shelbinator.com

Some of you managed to figure out the magical metaphor about how nonprofit work can make me feel like a cat dragging in small dead animals. It also reveals my very cat-like tendency to piss on things that other people like for no good reason. To wit: Second Life.

A major news service has a news desk in SL; John Edwards has a virtual campaign headquarters there; a sizeable anti-war protest took place in SL in parallel with the one in DC; there’s even been an address by a real, actual Congressman in a virtual Capitol in SL. Still, I was pretty flummoxed when Young Democrats of Georgia established a small virtual presence in SL, because I still relegated the 3D virtual world to the same conceptual dorkbin of things like Dungeons and Dragons and dressing up like Harry Potter characters, with an extra dose of pervy-ness for good internet measure — interesting to many, but bizarre to me and most likely of little practical utility for political/social action. And even if it could prove useful, I thought it was a major case of Cart Before the Horse action, chasing after internet buzzwords for the sole purpose of saying, “See us implement our social marketing optimization,” before there’s been enough first life work done in establishing just what it is that’s being marketed (and then marketing it in very old fashioned first life ways).

But then, I was dead set against MySpace a year and a half ago and proved to be wrong on that one, so I thought I should go check it out for myself. Six or eight wasted hours of dissertation time later, I return from Second Life a much less cynical man; there may yet be some serious potential for social organization in Second Life, if only because there are just so many people with amazing boobs there.

Yes, in Second Life, we are all hot! At least those of us who are not anthropomorphized animals or robots, or painfully literal with our avatars (read: me). Of all the people I saw walk across my screen in Second Life, I was the one who would be graced in the SL Yearbook with the superlative “Most likely to have his ass kicked by any other avatar, including the chicks.” When you first arrive in Second Life, your default body is pretty ripped, for dudes, or rather buxom, for the ladies. Your virtual milkshake will definitely bring all the nerds to the yard. With a few tweaks to the attribute sliders in your Appearance settings (and some opportunities for free custom-designed garb), you can enhance your hipness with funky hair, edgy five o’clock shadow, a perfectly lifted bubble-butt, stiletto heels or combat boots and other eclectic outfits.

Me, I went for truth in advertising: bumped up the “love handles” setting, threw in a little beer gut, nixed the bulging pecs and skinnied down the python arms, and did my best to reproduce the standard jeans, sweater, and army jacket I wear to work almost every other day. I am, in short, a Second Loser. See, I even gravitate toward pictures of women in their underpants. Real stretch there.

I am not a gamer, so the whole concept of interacting with other people in a virtual 3-D space is new to me; thus, I was easily wowed by the content in Second Life. One of the friendly people I met gave me a link to teleport right to a pub in Second Dublin, a good-sized chunk of downtown Dublin near the Temple Bar district that’s being built by a number of Irish web developers. It’s been several years since I was in Dublin, but I have to say, this electronic representation of it really took me back. Color me impressed (which attribute slider does that?).

The world of Second Life is big enough to get plenty lost, which I did on a number of occasions. (Well, I wasn’t really going anywhere, so I guess I couldn’t really be lost.) As fake-day turned to fake-night in some dark and quiet neighborhood I had accidentally teleported into, I headed toward a spot on the map that indicated a number of people had congregated there. I walked into another bar that was decidedly less friendly than the pub in Dublin, and six avatars sat in dead silence, occasionally glancing over at me, but generally just sitting there, one or two of them nursing a beverage. I was once again impressed by Second Life, this time by the ability of virtual weird people to skeeve me out as much as real weird ones. I backed out of the bar and started walking down the street, and, already skeeved enough, realized that my real self was becoming rather nervous and unsettled by wandering around, at night, lost in a fake city, despite the fact that I was still sitting comfortably on my own couch at home. Maybe it didn’t help that I was sitting alone in the dark (the real dark) way past my bedtime after a rough day. It definitely didn’t help that the first place I accidentally teleported to was entitled something like “Vampire hunting ground,” and I hadn’t really read through the Second Life rules and regulations concerning something they called “Safe” and “Unsafe” regions. I didn’t quite know what all could go wrong for my poor, clueless avatar in an Unsafe region, but the knowledge that if worse came to worst I could always just create a new account didn’t help soothe my nerves one bit. I was officially sucked into the simulation.

I gave up trying to get around the old fashioned pedestrian way and teleported my virtual ass back to Dublin, now that it was night, to try out the free “Get Down” and “Boogie” dance moves I had added to my inventory of gestures on Help Island. It was on the dance floor that I discovered that in addition to be a lousy dancer, I am also pretty bad at controlling the angle of view of the camera that follows you around. Most of the time in Second Life, your perspective is from a position just a few feet above and behind your own head, but using various on-screen or mouse and keyboard controls, you can move that around to see yourself from the side, above, or uh, below. With one ctrl-alt swipe of the mousepad, I had moved my point of view right through the wall behind me and into the building next door. I could no longer see my surroundings, though I could still “hear” the chit-chat going on around my avatar. I couldn’t really move that effectively because I couldn’t see where I was going, so I just stood there for a while like a zombie while I tried to reconnect my fake eyes with my fake head. My field of vision drifted around some food store, went through another wall into the street, and a few pieces of furniture later came back into the pub right up through the dance floor, where I got a real eyeful of their star dancer and her spinning glow sticks. I swear it was an accident the first time!

I used to visit the occasional chat room back in the 90’s, and even though you only “talk” in Second Life by typing, there’s definitely a difference. There’s something about a fake face “looking” right at you while you’re talking to someone that peels back one of the layers of anonymity that you normally find in online interaction. At least, theoretically; the fact that there’s a 50-50 chance this hot chick you’re chatting up at the bar is just as frumpy a dude as you and ten times as dodgy certainly brings e-anonymity right back to the table.

But at least he can’t tell I’m still staring at his amazing rack.