The Alphaville Herald

One Life is Not Enough

by Alphaville Herald on 14/06/05 at 4:10 pm

by Budka Groshomme

The brains behind Linden Lab? See below.

Three months ago somebody whispered “Ever tried Second Life?” When I hesitated he added, with a knowing smirk, “Come on, the first week’s free.”

Since then I’ve become a regular, but I’m not particularly worried about it. I’ll make certain that it doesn’t start controlling my life, consuming my every waking second, pushing every other concern to the sidelines as it consumes ever greater segments of my first life.

At least, that’s what I said after that first week or two. But that first rush, that first heady plunge into a universe of color and light and wonderful sights made me aware of how much potential it had to offer. Night after night I logged on, seeking to recapture that first jolt of intellectural, emotional, almost physical, rush of discovery.

And I was never disappointed.

But I still wasn’t really addicted. I found that I could go eight, sometimes even nine whole hours, without yearning for a bit of the Sweet Life. Just a little visit, I’d say. Perhaps a small peek would suffice.

Only a month into Second Life, I found myself carving time from my other activities to build my SL skills and hone my talents. Views of life “outside” no longer seemed quite so intriguing–although the resolution was much higher, I’ll admit. As I spent more and more time in SL, I began to think of it not as a game, but as an actual, physical and mental location. And in many ways it is.

At the two-month mark, the thirst for new discoveries continued to grow. At this point I was no longer interested in merely being a casual tourist, but started reading the forums, hitting the fan sites, viewing the pictures, downloading software, and otherwise exploring all the ephemera surrounding the growing artificial world, environment, culture and glorious experiment that is Second Life.

The revelation that made me wonder if I could handle it all without my brain exploding was when I found myself in the wee hours of a morning (PST) stroking the keyboard lovingly and saying over and over, “My precious. My precious.”

I fantasized over the creative geniuses at Linden Labs, and pictured them in their pristine white coats and bulging brain cases (see above), musing on which wonders I, a mere mortal, could bear were they to further enhance my experience. I found myself posting pictures I’d taken, just as if I’d actually been somewhere besides locked to a desk, staring at images on a glass screen. I even, on one occasion, found myself pointing at the real ground and murmuring “Create, damn it! Create!”

That’s when I realized I had switched lives.

I began to wonder if Linden Lab had a twelve step program for avatars/people like me? Otherwise, how could I ever hope to untangle myself from the alliances, friendships, casual relationships, imaginary property, and other aspects of the life I’d been leading in SL? How could I possibly contemplate extricating my psyche from the investment of time, experiences, skills, and knowledge that gathered around me as barnacles on a wooden ship?

The deeper question I now face is the validity of everything I’d seen and done. Has it been “real?” Aren’t the emotions I’ve engendered in others in SL as valid as those in real life? Aren’t the dialogues with other avatars, in which neither typist knows the real person behind the avatar, as honest and forthright as a conversation would be in real life?

Or have I been like a driver during rush hour, behaving rudely as I never would in person without a couple tons of metal wrapped around me?

What I realize is that accepting the fiction is all that matters. Second Life is as real as one makes it, just as in the day-to-day lives we lead. Yes, came the epiphany, every experience was as true as in any other human interaction. It certainly justified the time and effort I had put into it.

So it hasn’t become an addiction at all. What I had been experiencing since that first rush of discovery and exploration was another way of making something from the world I’d entered.

More importantly, and far from being an imaginary world, it lets me reach out and make the real human connections to others that we all need in our lives.