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.

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?

The Beauty of an Avatar

I like to pay compliments. I think it isn’t done nearly enough, both in RL and in SL. Of course, you hear more compliments in open chat in SL than you would in a similar setting in RL, but they are not always of the kind that would make those who receive them feel good about themselves.

Which is what a compliment is about, really, isn’t it? That is why grossly exaggerated compliments just don’t cut it. For a compliment to have the desired effect on you, it must express something that you know to be true, or at least can accept as possibly true, about yourself. A true compliment tells you that someone has perceived something in you that impressed them or that they find attractive, and that’s a gratifying feeling.

So how can you pay or receive a true compliment in SL? That’s a puzzling question for some. After all, SL is all fake, isn’t it? Of course, you can compliment people on their creations or their conversation, but when it comes to looks and character, what you perceive in them may have nothing at all to do with the truth. The gorgeous woman or hunk you see before you may in truth be anything but. Lots of people, so I’m told, even play their opposite sex as their avatar, and not all of them are upfront about it.

Kurt Bestor expresses it well in his “Poseball Blues” (which you can hear only at his concerts, and you really shouldn’t miss it): “All the girls are beautiful, and I don’t wanna boast, but they like me, yes they like me … but then again, is it really me?”

That’s the problem. All the girls are beautiful. Beauty isn’t anything special in SL, or so it seems. That’s why it’s sometimes awkward to receive a compliment on your looks. People don’t know quite how they should react to it. Some people work around that by complimenting people not on their looks, but on the great work they have done on their avatars. That sounds as if it is more to the point, but … it’s not what we really mean, is it? The fact is, we see a beautiful avatar and it touches us the way beauty touches any human being, and that is what prompts us to pay a compliment at all.

But this hits on an important observation, namely, that it just isn’t true that all girls, or all guys for that matter, are beautiful in SL. Some obviously are too new to have put any time and effort into refining their avatars at all, and some obviously have something other than beauty in mind when they “refine” them. But even the rest are not all equally beautiful or beautiful in the same sense. When you look around, you see avatars that are obviously striving to look like your generic sex toy or supermodel or hunk or whatever, others who are trying to express something of how the people behind them see themselves, still others who use their avatars to make witty or funny statements. And then, once in a while, you see that rare thing, an avatar so unique, so expressive, so beautiful that it makes your heart burn, makes you want to get close to that person or just sit there admiring them.

The point is, all these variations do say a lot, in my opinion, about the people behind them. They don’t tell us how these people look in RL, but they do tell us a lot about who they are, and the more so the longer people have been working on refining them. Our avatar is similar to a mask we create for ourselves. Some people strive to make that mask as similar as possible to their RL appearance; some try to make it as different from it as possible. No matter. A mask, as the Commedia dell’arte shows, is a thing that serves both to hide behind and to express something that is in us. In the Commedia, it veils the actor, but it expresses the role they are playing. In SL, it also inevitably is a mixture of both, I think. I find it interesting in that context to remember that the Latin word for “mask” is “persona”.

From that point of view, it really isn’t that different from RL, is it? Ugly duckling movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding can show you that the way we look isn’t just genetics or fate, it’s to a large part the way we choose to look. Typically, people change their look when they want to change their lives (i.e., when they want to emphasize a different part of the sum total of what is inside them). That’s exactly what we’re doing in SL.

That’s why I do compliment people on their avatars’ looks and I really mean it when I do, and I enjoy it when someone says something nice about my av. Sure, nothing should be taken too seriously, but to dismiss our avatars’ looks as irrelevant is quite as naive as falling in love with a person just because her/his av looks so sexy.