Is This Real Life?

After spending a lot of time traveling through different virtual and in-depth worlds in Second Life I’ve been wondering less about the avatars and the locations of virtual pleasure and escape, but of the actual people behind the computers and how much actual pleasure they’re getting out of the game. I decided to see if anyone was willing to reveal a portion of his or her real selves to me, a concept that I approached with some trepidation. Breaking the façade of the virtual is a risky process, as most people I’ve come across seem to play the game only in order to live out a fantasy or try something new and out of the ordinary – but it was worth a try.

I went back to Hapuna Beach since a lot of interesting avatars hung around there and tried to talk to a few people about their habits or reasons for choice of dress and most of them just responded that they thought it looked cool, but no one really was willing to commit to tell me something about their real personae. That was understandable, as I would not want to tell anyone that I was trying to talk to that I was a student doing a project on second life and pleasure, since that would ruin the illusion of leaving your real self at the door to fully explore the personality of the persona that you created.

I was about to give up on Hapuna Beach but then I saw this avatar who was morbidly obese, dressed in Goth wear and was talking to, or at least attempting to talk to, two women. They were blatantly ignoring him and he was resorting to running into them and trying to get their attention in other manners that were slightly more obscene. I went up to them and asked if he was bothering them, and one dressed in pink responded that he was and that he was “disgusting.” The man then asked me “Why do you care?” and I sort of played the part that I cared about modesty, decency and respect and he responded by informing me that “this is just a game, what does it matter what I do.” 

Only a Game?

Interestingly, this is the first person that used the idea of it being a game to totally protect any real world implications from lewd behavior. As Julian Dibbel stated in his “A rape in Cyberspace” article in the Village Voice, “the[re is an] ease with which very knotty metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR.” By fully separating the concept of who you are in real life with who you create yourself to be, a sort of freedom is achieved; however, this raises the question of can/should people be responsible for doing things online that would be frowned upon if they did it in real life? What if they realized that it was wrong and admitted to just doing it for fun, in a game, like this obese stranger did? Does anyone play this game in a way that is close to his or her life? These are just some of the questions I will attempt to answer in my next post.

Work Cited:

Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society." The Village Voice [New York] 23 Dec. 2003. Print.