Click above to visit the entire site

23 February 2007:

Jenny Diski on Second Life

See how far you can get with this:

A poseball [I'm] not sitting on, is a wasted Prim! For those of us who worry about our prim limits ( and dont we all ) having large numbers of poseballs lying around without anyone sitting on them is simply a waste! but we dont want to go through the hassle of fetching them from our inventory, and repositioning, rotating, every time we want to use them.. So why not keep your poseballs INSIDE your furniture, instead of on top of them? Simply touch your furniture, and Ultimate Poseball Controller will provide you with a menu, listing all poseballs that it contains. Make your selection for your poseball to appear, in exactly the spot you left it! Perfect for those large sofas which can easily contain 8 or 9 poseball sets. The Ultimate Poseball Controller will also tidy up after itself as well, allowing you to keep your prim count as low as possible. You can also specify the people who you wish to be allowed to use this product, so only friends and family will have access. Detailed instructions are provided inside this product, along with a number of purpose written tools, to make setting up this script as easy for you as possible. *WARNING: You will have to actually READ and FOLLOW the instructions, in order for this product to work for you. Ive specified the setup into easy to follow steps for you. *NOTE: You have to have the ability to MODIFY any furniture you wish to use this product with... and copyable animations too..

No, I couldn't make any sense of it, either. Now, if you're a Second Life enthusiast, you undoubtedly must know all about poseballs. They sound like something that you must take for granted. Another poseball product available at the Second Life Boutique is advertised by what I can only call a rampantly copulating couple (they're naked but for footwear). If I were younger, I might be intrigued. But I am not younger; I know. I know that the virtual reality is not, ultimately, going to be an alternative to real reality. It is simply going to reproduce it. How can it not? The very same players - human beings - are involved.

Jenny Diski's hilarious, rueful account of her visit to Second Life, in the avatar, if I'm speaking correctly, of a frumpy old lady called Jehu, remains funny upon re-reading. It is a brilliant piece of humor writing. But it is also a rather pungent sample of the generally limited capabilities of most imaginations. Bewildered by Second Life's failure to present truly original opportunities, Ms Diski got in touch with the helpdesk avatars.

"But why wouldn't I do the things I like in the real world in the real world?"

"Because here you can do them better."

Now, how would that work? René Descartes, in my view, gets credit for something that seems to occur quite naturally to many people. They tend to think that there's something like a little ego sitting somewhere in the brain. The ego tells the body what to do, and the body does its best - which, frankly, is often pretty mediocre. The unreflective ego is omnipotent, capable of anything, except taking action. Wouldn't it be better if the ego could instruct a better body? And doesn't it deserve to live in a better neighborhood? Now you know what Second Life is all about. Sex and real estate: video gaming for adults.

Ms Diski, of course, is not like most people.

I was taken with the notion of becoming a great painter, but I couldn't see how Second Life would make me great at what I'm no good at in real life. If I wanted to think of myself as a great painter in spite of what I created on canvas or screen, I could just as well be delusional in the here and now. The point of virtual existence became less and less clear to me.

Ms Diski likes to read, so she buys a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets. But how do you "read better" in cyberspace?

But reading, after all, is and always has been a second life. So now a virtual me was carrying around a virtual book of poetry. And if my avatar ... could have read it I/she would have done so to keep the virtual world out, just as I have done for much of my real life. Though, of course, my fantasy self couldn't actually read my unreal book because an avatar doesn't read or do anything, being entirely dependent on the will and brainpower of a real self out here in First Life directing it.

Virtual living, like playing video games, seems to me to require a massive displacement of selfhood, a subtraction of one's very being from the real world. The Matrix films, undoubtedly among others, suggest that large audiences cope with this displacement very easily. Our consumer culture seems to have created a climate in which the self dissolves into a puddle of miscellaneous desires - you are what you want. Some people want stuff, while others want skills, but everyone wants another state of affairs. While thinkers like Ms Diski try to imagine making the real world a place for everybody, everybody else is slipping out of the real world altogether, into lives of fantasy and, yes, delusion. While readers like Ms Diski encompass the imaginary but deeply human worlds created by great novelists, expanding their sense of social possibility, everybody else is escaping society altogether, taking up a pretend existence among the avatars.

If I were designing a fantasy world, it would be quite real, and no one would want to escape it.

Permalink | Portico

Write to me