May 7, 2008

• Second Life: Freedom

  On Second Life, you meet a lot of people. But you only kind of meet them; you meet a part of them that is less ruled by convention and more ruled by fantasy. People come to SL to escape. And in my experience, meeting someone in this way is a much better view into someone’s truth than most other ways.

  In the real world (or the ‘big simulator,’ as we call it), people have a lot at stake. People need to have their guard up, need to not make waves, need to play an offensive game. The world tends to favor those who race to the bottom in their dealings with each other.

  I’m not going to offer Second Life or any virtual world as wholly different, but it does take the pressure off and allow greater room for better motivations. And it’s wonderful to see how this potential is used and abused.

  For most people, this freedom means one thing: Release from puritanical sexual morality. They get to play fantasy sex. It’s not unsafe to say that the driving force of the SL economy is sex. If you make something and sell it, and it can’t be connected to sex in some way, it won’t sell. Of course, there are all kinds of things going on that have nothing directly to do with sex; but there are only a few ways to actually make money in SL, and sex is one of them.

  Another way this freedom leaks out is abuse. ‘They’re all just pixels on a screen… You shouldn’t come here unless you have a thick skin…’ Excuses like this. In many areas, you’ll find random shootings, verbal abuse, ‘caging,’ ‘orbiting’… Which is, by the way, perfectly fine, in the regions set aside for such behavior. So essentially, you can become anonymous and harass or even kill people if you want to. I call this ‘abuse’ because I don’t know what else to call it; where it’s consensual, it’s perfectly fine. I tried to kill a friend of mine last night, and he killed me back. It was amusing. But it also leaks out into the non-consensual realm, where people are just jerks, will try anything just to see if they can do it, and so forth.

  None of this is necessary to enjoy Second Life. One can enter into the place as oneself, and use these freedoms from social norms in ways that benefit more than hurt. My problem at the moment on SL is that I think I’ve found most of the communities where the benefit is valued above the drama. Or at least all of them that I can hold in my social life. And that’s a bit constraining, because my impulse is to find more, rather than develop what exists already.

  So my freedom leads me to avoid the potential I’m seeking, which is true not only in SL but in the real world as well.

  • 1:21 pm
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