Identity Crisis: Observations on Second Life and the Emergence of Mutability as Play (Assignment 6)
I wonder if the creators of Second Life anticipated that the online virtual world they created would turn into a fun-house mirror representation of reality. The game world most likely resembles how Earth would be if everyone had amorphous identities with the ability to fly, teleport, and instantly create objects from thin air. There are familiar representations from our experience – theme parks, casinos, malls – but the interesting thing is how they dominate the landscape, and how alien they feel, as if the Internet were turned into a three-dimensional space and unleashed upon us all.
Then there are the Furries.
My experience of Second Life was something I had to create for myself, as outside of the tutorial, there is no direction to the game besides what one makes for oneself. Because this doesn’t even come close to resembling a quasi-linear game experience, it’s difficult at first for me to get my bearings, and the community seems to be dispersed and concentrated in various areas. A critical consequence of this lack of shared “game world” questing and direction is that more of the players’ energies and identity is tied up with subcultures and construction, and as a result groups of players become more divergent from one another, a facet I’ll tap into later.
In checking out Second Life, I decided to go to the most popular areas of the game, to see what the dominant culture and play of the game was like, and at the same time also see what kinds of games the denizens of Second Life have created – how they’ve brought structure to the world, so to speak. The dominant forms of gaming I saw involved playing with the physics engine and recreation of board games. I skydived and parachuted, interesting activities in a world where everyone can fly and teleport; there was also a demolition derby-style game in which people crashed cars into one another. I also found many versions of board games in various places around the world. Their presence is probably facilitated by the world being primarily Socializer-oriented, and games such as Monopoly and “Settlers of Second Life” (a version of Settlers of Catan) are fun ways to pass the time while Socializing, so they are recreated to serve that purpose in Second Life.
However, by far the most dominant form of gaming in Second Life was gambling. As Michael Wolfe pointed out, there are many casinos where people try to win Linden Dollars, the online currency of Second Life. These casinos dominate the landscape and made up the majority of the “most popular places” list. The population of this area is interesting, again because of the way it replicates reality in a distorted fashion. The only way to earn money in Second Life is to create objects that people want to buy (planes, boats, clothes), or own objects that people want to use that give you money (blackjack tables, vending machines). If one can do neither of those, they are forced to gamble to increase their stipends, which seems foolhardy, especially since one cannot examine the machines in the game world to make sure they are legitimate and not rigged. However, the non-creatives have no other option. I believed seeing rows and rows of people plugging Linden Dollars into virtual slot machines was depressing, until I saw groups of people “camping” – that is, sitting in the casinos to earn trickles of money, about a dollar every ten minutes.
One wonders what the money is used for. Well, in a game world where mobility is unrestricted, and there is no over-arching game “quest”, the most important thing one possesses is identity. Second only to casinos are the thousands of stores selling avatar customizations, clothes, and avatar toys. They’re everywhere, and they’re organized in mall fashion, again a representation of reality – but they’re floating in space, or they have no ceilings, again a distortion of reality. You can be rated on appearance, and the appearance of the avatar is the only thing that distinguishes you from others (after all, there are no Molten Shoulder Blades of the Eagle that grant +40 to Agility), so people spend their money to set themselves apart from everyone else.
And thus we come to the crux of the game world – the creation of subcultures and divergent identities. I mentioned before that casinos dominated the “Most Popular Places” list; that was before I clicked on the checkbox that said “Include Mature Places”. It is like unlocking a door into the seamy underworld that one never knew existed. Again, it is an inversion of reality, in which deviant sexualities and modes of action that go against real-world norms become the dominant modes of action .
Wikipedia states that the dominant subculture of Second Life are the Goths; from personal anecdotal evidence, I would have to disagree and posit that there are far more Furries – people who fetishize animals and the anthropomorphic representation of animal sex. I encountered this subculture twice during my exploration of Second Life. The first was while I was trying to find another gaming area, I was directed to an elevator. Because of a scripting bug, the elevator was stuck between floors, and in trying to exit, I found myself in another building, one which was covered wall-to-wall with graphic art depicting anthropomorphized animal sex. The second was purposeful exploration, since the fourth most-popular place in Second Life was “Island Sim of FurNation Prime. Furry based sim maintained by FurNation Multimedia. Home of the famous Club Fur!” There, while trying my new motorcycle object (which, incidentally, I received as a gift from “Pure Passion”, ostensibly “Home to the Most Erotic Orgies in Second Life”), I stumbled upon a Furry gathering, in which players with animal avatars were re-enacting scenarios similar to the art I had previously seen, thanks to custom animations.
I have no doubt that other representations of deviance exist in the game world – virtual prostitution, racketeering, other sexual fetishes – but it is interesting to contemplate how these elements have become such a big part of the world of Second Life. Celia Pearce notes that “The computer is an ideal place to manifest a fantasy world. It allows for a wide variety of effects that cannot happen in real life” – a boon for those who wish to recreate difficult or impossible scenarios, such as the Furries. And because it is a “Second Life,” one divorced from one’s real life, it is likely to become an inversion, and the impulses one represses in reality come out in the game world.
Thus, the creators of Second Life have facilitated the process. Not directly, of course. As Salen and Zimmerman point out, game designers are second-order creators: they create a framework for player experience, but they do not make the experience themselves. This is doubly true for “Second Life,” for the creators give the players a blank world and ask them to make what they want. Linden Labs didn’t create the casinos, the malls, “Club Fur” or “Pure Passion” – players did, because those are the things they wanted to see, and those places would facilitate the types of experience they wish to have. Thus, it is the realization of Pearce’s statement that in gaming, “the consumer is thus transformed into consumer/producer and consumption itself becomes an act of production.” This is the result of emergence – from empty plots of land and basic scripting and modeling tools, we get a whole bevy of deviant subcultures and the sprawl of online commercialism – much like real life.
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Images:
Settlers of Second Life, a recreation of Settlers of Catan
Parachuting
A Board Game in which one nukes European countries for points. France is a highly valued target.
The Teleporter for Pure Passion. (They gave me a shirt, a motorcycle, and a convertible.)
A work-safe image of a Furry.