Avatar Name: Gordon Wiskee

My favorite places to visit in Second Life (SL) are known as infohubs. I realized since I hadn’t defined a “Home” within the world yet, clicking the “Home” button would teleport me to various infohubs seemingly at random. These places ended up being where I met the people that I had the most conversations with. I would teleport in, look around for a moment and then eventually type “Hello” into the group chat. Every time, someone answered. Most times it was an experienced user who was willing to help and share their favorite things about the world. Sometimes there were jerks. So that’s the same in real life (RL) as it is in SL. But, in SL there is the ability to mute individual people which saved a couple good public conversations during my time in-world. Project Idea #1: Real Life Jerk Muting.

The Moose Beach InfoHub

My Avatars Look w/ Custom Shoulder/Neck Piercing

The people that I met in the infohubs ended up giving me the information that I found to be the most interesting. Early on in my time there, I met a nice vampire and she told me about a really good place to free-shop. That is where I got the clothing I settled on and a house to play with in the sandbox areas. As you can see by my avatar, I wasn’t too interested in playing dress up for very long. Basically, I just wanted to not look out-of-the-box so that I could get on with finding people to have conversations with which was much more interesting. I did however explore making some basic objects using the prims in the sandbox areas. Without a great deal of practice, its very difficult to build anything very detailed in-world. I managed to create a light up neck/shoulder piercing that I can actually add to various parts of my avatar’s body from my inventory.

I only logged in a couple times for a total of a few hours. But in that time, I have made 8 friends that aren’t in the class, 6 of which I have had 2 or more different conversations. The direction of conversations was much different in each case. Basically, there 3 types. The first type was one in which we spoke more about RL stuff (where you from, what’s your job, how did you end up in here)… basically chat room small talk. The second was mostly about SL but still talking about is an alternate world in which there are activities and various types of people. These are the conversations in which I learned that there are people who have formed militias within the world and even use their avatars to play roll-playing games in what i would consider a type of roll-playing game. The third type conversation existed as if SL *was* RL. The language, use of words, reference to land and other people where all as if this was really where the conversation was happening. And to a certain extent it was… kind of. This type of SL is the world conversations where very dedicated. In fact, the few that had never made mistake. There was no mention of the avatar, only “I” and “you”. There was no reference to the fact that the person controlling the avatar was actually sitting at a computer somewhere, not waiting near a waterfall for their mistress to come home (waiting, by the way, in order to get permission to invite me… er… my avatar… over to see the castle). This third type of conversation happened with people who where so familiar and implanted into this world that they are able to transform all language and perception to be as if it is where they are. At a certain level, I admire the level of commitment.

Racing with an avatar I met in an infohub. My Guest to class. Driving a go cart that he gave me for reacing.

All three types of conversations did do one thing. They provide a mask and a level of anonymity as determined by the individual. Even though my conversations had 3 different types of content and language, they still could have been anyone. In this environment we don’t have any of the normal ques that we use in order to determine how we feel about what someone is doing or saying. There positive aspects of this in that we don’t have all the information that could be used prejudge someone. However, we also don’t have any of the information we would use to evaluate the quality or character of someone speaking and interacting with us. The chats that I had within SL were all text based. Even audio chatting would give a little more usable information to evaluate the person we are interacting with. That is still no replacement of key aspects of communication such such as body language and facial expression. Although there is always the chance that someday Linden Labs and James Cameron will team up and make something to address this that will become very popular for several months.

Near the rented home of a contact I made.

As for the third type, the fully immersed vampire, I really got the feeling that this person was an escapist using SL to operate in ways that weren’t possible in real life. In-world, she was part of a very specific community with a very strict hierarchy. She was a subordinate to a dominate “mistress” and from what I could gather from our conversations, it was mostly not based in sexual practice but instead a social order of control and controlled.

Just like a good movie, piece of music or book, I can definitely see the pull of escapism offered by SL. Sometimes, one just needs to feel in control. As designers and makers we get to experience this quite often during our creative process. But the people I met in SL said that they had non-creative, non-making types of jobs. So from that perspective I can understand the draw of world that could be completely within your control.

Outside the Delta Blues Bar

Meditating atop the mountains in the SL Botanical Gardens

World jumping with a contact.

Hot air balloon ride in Africa

"Play the Blues, Punk!"

Just landed. Default clothing.

And to give you a good idea of how confusing the 2 worlds can be in terms of language, look back at how I’ve written about and referred to me, my avatar, RL and SL. Look at the context shifts and how that informs the 2 different “me’s” within the text.

Pretty much what I expected it to be like here

Oh, and there was no shortage of pink dust spewing penis pigs with a dirty talking (on the microphone for all to hear) couple sitting on laps in the background with a dancing turkey looking on.