boat ride or two, eat fish, sleep some more, in no particular order. And then again.

Incidentally, this is going to be the longest stretch of time I’ve ever been out of SL since I joined. I’m not too apprehensive about that aspect, though I know I’m going to look forward to seeing my friends again. Hope you’ll all have a great summer! (Okay, okay, or winter, depending what hemisphere you’re on.) See you in early August!

Lovers, Secrets, Lies

Okay, I’ll come right out with it and say that I do have an alt. Not a big secret either, many of my friends know her (yes, Adrian is a she), and no one who has any kind of relationship with her is left in any doubt as to who she is.

Originally Adrian was a guy. I created him because I wanted to go back to Help Island (this was back when Help Island Public didn’t exist yet). Then I found it convenient to use him as a piggy bank to keep myself from spending too much of the money I made in-world because I needed it to pay my tier. Some time later, I gave him a female shape, a freebie skin and some freebie female clothes because I make animations and jewelry and need a female av from time to time to try things out. So Adrian turned into a girl. Then, not too long ago, fancy struck me and I decided to spend some money on her and make her as beautiful as I could. Here’s the result:

I learned a lot while creating her, among other things that there are a lot more temptations to spend money for female avatars than there are for male ones.

Then, of course, came the question of what I would do with Adrian. Should she have an independent social life of her own? If so, how upfront should I be with the fact that the person behind her is actually male? And what was the point of having a female alt anyway?

For a couple of days, I fidgeted over these questions, editing and re-editing her profile, sampling reactions to her from other people, and watching myself to see how having a female avatar affected my own behaviour. Then, one night at the Shelter, Adrian agreed to dance with a fiery Italian who proceeded to take quite a fancy to her in the course of the evening. She tried valiantly to defend her honour with resolute charme. Of course it would have been much easier to just tell the poor bloke who she really was, but at that point that would have been a most mortifying revelation for him. So in the end she excused herself, and I called it an early night for a change. The next day she had her coming-out at the Shelter to hoots of laughter from all those present who know me. (The poor Italian wasn’t there.) It was great fun. My friend Robin brought in her male alt, and we enjoyed a nice waltz together. Since then, it has been clear that in terms of her social life, Adrian will just be a variation on Dylan. She’ll have no friends of her own. Mostly, she will just shop, look at herself in the mirror, model (see my flickr!) and assist me by trying on jewelry and animations. Now and then, she’ll come out and play and have some fun with my friends who know exactly who she is.

Frankly, I realize now that I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way. I’ve never been a roleplayer, and having a second life is complicated enough for me; I don’t need a third one. I don’t have any doubts as to my gender identity either, so I definitely don’t get into Adrian’s skin the same way as I get into Dylan’s. If I had a male alt, would I get into his skin? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t see the point of having another version of Dylan, nor of having an av who would be completely different from Dylan. He’s as close and as diverse an expression of who I am as I can make him, so why have another one?

Generally speaking, there are plenty of answers to this question, of course. Alts can be used to do all sorts of things, from parking money to building and creating without interruption to roleplaying to hiding from people to spying on unfaithful lovers. Some of these things make sense, some less so. Recently I went through a number of experiences that made me wonder whether some people aren’t overdoing this alt thing a bit.

The first one was really rather hilarious, if only because I have no very high stakes in any of the relationships involved. There are two people in SL I’ve known for more than a year; one of them even has been on my friends list for many months. One of them I believed to be a man from country A, the other one a woman from country B, on the other side of the world. I’d known the woman quite well (I thought) for a while, but I’d started to hang out more with the man only recently. After we’d talked a few times I suddenly noticed that there were a few peculiarities in his manner that reminded me of this woman I know. On an impulse, I asked him directly right away, and he admitted that he and the woman are really one and the same person – a man from country B, to make the confusion complete. I very nearly fell off my chair laughing, literally. But as I said, that’s only because I wasn’t too involved with either of them. Had I been, I might easily have felt a tad murderous at that point.

The next experience was not so funny. I can’t go into much detail here, but one dear friend of mine got a bit tangled up in her various alts recently. Personally, I met and got friendly with three of them before she told me they are all the same person. She’s using her alternate identities to get some breathing space from (and spy on) a pathologically jealous SL lover (whose jealousy is in inverse proportion to his faithfulness). Each of her alts seems to have a somewhat different set of friends. Recently, things got so intense after a falling out between them that she lost her head and felt driven to a drastic and not very clever move that left many of her friends deeply hurt and bewildered. Trying to repair the damage is a steep uphill hike for her now. I tried to suggest to her that she might fare better by cutting down on alts and stocking up on some healthy boundaries. So far she hasn’t taken this advice, but I hope she will.

My last experience was even less funny, at least for me. I found myself at the receiving end of some particularly insidious spying by means of an alt, done by a person I cared about very much. The situation itself was unpleasant enough, but at the moment I saw that av on my radar and realized who it must be, I also realized that I’d met the person in that guise a few times before without recognizing her. The spying had been going on for a while. Up to that moment, I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told me that a feeling for a person can go that cold that quickly. It felt as if a warm, beating heart was dropped into a deep lake of liquid nitrogen.

For me, these experiences seem to have validated the instinct with which I have approached my SL from the start. I want my avatar to be a means of meeting people, not of keeping them away. I don’t want to play a role that I can detach myself from at any point by slipping into another avatar. Sure, Dylan is my creation, but he is intended to reveal, not to obscure, who I am. I want to relate to people as the person behind the keyboard, not as a little fiction made of pixels, with a fictional story attached to it. And I don’t want to relate to fictions either.

I’m not passing judgment at all, and as far as I am concerned, you can have as many alts as you want and do with them whatever pleases you. But if you meet me, you will learn a bit about who I am, and I will want to know who you are.

Face the Light

Time for another installment in Dylan’s popular series of Tips and Tricks. This time, let’s talk about something that can make your avatar look better when done right, but will make it look like Bela Lugosi in a 1930s horror flick when done wrong. The sinister thing is that you might not see the effect it has for others, depending on which Second Life viewer version you use. Let’s talk about facelights.

Note: As of April 2, 2008, the regular Second Life viewer is based on the Windlight engine. Some problems I mention here that have to do with the differences between Windlight and the older graphics engine will soon be a thing of the past. Still, if you’ve only now switched to Windlight and are wondering why your facelight suddenly looks so awful, you’ll find some clues here.

A facelight is a light-giving object you wear somewhere on your avatar to brighten up your face. The idea is first of all to make your face visible at all in dark surroundings, but also to make it look better by getting rid of stark shadows and smoothing over some of the less attractive parts of the polygon mesh that makes up the shape of your face. So far, so good.

The first thing to keep in mind when using a facelight is that it will work only for observers who have local lights enabled in their SL viewer. To check whether they are enabled for you if you are using the regular SL viewer, go to your preferences (ctrl-P), click on the Graphics Detail tab and look up whether the “Nearby local lights” option is active. If you are using the current Release Candidate viewer (which already contains the new Windlight graphics engine), go to the Graphics tab, check the “Custom” box to make the advanced options appear and find the “Nearby local lights” option at the bottom. If that option is inactive, you will see neither your own nor anyone else’s facelight, nor any other local lighting that may be present in your location. If your equipment can handle it, always keep that option active; it makes a huge difference for the better in the way Second Life looks.

You might ask why that option is called “Nearby local lights”. The reason is that the way local lighting is set up in SL, you can see only the light from the six light sources nearest to you. It’s simply a matter of saving computing power. Six light sources, that’s all; everything else will be ignored by your viewer.

This brings me to my first rule for using facelights: Don’t use them all the time. Use them only when you are in a badly lit environment. Good builders take great care to incorporate local lighting into their builds so that additional personal facelights will not be needed. And not just not needed, they may even destroy the effect the builders want to achieve with their lighting setup, so you deprive yourself and others of the enjoyment of seeing things the way the creators intended.

The second rule is: Always examine the effect of your facelight in different daytime settings in both the regular and the Windlight (RC) viewers. If your computer can’t run Windlight, get feedback and maybe pictures from friends. This is important because what the facelight does to your face in Windlight may be vastly different from what you see in the regular viewer. Local lighting works very different in these versions. While in the regular viewer the light is very diffuse, in Windlight the direction the light is coming from is clearly seen. The facelight of the lady in the following picture is located in her choker. She was using the regular viewer, so she wasn’t aware of how weird that looked in the more realistic lighting environment of Windlight at all.

Note how her nose and her lower jaw and the underside of her hair are lit from straight below. Pure Lugosi.

Another problem that is much more noticable in Windlight than in the regular viewer is that many people are running around with facelights that are much too bright for their skin tone and/or that light up a much too large area. Sometimes I think I’m looking straight into the center of a nuclear explosion when someone with a facelight like that rezzes in. Even after the initial blinding shock has passed, their faces are hardly visible because the intense light is washing out all colours and contours. One more reason to always check in both viewer versions.

So what do you do if it turns out that your facelight makes you look like Dracula? Don’t panic. A facelight is no rocket science. You can make yourself a good one within a couple of minutes. Here’s how:

1. Go to your home or some other place where you are allowed to build and create an object. The shape and size of the object doesn’t really matter, so if you know nothing about building at all just right-click on the ground, select “Create” from the pie menu, and then left-click on the ground. A plywood box will appear, and you will see the Edit window on your screen, with the “General” tab open. If you know how, you can choose a ball instead of a box and make the object smaller.

2. Give the object a name. Just put “Facelight” where it says “Object”.

3. Then go to the “Features” tab. Click the Light option and fill in the values:

My advice: Leave the colour unchanged. Anything other than white light might do funny things to your skin tone. The intensity is a value you might want to play with a little. 1.000 is the maximum value and looks good for darker skins. If your skin is very light, you might want to try a lower value. Radius is set to 10.000 by default, which is much too high for a facelight. 0.800 to 1.200 is plenty enough. Set Falloff down to 0.000.

4. Make your facelight (the object, not the light) invisible. You do that by going to the “Texture” tab, clicking the texture image and then replacing the plywood texture with a fully transparent texture. If you don’t have one, pick up a freebie textures box somewhere or ask your friends. Someone will have one for you. If all else fails, give me a shout in-world, I’ll give you one. Note: Setting the “Transparency” spinner on the “Texture” tab to 100 won’t work, the spinner only goes up to 90. Your object won’t be completely invisible. You need the invisible texture.

5. Close the edit window and take the object into your inventory.

6. Find the object in your inventory, right-click on it and select “Attach to”. Select an unused spot in your face, the chin for example.

7. The next step is probably easiest if you do it standing on a posestand. You’ll find one in any clothes store in SL. Press Ctrl-Alt-T to make all invisible objects visible. You will see your facelight as a red, half-transparent shape right in your face where you attached it. Right-click it and select “Edit” from the pie menu. Now you will see the edit window again, and also 3 axes going through the middle of your object – red, green and blue. Each axis has two cone-shaped handles. Move your mouse cursor over one of the handles on the red axis (which will point away from your face) until the handle gets larger and lights up. You can then grab the handle with the left mouse button and drag it carefully away from your face. The object will follow the handle. Drag until the object’s center is floating about 30 or 40 cm in front of your face. Close the edit window and press Ctrl-Alt-T again to make the red beacons disappear.

8. That’s it! Now if you want to detach the facelight, right-click it in your inventory and select “Detach”. If you need it, right-click and “Wear”.

9. And if all this is too much hassle, just visit The Shelter, go to my info stand to the left of the freebie corner and pick up your free ready-made, full-perm facelight from there. That one’s even got a built-in script that lets you switch it on and off with chat commands .

One final hint: When you’re dancing with someone, even if your facelight is set up properly for yourself, chances are it will be too close to the face of your dance partner and make them look ugly. There are ways to solve that, for example by adjusting the light intensity down to 0.500 if both of you are wearing facelights, but in most cases it’s probably easiest to just leave facelights off while dancing with a partner.

Proper Treatment

I know someone in SL who frequently complains about the way people are “treating” them. I must admit that I’ve seen some not very nice behaviour from others towards them, but somehow that expression – “they treat me like …” – always gives me pause. English isn’t my first language, so it may well be that I’m imagining something here, but we have an exactly analogous expression in German, and I stumble over that one, too, whenever I hear it.

Maybe it’s because the verb “treat”, as well as its German equivalent, is also used in the sense of medical treatment. In other words, “treating” is what doctors do to their patients. And the word “patient” – forgive me for letting the language nerd in me roam freely here – has the same root as “passive”. (Incidentally, that root comes from the Latin word for “to suffer”.) So when I say “You treat me like a piece of garbage”, for me that makes it sound as if I were the passive recipient of your treatment, unable to do anything about it. Moreover, it makes it sound as if the way you treat me were entirely your responsibility and as if my role consisted solely in expecting or demanding a certain kind of treatment and in reacting with the appropriate reward or punishment, depending on whether I get that treatment from you or not.

Well, I think this is misleading, to say the least. People don’t just randomly decide how they are going to “treat” other people. It would be much more accurate to say that people are reacting to each other, which means that both parties have an active role in how their dealings with each other are going to play out. I’m not a patient etherized upon a table when it comes to the way people “treat” me. Rather, I’m actively shaping their reactions toward me.

This is true even in real life, even though I have only limited influence on the way I look, for example. If I look like Justin Timberlake people are going to react differently to me than they would if I looked like Margaret Thatcher. The sound of my voice and my accent are other things people react to which I can change only with considerable effort and only to a certain degree. Also, subtle and not so subtle reactions to my ethnic background may be among the things I can do little or nothing about. Still, it’s not as if I had no power at all over the impression I make. I can choose (within the limits of my budget) the way I dress; I can choose the way I talk and approach other people; I can choose to be friendly or unfriendly, respectful or arrogant, readily forgiving or forever bearing grudge, and these things are going to go a long way towards getting the kind of reactions from them that I wish for.

This is all the more true in Second Life where I have complete power even over that first impression that is triggered by my outward appearance. In SL, the way people react to me is to an even higher degree my own doing. For example, if a female avatar chooses as her everyday attire an outfit such as a pole-dancer might wear during the later stages of her performance, this is going to lead to a particular, predictable kind of reaction from others – and if that’s not the reaction she wants, why does she do it? And even some of our deeper limitations in RL don’t seem to apply in SL. I know a few people who suffer from all sorts of social anxieties in their real life. I would never have guessed that if they hadn’t told me. If you talk to them in SL, some of them are veritable fountains of sparkling wit and show an uncommon ability to form deep and rewarding friendships.

Those are the moments when Second Life really shines: when people who are hemmed in by all sorts of barriers in their real life become able to show their true qualities and receive the sort of “treatment” they deserve; when the faces we show to each other in the virtual world become a more accurate expression of our true selves than we are able to give in the real world.

Mute-ual Silence

You can be in Second Life as long as you like, there will always be moments when you will feel like a noob again because you discover something that was there all along, but you never knew it. This happened to me recently when I found out about the true purpose of the muting feature.

Of course I had known for a long time that you can mute both people and objects in SL, but silly me, I had a totally wrong idea about what that feature is for. I thought you use it for fending off stalkers and offensive people who pursue you with hateful or harassing chat and IMs, for finding some peace and quiet when someone is getting a little too enthusiastic about their store of sound gestures, or for protecting yourself from griefing objects or shouting lucky chairs in your neighbourhood. In a nutshell, I was under the impression the muting feature was a defensive tool. Nothing could be further from the truth. The true purpose and proper use of muting is to create and prolong drama.

Let me illustrate. The other day an old friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in a while turned up again at our favourite waterhole, and of course I was happy to see him and greeted him enthusiastically. No reply. He proceeded to say hi to everyone else in the room, but not me. I concluded he hadn’t noticed me, so I said hi again. Still no reaction. Hm. Weird. Next, I tried IM. Nothing. “It’s almost as if he has me muted,” I thought, but then: “Naw, why should he do that? I’ve never had a quarrel with him, nor did I ever spam him with anything. He’s probably just AFK.”

But when the same thing happened the next two or three times I met him and finally even a notecard I tried to pass him got rejected the split second I let go of the mouse button, I had to draw the inevitable conclusion: I was muted. I was incommunicado. I was a pariah. I was as repulsive as a leper to him. My self-esteem dropped like something a vulture lets fall over the Grand Canyon.

I still didn’t have the foggiest idea why he would have done that. Since then, I’ve found a clue – apparently someone’s told him something which made me look bad – but that’s not really my point here. I’d rather draw your attention to the astonishing versatility and effectiveness of the muting feature demonstrated by this story.

This is really where Second Life comes into its own. It’s one of those things that you just can’t do in real life, unless you’re Adam Sandler. Forget about confronting people you feel have done you wrong. Just right-click and mute them! Forget about making an effort to resolve a conflict. You have better things to do, right? You’re in SL for fun after all. Just zap’em. Forget about listening to both sides of a story. Click!

And oh, just think of the sweet drama you can create this way! Even in RL, expert sulkers have long known that it is the silences, the barely audible sighs, the shrugging off of all questions as to what on earth is the matter with them, that draw the most gratifying responses from the people around them and make them the immediate center of everyone’s attention. And they ensure that no constructive communication can happen which might mess it all up by opening up the way to a resolution. Thus, a sulker worth his salt can keep it up ad infinitum. Sulking is an art, and in SL the muting feature is the master’s brush.

Of course, like anything in SL, the muting feature offers room for optimization. There’s no reason, for example, why you should be able to shut out chat, IMs, sounds and objects from other avatars, but not their sight. It’s a real drawback that you still have to see those abominable people you’ve punished with your powerful muting wrath. (For you still go to the places where they are, of course – what would be the point of muting them if you didn’t, after all?) And you still have to listen to the things others say to the muted person, which can be a bit of a nuisance at times when you’re trying to follow a conversation with parts of it beeped out. Maybe someone should put in a feature request so that anyone who still talks to the person you’ve muted will automatically be muted, too. Might get a little quiet around you over time, of course, but so what? If anyone had anything worthwhile to say, they wouldn’t be saying it to them anyway, right?