A Game of Life
Since becoming immersed in Second Life, I can not believe what I am interested in reading. The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, edited by Ralph Shroeder and published in 2002 by Springer-Verlag, is a collection of articles by a variety of people on different aspects of avatars and virtual world research. What follows are some thoughts based on readings from this collection. The following pictures are all photographs of various avatars taken over time at the Second Life Welcome Center on Ahern.
Avatars are our representatives and our means of connecting and communicating in virtual worlds. Your avatar projects a certain style, personality, and attitude. Avatars can be used to express our politics, our religion and our sexuality and we use them to communicate in groups, both casually and in meetings or classrooms and as well as in one on one conversations.
One of the factors that makes up a virtual world is the sense of presence; the feeling that you are there in the virtual world and interacting with that world and the other people in it. So it is inevitable that the theme of presence runs throughout the Social Life of Avatars.
In “Social Influence within Virtual Immersive Environments” Jim Blascovich writes that although there is not yet an accepted definition of presence in virtual worlds, the concept of presence is essential. He describes it as “a psychological state in which the individual perceives himself or herself as existing within an environment” and he further describes social presence as the “psychological state in which the individual perceives himself or herself as existing within an interpersonal environment.”
A number of people, including myself, have said that speaking through an avatar has helped us become better communicators; has resulted in an improved ability to talk in real life more easily about things that are more personal or difficult to us. The article, “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds” by T. L. Taylor addressed the topic of self expresson, relationships and embodiment.
Taylor’s article also addresses the topic of “making sense of plurality” or reconciling the individual’s physical body, the avatar’s body and our mental image of our body. Taylor mentions that people frequently alternate in talking about their avatar from the first to the third person and that as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between our self and our avatar. Taylor quotes one person as saying “…the more time I spend inworld… the harder it is for me to differentiate between my inworld self and my offline self…The two seem to be merging with each other…”
I was asked recently by a non-virtual world user, “what does it all matter since it is not real?” If I had not been on a virtual world, I could probably be the person asking that question in all sincerity. Shortly after that question was asked of me, I was happy to read the following quote from Mikeal Jacobbson in “Rest in Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds.”
“A common conviction among people who have no first hand experience of virtual worlds is that it does not really matter what happens in a virtual world because, after all, it is not for real… seeing someone engaged in interaction in a virtual world looks very similar to someone playing a computer game… however, appearances can be deceptive. In a virtual world, sticks and stones can’t break my bones, but that does not mean that I would not take notice of someone trying to throw stones at me or beating me with a stick. My mind and my emotions are present, and virtual actions can work as causes of effects on my mental state that are as real as anything I might experience in the real world.”
We do not question that communications with someone via the phone or e-mail are real since it does not take place face to face in the real world. The difference with virtual worlds as a communication tool is that we have an avatar that represents us in the communication process. While the avatar is not “real” we have extended ourselves into the virtual world through the avatar and we begin to feel one with the avatar that we use for communications.
A final statement from Jacobbson, ” I began… by comparing the surface of virtual worlds interaction to playing games. By looking beneath the surface, I found that what people do in these virtual worlds is really no different from what they do at work, at home, or in bars. They are not playing games; they are living their lives.”
–Kara
“He describes it as “a psychological state in which the individual perceives himself or herself as existing within an environment” and he further describes social presence as the “psychological state in which the individual perceives himself or herself as existing within an interpersonal environment.”
For whatever you want to call it, Second Life, is a fantasy. A fantasy life is the absence of all things related to life. The above assertions say as much. The feeling of “presence” as it is call is what it feels like when you are happy being “nowhere at all.”
What I DO find intriguing from the quotes you’ve choosen to use above is how it would seem our everyday choices for how we would want to live our lives is not much different from “Second Life.” We can get just as easily lost in our silly delusional versions of love and companionship in both “worlds.” “Second Life” is simply our choice to make real our perception for what we have “in mind” for who we THINK we are.
Eventually, the avatar online or the facade we choose to use with our friends, neighbors, and co-workers will grow old. Eventually, our true brilliance and magnificense we smother with such temporal experiences will shine through.
At what time will that be? Could be in the next hour, tommorrow, a week later, a month….or when we lie still pulling in the final breaths of this place we call home.
AngllHugnU2
Author of IM with God
During a creative drought, I also immersed myself into an online world for a few months, and came across similar reasonings you describe above. The connections can be real but incomplete and the lack of proximity and actual presence could never be replaced by the virtual. While the visual sense, communications, imagination can create a very persuasive facsimile, it cannot possibly compensate for the visceral experience of proximity to another.