A Year Inside the Snowglobe (Part I)

The Lure of the Miniature

It’s been well over one-and-a-half months now since my own rez day has come and gone on October 9, and being the expert procrastinator that I am, I still haven’t done what I had planned to do for that day, namely, write up a sort of review, a summary of all the experiences I’ve had and all the lessons I’ve learned during my first year in Second Life.

As one would expect from an expert procrastinator, I do have an excuse, though. The more I thought about what I would write, the more daunting the task became. There is just so much to tell, so much to reflect on, that it looked more and more like I would have to take a week off to put it all into words, and any readers of my blog would have to take a day off to take it all in.

So now I’ve decided to make it a bit easier for us all and split the task up into manageable chunks. Today I would like to start by musing a bit about the fascination that drew me to SL in the first place.

I don’t know about you, but I remember exactly where and when I first heard about SL. We had some friends over at our home, and one of them mentioned a story about Anshe Chung he had read in a magazine. He had never seen SL himself, and what he told me about it was just a very rough sketch, a bare bones description of a virtual world in which people lived, moved, talked, and did business.

As vague as it was, I was instantly hooked, and I knew that I would have to explore this new world, which I started doing the very next day. Since then I have often asked myself what exactly fascinated me so much about what my friend told me, especially as he himself seemed to find the whole thing more bizarre than anything else. To me, the idea of a virtual world you can enter through your computer, which you can explore moving freely and in which you can meet real people represented by avatars had an immediate, overwhelming lure to it.

The more I thought about it, the more I got the impression that this specific kind of fascination was nothing new in my experience. It’s a fascination that has always had an enormous power over me, and I think I can trace it back to my early childhood. For lack of a better description, I’m calling it the lure of the miniature.

I have no idea how old I was, but I can still recall the feeling that came over me when I saw my first snowglobe as a small child in the house of one of my aunts. There was a little house in it, with two children riding a sledge in front of it, one or two trees spreading their branches over the roof, and of course thick snow covering the ground. It sat on the mantelpiece, and it seemed such an exquisitely beautiful thing to me that I hardly dared touching it when my aunt said I should take it and give it a good shake. Still, I did, and I was filled with wonder when the peaceful landscape inside the snowglobe turned into a furious blizzard. I felt as if I held a tiny world of its own in my hand, and instantly a powerful desire came over me to enter that world, to live inside it, to explore the rooms of that little house, to find what secret doors within might lead to other spaces that I couldn’t see from outside the glass dome.

It may have been a year or two later, in any case I had learned to read by then, when I found in a magazine a story about a sort of amusement park somewhere in the Netherlands where they had built a miniature copy of an entire city – I believe it was Amsterdam or Den Haag. You could walk through the streets between houses that were about breast-high, look in through the windows and see the scenes of domestic life that had been set up there with little wooden figures, clad in tiny, but exquisitely tailored clothes.

I was enchanted. For weeks, I must have driven my poor parents mad with my persistent demand that we must go there at once, until they finally managed to make me understand that it was too far away. We never went, but the pictures from that article never left me, and to this day I have no idea where exactly that place was and if it still exists. Maybe I’ll make an effort to find out now.

With reading came my first literary adventures, of course. I remember an illustrated children’s edition of Gulliver’s Travels we had when I was little, and of course the part about Liliput was what I loved best. There also were lots of children’s books written and illustrated by a lady named Ida Bohatta. Her heroines and heroes were squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs and little dwarfs living in cosy little holes in the ground or in trees in the forest, complete with tiny furniture and table cloths and rugs and window curtains. Her style was a bit similar to Beatrix Potter, whom I discovered only much later. I loved those stories and the little worlds in which they were set, and for a while, whenever I walked in a forest I half expected to see little dressed animals going about their business in and out of every hole in a tree trunk or in the ground.

People from English-speaking countries will by now be thinking of The Wind in the Willows and all the other examples from England’s rich tradition of children’s literature. I discovered those books only in my twenties, but they still didn’t fail to put their spell on me. The prime example is of course Narnia, the world inside the wardrobe. Narnia itself is a miniature world, and it is filled with lots of little microcosms within that microcosm, from the faun Tumnus’s cave to the Beavers’ house on the dam to the place under the roof that Polly Plummer set up for herself. That scene where Polly and Digory crawl along in the secret space between the attic rooms and the roof beams to get to Polly’s hide-away alone would have been enough to make me a Narnia devotee, but of course there is so much more there…

I think I was 22 when I first read those seven books, and by that time I had become conscious of the common element of the miniature that connects all these experiences. By the way, Narnia’s author C. S. Lewis had caught that same bug too. In his autobiography, he describes an incident where as a small child he was filled with unspeakable ecstasy when his older brother came into the house with a miniature garden he had made with twigs and moss in the lid of a biscuit tin. When I read that, I knew exactly what it must have felt like.

A few years later, I got my first computer. It would take a few more years, however, until my miniature addiction connected with that. The internet already existed, but it wasn’t accessible for private use yet, and graphics, as far as they existed at all, were far away from anything that could be called a virtual world.

The nearest thing to what we call the internet today in those days was CompuServe, and they were the ones who tried to pull off the first virtual world that I became aware of. It was called “WorldsAway” and it was sort of a 2.5D world. I don’t remember whether people were actually able to create content for WorldsAway, but I think there was some commerce going on in there, and you could rent places. The lure of the miniature grabbed me, and I was totally hooked for a few weeks, but in the end there just wasn’t enough there to hold my interest for very long. One curious thing I noticed there was that although WorldsAway was hardly more than a sort of illustrated chat room, people didn’t seem to be very talkative. I tried lots of times to strike up conversations with other avatars (yes, they were called avatars even then), but I found it hard to get more than a “hi” out of them.

After that, I didn’t follow the development of virtual worlds very closely. Just now and then I happened to read an article about VR in some computer magazine, and whenever I did, my imagination went bonkers with the possibilities. But I wasn’t prepared for the level of realism, the creative possibilities and the total immersion that awaited me when I first explored Second Life a year ago. True, today I whine as much as anyone about lag and borked sim crossings and sim crashes and inventory issues and all the other shortcomings so familiar to all who spend any amount of time in SL, but I still haven’t forgotten the wonder and amazement that I felt when I took my first steps in this colourful new world, and I’m still just as amazed today when I explore places like Neufreistadt, Straylight or Thursday’s Fiction.

Considering how huge a place SL seems to be when you’re in it, you might find it curious that I think of it as a miniature world. But to me this is just what a miniature is: a place that is much bigger on the inside than on the outside; a house on a wooded hill inside a little glass ball on a mantelpiece; a country peopled by talking beasts inside a wardrobe; a still larger world inside a shabby little stable within that magical country; a huge virtual world full of people from around our whole planet inside that 19” screen before me.

I’m sure the psychologists will have some cut-and-dried theory as to why things like that fascinate me so much. No doubt it’ll turn out to be pathological or something. But I’m probably not a strict enough Freudian to buy into any reductionist explanations. For me, there’s some meaningful mystery in the snowglobe, and I feel sure that I will be more fascinated, not less, the closer I get to the bottom of it.

(Continuing here.)