Maude Standish

We all lead such binary lives these days. Binary in the sense that we are immersed daily in code, surrounded by a complicated grid of zeros and ones—as we email, as we IM, as we text or just plain function in modernity. But also every one of us has a dual existence, the person we are when encountering someone physically and the person we are when communicating through technology. Sometimes this disjointed existence is readily apparent, like when articulate, educated girls post MySpace photos of themselves in bikinis with their lips parted into a sensual O, or the nice little suburban boy whose online interests are blunts, 40s and bitches, but not necessarily in that order.

Second Life is just a virtual embrace of our already dual existence, or that is what participants at this year’s national conference, hosted in Chicago two weekends ago, seemed to be saying as they joined each other for real-life drinks in the Hilton hotel bar. More than 800 people flew in from all parts of the country to gather and discuss the future of Second Life—a hot topic considering that within the last year Second Life has become a corporate and media darling. The crowd in the lobby looked like any other conference except for perhaps a few more male ponytails, the occasional wacky foam hat, Hawaiian shirts, a man dressed in a fox suit and a 13-year-old chatting code. Some out-of-town Bears fans also flocked to the hotel, and upon hearing what conference it was, scrunched their blue-and-orange-painted faces and pointed a giant foam finger at the techies. The Second Lifers seemed too distracted by meeting long-term virtual friends in the flesh for the first time to care very much.

Second Life was made available to computer addicts everywhere when in 1999 Linden Lab launched the site. Users have only to log onto Secondlife.com to download the game for free. Downloading the game is the equivalent of opening up a small universe inside the hard drive of your computer, meaning that if your computer is already filled up with music, or just plain old, your fifteen-pound laptop might have trouble opening up the digital parallel universe.

Once your computer’s internal fan starts churning and it is no longer burning your legs through your jeans, you will want to customize your avatar. The word avatar, derived from the Sanskrit word avatara, meaning "incarnation," originally referred to an immortal’s physical presence on Earth but around the advent of the Internet became a term for people’s presence in the Web (or mortals like us wandering in the immortal world of cyberspace). The pre-made avatars in Second Life come with a limited range of styles—and no genitals, so unless you are good at programming, you are going to want to buy clothing, the ability to dance and your preferred sexual organs. Combining gaming culture with social networking, proponents of Second Life argue that your avatar can act as a creative extension of the self. Second Life actively hosts around 1.5 million users—at the moment I am writing this, 37,346 of those avatars are logged in.

Wandering the world of Second Life can be lonely at first. This intricate spider’s web of digital hedonism is by no means self-explanatory, so it is suggested that new users approach others and start chatting. Hopefully you will find an altruistic avatar to help you but, if not, you can hire a tour guide within Second Life. Hiring someone, like buying dance moves, takes Linden Dollars, the real value of which are constantly in flux, but recently have traded at about 270 Linden dollars to every U.S. dollar.

"Do you remember virtual reality from fifteen years ago?" asks Joel Greenberg, vice-president of marketing at Electric Sheep Company. Greenberg began as a player of Second Life and has since joined the Electric Sheep Company, which specializes in integrating real businesses into the virtual platform of Second Life. To date, his company has aided the infiltration of the likes of Nissan, the NBA, Ben & Jerry’s and shows like "The L-Word." Fifteen years ago was the year that Neil Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel "Snow Crash" popularized the current meaning of avatar.

"Well, around that time," Greenberg proceeds in the tone of a grandfather sitting next to a fireplace, "and even before the Web came around, everyone was talking about virtual reality, where there was this world that you could meet friends, talk to people and interact with people. But you would have to wear goggles and gloves. When Second Life came on my radar screen about two-and-a-half years ago, I realized, oh my God, this is the promise of virtual reality."

The promise of virtual reality is fulfilled with watermelon-sized breasts, rippling muscles, perfect homes, looming billboards, furries, intellectual exchange, BDSM, philanthropic pursuits and lots of corporate advertisers. In other words it looks a lot like the real world (minus the furries and teleportation), only everyone can look like they want and live like they want. "You really are selling the dream in Second Life," says Greenberg.

Second Life is indeed dreamlike. Cities are built into the sky but the sidewalks have no cracks. Leaves blow methodically back and forth in the non-existent wind. Glass can’t break unless you program it to and everyone has the agility of Neo from "The Matrix." However, because Second Life’s dream lacks the porous quality of reality, it tends to look a bit like something a talented middle-school comic artist doodled while in math class. Yes, it is 3D, but there is an undeniable flatness, an overwhelming sense of smoothness that makes all of the different elements—steel buildings, shimmering lakes, perfect cotton-ball clouds, people’s eyebrows—look like they are made of the same indefinite material.

Like sleep-induced dreams, Second Life has a tendency to make users restlessly wake to wet spots in their pajama pants. Kevin Alderman is better known as his longhaired, muscular, sunglass-wearing and tribal-tattooed avatar Stroker Serpentine. This year Alderman hosted the conference’s Second Life masquerade ball (it was themed "Leather and Lace") and is considered the kingpin of Second Life Sex. Every computer-generated thrust, moan and electronic consummation of a sexual dream has him to thank, as he invented avatar genitals. Now he specializes in selling sexual positions and toys like the Eros SexGen bed—a plaid bed straight out of a seventies porn that allows your avatar to invite others over and engage in way more positions than your big brother ever told you existed.

"I provide a service that is very popular. I started off with genitals because the avatars come without them. It was a public demand. If I didn’t do it, someone else was going to," Alderman says. His entrepreneurship did not stop at genitals; he also built a sin city called Amsterdam, which was eventually purchased for 50,000 real U.S. dollars.

Alderman is a bit of an anomaly, but as Greenberg pointed out and the business track of the conference discussed, there is something in the way Second Life is designed that allows users to participate in the economy. "One of the really interesting values of Second Life is that because of the way Linden Lab has set up intellectual property is that it really is a way to become an entrepreneur without having to sink money into inventory," Greenberg says. One lady who attended the conference talked about how she started a clothing line in Second Life that became so popular she has since had her designs made in China and is selling them in real life.

Corporations and individuals aren’t the only ones making moves in the digital world. Not-for-profits such as the American Cancer Society (ACS) have entered Second Life with the hope of engaging and informing residents. "The American Cancer Society recognized immediately that it was a community-building platform that had the opportunity for change in community engagement," says Randal Moss, director of the Futuring and Innovation Center at the ACS. This year 1,700 people participated in the third annual Relay For Life. Decked out in costumes appropriate for the "Quest for A Cure," these altruistic avatars walked for eighteen-to-twenty-four hours and rested at campsites with themes like Jules Verne’s novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth." ACS was able to raise thirty-two million Linden dollars—or the equivalent of $115,000 real dollars—for the charity.

Additionally various groups have been using Second Life as an education platform. Harvard has hosted public lectures; Kurt Vonnegut discussed his writing at an open conference before he died, and groups like the Global Kids, who recently received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are using Teen Second Life to increase adolescent awareness of social-justice organizations and the way teens around the world live.

So sex isn’t the only thing that people venture into the world for, but it does seem to have an edge on other Second Life industries. "Cybering" is nothing new, but Second Life not only stimulates verbally, it also titillates visually. "Let’s face it, it is very difficult unless you are a novelist to be able to spread an environment or a theme without typing paragraph after paragraph. You’re there writing ‘The walls were dripping with blood as he grasped her physically and clasped her wrist’… I mean come on! Whereas in a virtual world you can actually animate your avatar to create a scenario," Alderman says.

"I think the Internet and virtual world has made a profound impact on everyone’s sexuality in real life," Alderman continues. "I mean, lets face it, we use AIM and our cell phones to exchange erotic greetings and pictures. And look how porn has been integraded into society over the last ten years! I remember when I was a kid my mother, who was a single mom—God rest her soul—she kept her porn in an eight-millimeter colloid film tucked away in her cabinet or hidden under her bed. It didn’t make her any less of a sexual being. It was just socially unacceptable, but these days, even in the media, porn has become something not to be ashamed of."

Alderman further believes that Second Life provides a unique platform for creativity, be it sexual or not. "There are so many intricacies to the human sexual psyche. We have the side that we share with our mate and we have the fantasies that sometimes we are embarrassed about that we don’t take the opportunity to express in real life. It would be very difficult for me in real life to pull off being an African-American midget dominatrix. That would be physically impossible! The freedom that Second Life offers to create any type of persona in any role-play environment is infinite. I can be a male. I can be a female. I can be anthropomorphic. Because of the ability of people to create their own content, the limit is only your imagination," he says, excitedly exhaling.

Within the beige walls of the conference it becomes apparent that Second Life can’t always match a limitless imagination. For one, Second Life has a pretty defined aesthetic, and despite the variance between avatars, everyone tends to look like an airbrushed cyborg. Using Alderman’s comparison of a novel, it is as if different personas can choose their own narrative but, alas, the writing style is all the same. Complaints were also voiced about the software’s occasional failings, such as when Super Mario clones invaded the world or the fact that when an island of space is crowded, service can slow or sometimes the avatars, or the island itself, will vanish.

Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Linden Lab, addressed these recurring concerns in his opening speech, stating, "If you look at overall service performance lately, we're sort of somewhere above ninety-percent availability once you include the planned downtimes for updates and you include the unplanned stuff that we seem to be doing to ourselves."

Despite Rosedale’s reassuring words, there has been a recent wave of backlash following a Wired article in which the author argued that investors and techies overestimated the economic possibilities of Second Life. "I think a number of companies are just looking at this as another media buy or something that they don’t really have to pay attention to, they maybe build really nice buildings but they are more a marketing kind of company and they don’t realize that really what you have to do to be successful in Second Life, in addition to building, is really provide value to the community through events and through offering objects that are valuable to customers," Greenberg says. Conference attendees seem unfazed by the backlash. "I am definitely an evangelist," Alderman says. "I see a lot of potential for this platform. And Second Life won’t be the ultimate and Linden Lab has no illusions that it will be. But I think the perception of the web as a static platform is being torn down on a daily basis."

The backlash hasn’t been restricted to fighting in the real world, either. A group of avatars formed the Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) in hopes of gaining political rights within the virtual world. Launching attacks at corporate entities within the platform—such as the American Apparel store—the SLLA sought to bring attention to what they considered the fascist rule of Linden Lab. You may laugh at the idea of needing "rights" within a game, but when a game has an actual real-life economy of trading upwards of 1.5 million U.S. dollars a day, the lines between reality and virtual can become blurred.

The conference itself seems to exist somewhere in that very gray zone. Yes, actual people are there, but most go by avatar names instead of their given names. You can overhear sweet little ladies complimenting each other’s garden, only to remember that the gardens are comprised completely of pixels. Most people who are in the business of virtual reality will tell you it is exciting because it will allow you to be whoever you want, but then they all seem to have "transparent avatars," or avatars that simply reflect their real-life entity.

And sometimes an avatar persona makes an appearance on a fleshy, sweaty, dance floor. At this year’s masquerade ball a woman came dressed in a vampire dominatrix outfit with her pet—a 30-year-old man with vampire features, on a leash, crawling behind her. Others interpreted the theme more literally, like one tall man who wore a blue Lucha Libre wrestling mask, or a pair of demure ladies who covered their identity with dollar-store Zorro masks. A masquerade ball seems particularly well-suited for the event, only in so much that masks allow you to dance and drink away the night somewhere in a gray zone of identity. You still experience everything but the consequences that most "real" actions come with are strangely absent because the next morning, as you roll out of your overstuffed hotel bed, you can just pretend that it was somebody else behind the mask. Of course, your hangover will be there to remind you that in fact it was you.

A machinima video—a film made within Second Life—on YouTube called "If this is Second Life why is my heart breaking in real life?" aptly exposes the conundrum of virtual activities melding with reality. Two women, one blonde and one brunette, both with cinched waists and massive breasts, have fallen for the same blonde Ken-doll-looking avatar and are bemoaning the fact that he has left both of them for the "other, other woman." They sing in eerie, feminine computer voices and dance moving their arms and hips in almost total disregard to the actual rhythm. Occasionally their legs go through a stone wall—or one of the horses they are dancing in-between—but who's to say their pain isn’t, well, real.

(2007-09-11)

Also by Maude Standish

Fairy Tale
"They call me the Cubs parking fairy," says Susanne Harris, although today the reason for this is not apparent to any of the numerous sports enthusiasts anxiously strolling down Clark Street avoiding getting wet and eye contact
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As you descend the stairs to the basement of MoJoe’s HotHouse, to a clean yet cluttered space that houses the Chicago Underground Library (CUL), you hear Nell Taylor’s instructional voice telling someone just exactly what it is he is holding—this hastily bound pink book, with its enlarged font and minimalist writings by middle-schoolers is an "orphan work," she’s saying, which is a publication whose authors have been lost to obscurity, or was published under auspices no longer discernable to the naked eye
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Poparazzi
"Claaaayton, will you take a good picture of me for once?" asks a pouty-lipped girl in a sparkly vest as we walk down the stairs into Smart Bar. Three other girls join her, alternatively winking, licking their lips and blowing posed kisses. Clayton Hauck hasn't even taken his camera out of the bag
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The Perfect Game
From the outside, Southport Lanes might look like any other yuppie bar on a street dotted with striped-wood designs in an effort to age new buildings quickly and give this young burgeoning community a sense of history. But Southport Lanes isn't just another new-old Irish bar attempting through green shellac to make claims of a connection to the Fatherland. It is the last handset bowling alley in Chicago, if not the Midwest
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Silent Shout
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The Vintage Type
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