My character chats with Tom Lowenhaupt's character inside Second Life
My super screwed up last month, leaving my building without heat for 5 days; without hot water for 7 days; without a stove for two weeks. Gas companies were called and city inspectors inspected, but I still spent $110 in electricity running a space heater 24 hours a day. On top of all that, I lost my shot at publishing the best story I had all year.
As I contemplated burning furniture for warmth, I "escaped" to a wacky press conference held entirely inside the computer-generated world of Second Life. Time has passed, wrapping both these events together in my head—much like a wooly mammoth and a diamond mine buried under the same glacier. Something compels me to tell both stories, even after the editors killed them.
In real life, I was pounding away on my laptop and breathing puffs of frozen air. In Second Life, I was lounging on the tropical island pictured above, with a crew of pixilated characters that included a blue skinny Martian, a Goth girl with a shimmering halo, a foot-tall monkey with cymbals, and some guy dressed tight black pants who floated in mid-air, bitching about everything he saw.
Inside the virtual world of Second Life, more than 100,000 real-life people use digital representations of themselves, or “avatars,” to interact with a videogame landscape. Second Life is a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" (or MMORPG), a participatory videogame environment that allows players to explore fantastical landscapes and communicate with typed messages.
People perform everyday tasks with a virtual twist: shopping for virtual clothes to wear on their avatar; building and owning cartoon mansions on Second Life property; or exploring hundreds of sexy, mind-bending activities. Membership is free, but thousands of people pay to own land within the game.
That shivering Sunday, I logged on to the Second Life server. My digital avatar flickered to life, materializing in the game world. My character isn’t fancy, just a skinny white guy in a white tee shirt. Accessories like eyeglasses, nurse uniforms, dominatrix leather, or gimp suits all cost extra, and I wasn’t trying to impress anybody.
I scrolled through the 12,000-acre map of Second Life, until I found Democracy Island. With a single keystroke, the program zipped me to this imaginary space built by a group of New York designers. January 7th was the grand opening of Democracy Island, a grandiose social experiment for a game-world more accustomed to nightclubs, gambling, and bizarre sex.
A billion miles away from my infuriating apartment, I materialized inside a computer-generated replica of a sunny Roman amphitheater. I arrived in the middle of Jerry Paffendorf’s speech introducing Democracy Island to a crowd of 30 other Second Lifers. Wearing a Google tee shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, and camouflage pants, Paffendorf’s digital avatar proudly maintained the geeky chic that has banished smart kids to imaginary worlds ever since the dawn of Dungeons and Dragons.
In real life, Paffendorf lives in Williamsburg. He works as community director at the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a non-profit think tank that brings together over 3,000 tech advisors and industry leaders to evangelize about the possibilities of new technology.
His virtual guest list included law professors, game designers, and public policy analysts from around the country—each with a crazy avatar. Under Paffendorf’s supervision, they created a vast spread on the Island: an intricately rendered recreation of the Federal Supreme Court building, a Roman amphitheater for meetings, and a giant map of Jackson Heights, Queens. The designers hope to initiate conversations about virtual government, conflict resolution within imaginary worlds, and explore how Second Life can interact with “real life” governments.
There is no vocalizing component in Second Life. Paffendorf typed his speech into the computer, and his words spieled inside a chat box at the bottom of the screen. After outlining the Island, Paffendorf introduced the guest of honor—Tom Lowenhaupt, a web consultant and technical director at Queens Community Board 3 in Jackson Heights. “Heya tom,” typed Paffendorf. “He's got a fancy new avatar that looks just like him :)”
In the videogame, Lowenhaupt has an elegant mustache and a rippling set of muscles. His avatar fluttered one hand in mid-air, mimicking the prissy wave perfected by generations of Prom Queens. “That’s my only move,” Lowenhaupt typed back. “Looks like a real public official.”
Sitting there with 30 other avatars, all I could hear was the recorded “clickety-clack” of computer keyboards and the occasional burst of canned laughter uploaded by a tech-savvy Second Lifer. Only fictional character commenting on a fictional poem could encapsulate the detached and surreal feelings I felt while reporting this story inside my frozen house. I felt like Charles Kinbote in his Pale Fire commentary when he writes, “There is a carnival outside my window,” that dazzling moment when the reader realizes that there is something really, really wrong with the person telling this story.
To be continued...
This is the first in a possible series of gonzo journalism forays into the world of Second Life, written by Jason Boog.
If you want to read more, tell me. If you think this story is silly, tell me. Just tell me what you think!
The entire time I read your story I had a smile on my face, and I would love to continue to get to know it better !
Posted by: ophélie | February 9, 2006 3:55 AM | Permalink to Comment