Ellison Homewood was walking home one day when, out of nowhere, the Chrysler Building fell on him. Dusting himself off, he strode down the street where he was promptly mugged by a small man carrying a nuclear bomb. The man then explained he was fresh from launching a terrorist attack against a chain store, and the two quickly set aside their differences and decided to grab drinks and go dancing in a nearby pub.
But that was no ordinary pub, and that was no ordinary Chrysler Building. No, what just happened was the kind of mind-numbing introduction that's been tacked onto half the articles ever written about Second Life. I'm sure I've written some of them myself, and with the recent news that CNN is opening up a “bureau” in Second Life, it's the kind of twaddle we'll be seeing more often.
It's not the hackneyed prose that's troubling, though starting a story with “It was all virtual!” is fast becoming the equivalent of ending a TV show with “It was all a dream!”
The habit of describing virtual-world happenings as if they were scenes from a TV episode leaves key questions dangling. What are the players, sitting at their keyboards somewhere, actually doing all the while? What's the point of drinking a virtual martini? Does that atom bomb really pose a material threat? And how does someone sitting at a computer go virtual dancing?
I get the sense that, at this particular juncture, people are hitting a language barrier when they try to talk about virtual worlds. How can we describe things that happen there without talking about them like they really occurred? I'm not trying to be a stickler about what what's real and what's not – to be sure, virtual worlds contain great dollops of reality, however you define it. But those realities play by different rules than the real world, and to ignore those differences paints a picture that's just plain deceptive.
Sorting out these questions is becoming less academic by the day. Virtual worlds are a niche, certainly, but they're creeping toward the mainstream. Second Life has an active population of around 1.5 million players, and millions more have dabbled. A procession of corporations has opened up promotional ventures there, ventures that inevitably attract far more media attention than actual visitors in Second Life.
The CNN venture consists of a “bureau” that will have no reporters, but will solicit pieces from Second Life users. This might be just as well, since most journalists don't have that much experience reporting from inside a simulation. And besides, this is CNN we're talking about: The first time a celebrity avatar is put on trial, you'll know where to turn.
But it also means we're going to see more stories about virtual worlds that take the events they describe out of context. Some of that context is simply the rules of the game. In Second Life, for instance, residents can't destroy each other's property any more than I can destroy your e-mail inbox. They can, however, render it temporarily unusable via dirty tricks that bog down the server, much as I could overwhelm your inbox with spam.
But the real question here is who's doing what to whom. Dancing is a good example. Real-world dancing is something you put your mind to – a physical, focused thing. In Second Life and other virtual worlds, though, players merely click somewhere to set their avatars dancing, and sit watching as they gyrate away like wind-up dolls.
In other words, the players aren't dancing; they're being danced. The appeal is purely social. There are other avatars gyrating in the same room, and they chat among themselves; some banter out loud, some single out other avatars and message them directly. To blithely report that two avatars went dancing might illustrate what happened on screen, but it doesn't explain what actually took place.
This is all the more important in the accounts that occasionally emerge about avatars suffering from “rape” or “murder.” Nobody in Second Life can do either of those things to someone else, and to mimic such a situation requires the connivance of both parties.
Second Life and its players go to great lengths to digitally recreate real-life situations, so it's no wonder people are inclined to describe them in cinematic terms. But in their most basic form, worlds like Second Life are chat rooms set in three-dimensional space, out of which the most complicated webs of socialization, bonding and animus are spun.
In other words, events there usually come down to who said what to whom, not who did what. The emphasis on bizarre actions – the ones we keep hearing about – might paint a vivid picture, but they miss out on what's really happening, the reasons that people engage in these worlds in the first place. Recognizing that is the first step in wrapping our heads around the virtual world that's creeping up on us.
