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.