The Alphaville Herald

Is Beauty Only Pixel Deep?

by Alphaville Herald on 10/05/05 at 2:48 pm

by Budka Groshomme

Kim Charlton fuels a few philosophical ponderings

Can one fall in love at first sight? Could the sunset ever be as lovely as the time you first glimpsed the girl of your dreams walking along the seashore, coming toward you, a vision with flowing blonde locks and tight bodice?

The sight of her immediately makes your heart pound and breath grow short. All your systems go on high alert as your little mammalian brain is thrown into high gear.

You suddenly come down with a severe case of fumble fingers. There’s a loss of focus as all you want to do is throw yourself at the feet of this magnificent being, begging to do whatever she may request just for the sheer pleasure of watching her every move, reading her every word, and gaining, perhaps, a crumb from her basket of affection.

But isn’t this, after all, Second Life? As everything else, her appearance becomes immediately suspect. You know that the “solid” ground you walk upon is nothing more than a pixel-thin skein of images and that the builds surrounding you are really just numbers. Everything you see is, in fact, just images on a flat colored screen.

That girl of your dreams, the one who has your pulse racing, is merely an idealized vision of whoever lies behind those beguiling eyes and lovely breasts. The person who captured your psyche with a glance is whoever scripted the moves of those inviting arms and legs, created her artful poses, and scripted every casual wave. You know on an intellectual level that she’s some young girl in Germany, an older woman in Florida, or, perhaps she isn’t a woman at all. Maybe she’s some hairy guy sweating over a keyboard in Cleveland as he watches his creation perform.

Or maybe it’s your own wife, girlfriend, neighbor, or coworker in disguise.

Appearances are deceptive. All we “know” is that someone indeterminate has created this SL image before us and is manipulating it for unknown purposes. Nevertheless the vision fools us, draws us in, and befuddles our visual sense on a visceral level.

Second Life is an artifice, a dose of unreality that tricks the very sensory organs that took us a couple of million years to evolve and which cause our glands to secrete their magic elixirs when we see something that keys the reproductive urge. We are, after all, visual creatures. We depend upon what we see to give us a sense of the people around us. In Second Life we can smell nothing but ourselves. We can’t use our sense of touch, and, sitting in our chairs before a hot game machine, we cannot use our kinesthetic senses at all. All we have to gather information is our own two eyes.

For paralytics, Second Life might be a blessing. Here they can simulate walking, flying and doing the things denied them in real life. Being deaf in Second Life might not be too great a hardship: Instead of being cursed with other peoples’ poor taste in music, they might find that a benefit. But being blind – there’s a real issue, for, without the visual, this world cannot exist.

Which means that, by relying only upon the visual sense, we cannot “know” the people around us. In fact, the very sense that lets us enjoy SL misleads us. In real life we gain perhaps 75 percent of our knowledge of people through our eyes. That percentage should fall to, perhaps, 40 or 50 percent in SL, at least where avatars are concerned.

Of course, our first impressions are often wrong. Over time and through interaction, a person’s true nature appears. We discover that they are kindly, polite, rude, dominating, argumentative, confused, naïve, or othewise. They are, in other words, human.

The same obtains in SL. That first sight draws you in, every exchange that follows clues you to the mind behind the vision and subsequent actions allows you to learn exactly “who” is wearing that wonderful, lovely, appealing avatar. Eventually you find yourself relating to her because of what she is, says, and does, not the way she might appear at first glance. This is as it should be.

As it should be in real life.