A Year Inside the Snowglobe (Part III)

SLooking for SLove

(Continued from here.)

It’s all Craig Altman’s fault. You’ve heard of Craig, haven’t you? Even if not, you most certainly have seen his work. Craig is the maker of the famous slow dances v3 through v7 that you see all over SL. (By the way, does anyone know whatever became of v1 and v2? I’ve never seen them anywhere.) Oh, and of course the makers of all those gorgeous skins have done their part too. Not to mention the fashion designers with their creations which show off those skins in the most enticing ways. They all conspire to make Second Life one of the sexiest environments you can find yourself in.

To be honest, in my early days in SL I had a sneaking suspicion that the fact that I kept returning and spending way more time there than was good for me was due, quite literally, to a substance addiction. I kid you not. I just wasn’t used to seeing that much skin around me all the time, virtual or not, and I’m quite sure my body reacted to that in ways that would have been easily detectable in a blood test. At least I had no difficulty noticing the effect.

Considering this, it’s not surprising that so many of us have a hard time keeping our heads screwed on when it comes to romantic relationships in SL. I’m no exception. I was swept off my feet almost the day I crossed over from Help Island to the main grid, and months went by before my feet touched the ground again. I’m still working on keeping them there.

I mentioned in Part II that the Dylan in me shows an astonishing propensity and talent for flirting. I have to add, though, that he has toned down his flirting quite a bit in the course of his first year in SL. I still like to make compliments, and I still enjoy flirting, but I have become a lot more cautious. I’ve made the mistake in the past of foreshadowing things that I couldn’t pay off, of raising expectations that I couldn’t fulfill, and I’m afraid I’ve caused some people I care deeply about a lot of unnecessary pain. I don’t want that to happen anymore.

My own experiences are only one aspect that helps me to be a little more level-headed now. The other aspect are the ups and downs I’ve observed in the relationships of others around me. One curious fact about SL is that everything moves so fast. Not only can you build a palace or a spaceship in a matter of hours; you can also move from equanimity to delirious raptures to abject misery within a day. Just watch those people who like to wear their emotional state as a group tag if you can keep track.

I’ve seen people fall in love in a flash, decide to “marry” after a couple of days, quarrel hours after they’ve tied the knot and be on non-speaking terms a week later. Interestingly, there seems to be a correlation between how much fanfare is made around a relationship and how long it persists. The few really lasting relationships I know of are very unobtrusive and discreet, whereas the more I hear people declare their immortal love for each other in public chat or in their group tags, the more uneasy I become for them. It’s almost as if they were setting themselves up for failure. A magnificent wedding party does not guarantee a fulfilled and long-lived relationship.

Let’s face it, we often kid ourselves, too, in terms of the kind of relationships we think we can have in SL without derailing our RL commitments. I’ve been guilty of that, and I’ve seen many other people who are married or taken in RL do it, too. Lots of people maintain steadfastly that they can keep both in balance, but what they mean by that often comes down to just totally compartmentalizing their RL and SL relationships. I don’t know, it may be possible to do that if you actually approach SL as a game. At least, the one person I met who most adamantly insisted she could do it was one who habitually spoke of “playing” SL (which didn’t keep her from displaying the kind of extreme emotional swings described above). But I found I can’t do it. As I said elsewhere before, I have only one life, not two. And SL is not a game to me. I’m very conscious of the fact that I am interacting with real people here who have real feelings, real dreams, real hopes, real fears and real stories.

I won’t even go into the perennial question that pops up on the SL Forums with clockwork regularity: “Is it cheating?” (Hint: If it involves lying to your RL partner, “cheating” is probably not an unfair description.)

Right now I’m at a point where it seems to me that both the relationships we have in RL and those we have in SL are unique in their own way. I’m still fumbling for an answer here, but my impression is that the best and most lasting relationships I’ve witnessed in SL are pursuing a particular kind of intimacy that is hard to achieve in RL, an intimacy characterized by total, unconditional acceptance of each other, without the kind of mutual claims and expectations and dependencies that you can hardly escape from when trying to make a life together with another person in RL. SL relationships have their particular limits, but it might just be that they also have their particular strengths.

One obvious limit of any SL relationship (unless it is carried over to RL) is the physical aspect. If your focus is on sex, frustration is inevitable sooner or later. This is not to say that an SL relationship cannot involve great tenderness. But I suspect that tenderness has very little to do with poseballs.

Having said that, I have to add that I cannot praise Craig Altman highly enough! The emotional expressiveness of his work is simply astounding and can greatly enrich and aid our real encounters in a virtual world. You can find it at his shop, Bits and Bobs.

A Year Inside the Snowglobe (Part II)

Will the Real Dylan Rickenbacker
Please Step Forward?

(Continued from here.)

So I followed the lure of the miniature and went to create my SL account. At first my instinct was to create an avatar that would be as similar to my RL self as possible. I looked for surnames that began with the same letter as my RL name and found “Rickenbacker”, which I liked because I do play the guitar, though I haven’t played much bass. “Dylan” is a name I’ve always liked, because of its sound and because I’m both a Bob Dylan and a Dylan Thomas fan.

Of course, the grid was down the first time I tried to log on, so I had to wait a few hours before I actually got to create my avatar. I picked the chap with the jeans and the white tee and the bland face, precisely because among all the options he looked most like a man without qualities – an empty canvas on which to paint.

In that shape, I walked through the first steps of the orientation until I arrived at Help Island. There, my first concern was to make Dylan look more like me – not necessarily like I actually look in RL, but more like the sort of person I am. For example, I put a little more meat on him and tried to make him look older. As the wrinkles options etc. didn’t get me very far with that, I decided to give him grayish hair and a full beard. Somehow the way he looked then made me think he needed a checked flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, which I proceeded to make for him. That first version of Dylan reminded me a bit of Grizzly Adams, and I still looked like that when I crossed over to the main grid a couple of days later.

The TP from Help Island took me to the Isabel Info Hub, where I ran into a girl named Amber who’d been around for a while and wore a very peculiar group tag. I asked her about it, and it turned out that she wasn’t keen on having people on her friends list (in those days, there was no way you could avoid being found on the map by your friends yet), so she had created this group for the people she wanted to stay in contact with. I joined and spent the next couple of days flying around with Amber and another of her buddies on her flying carpet and getting my first sniff of SL air.

Until then, I hadn’t even thought about how I as Dylan would act and behave in this new world. It hadn’t even occurred to me yet that I was actually creating a new identity. This began to dawn on me when I logged on a couple of days later and there was no Amber around, so I took off by myself. I just flew straight up from the Info Hub, saw the huge building with “The Shelter” written on it and decided to have a look.

Within minutes of stepping into the lounge, I was dancing with a white-clad angel with lots of bling in her wings. This was when I realized that Dylan has a few talents that I never had! Dancing without looking at his feet and sticking the tip of his tongue out between his tightly closed lips, for example. Speaking of tight-lipped, it turned out that Dylan is a much more talkative and charming fellow than my RL self manages to be, too.

Not to mention flirty. Dylan really surprised me there, the old smooth-talker. In RL, I’ve never been much of a flirt, partly because I’m a bit shy and partly because there really isn’t much room for that in my life. In fact, I was in my mid-thirties when I first discovered that many people view flirting as part of the social graces and engage in a flirt as a way of making pleasant conversation. I never quite managed to get to that point in RL, and I was amazed that Dylan not only didn’t think twice about flirting, but actually turned out to be quite good at it.

Soon, Dylan began to develop his own set of interests, too. I’m a wordsmith in RL, so it was only natural that I looked at the Metaverse Messenger and other SL publications when I started to think about something creative to do in SL. But somehow, I never really felt like doing that kind of thing here. I had way too much fun with building and texturing and, a little later, with making animations.

Outwardly, Dylan came to look less and less like me as time went on. The Grizzly Adams look made way for a (goo hair) mohawk and a shorter beard without moustache on my second or third day on the main grid, and it wasn’t long after that that I tried on a prim mohawk in a shop and couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the bald hair base afterwards. So I went bald for months. Good men’s hair was much harder to find a year ago than it is today, and all the hairs I tried looked much too cute and effeminate on me, I thought. Finally, I found some not totally awful hair at Calla’s and decided to give it a try. (Still, a friend told me then, “If you’re trying to avoid cute, this is not the way to go!”) I found a skin I liked, too, and discovered that the wrinkle sliders, not very effective at all in the first place, now had no effect whatsoever anymore. Thus, Dylan was rejuvenated by at least 15 years over night.

One day I was looking for a gift for a lady friend of mine and found some hair that I thought she might like. Never having heard of “no transfer”, I bought it on a whim, only to discover that (a) I couldn’t give it to her, and (b) it was actually men’s hair. The maker had used a manga-ish looking model on the vendor displays, and somehow it never occurred to me that this might be supposed to be a man. I decided to put it on and see how it looked. Surprisingly, I quite liked it. I still do, and I’m still wearing it. I’ve tried out other styles, but I’m always coming back to this hair. Somehow, it’s the only one that feels quite “me”.

Wait a minute, did I just say “me”? What am I talking about? “I” am a middle-aged guy with short grey stubble below the bald top of his head! “I” am a bookish, quiet, non-dancing, non-flirting family man who can’t draw or make things to save his life! Who is this Dylan Rickenbacker who pretends to be in some way connected to me?

I remember at one point thinking that SL must be a kind of software-induced, artificial schizophrenia. That was when I still believed in a “Second Life”. I still thought what Dylan did had nothing to do with my RL self. Meanwhile, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a second life. I don’t know about you, but I have only one life. Not just because SL has had a huge effect on my real life on this side of the screen, but also because Dylan, as different as he is from my RL persona in many ways, is really me. I’m not role-playing when I’m in SL. At least no more so than in RL. Dylan expresses facets of my personality that aren’t seen very often in my real life, but that makes them no less mine. And on some level, I feel really enriched and made more complete by having been given the chance, with a part of my life, to become Dylan Rickenbacker.

(Continuing here.)

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.)