Virtual world voters shunned

April 14, 2010 by 6 Comments

Back in 2008, during the US Presidential Election primaries, all the Democratic hopefuls had a Second Life presence of one sort or another; Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had virtual campaign headquarters, and there were several “Obama for President” resident groups. The GOP were slower to embrace SL, though eventually a couple of Sarah Palin avatars made an appearance.

I had expected to see the current UK elections stir some interest on the grid, but all I could find was this rather disappointing “Election HQ“, which consists of nothing more than a few balloons and a malfunctioning noticeboard outside an empty store:

There is a “Conservative Party Supporters” group, with a grand total of 3 members, led by one “ToryBoy Horatio”. Potential members are greeted with a jolly “Well hello fellow Etonians and the rest of you rabble”, which makes me think that this might just possibly be a parody rather than a serious vote-gathering enterprise.

It’s said that about 7.5% of SL residents live in the UK, which, out of active users, would amount to around 75,000 potential voters, a not inconsiderable constituency. The fact that none of the major parties has felt it necessary to establish a Second Life presence may say something about the how the platform’s profile has declined in the last two years.

Or perhaps they are are just wary of meeting the same fate as John Edward’s virtual campaign (as described in Peter Ludlow’s brief history of griefing in the metaverse).

Filed under Politics, Second Life Tagged with ,

There can be only one

April 7, 2010 by Leave a comment

One-time internet pace-setters AOL have announced that they are getting out of the social networking business. They have put Bebo, which they paid $185 million for just two years ago, on the market, though no one seems to think there will be any takers. If no sale goes through the service may be closed down as soon as the end of May.

The management at AOL have hardly covered themselves in glory in recent years – the Time-Warner/AOL merger is often cited as the worst deal of all time – but one has to feel a bit sorry for them, as back in 2008 it wasn’t clear that Facebook would come to dominate the market to the degree it has. In 2007 people were still writing papers identifying FB as a service for the upper classes, and youth-orientated Bebo must have looked like a reasonable bet.

I think the demise of Bebo is further evidence that, for Web 2.0, value lies in the network, not in any particular interface. Underlying the story is a much older lesson though; in a maturing consumer market the middle ground tends to disappear, and to survive an enterprise must either be dominatingly large, or serve a specialised niche. If I were running Second Life I’d be tempted to follow the latter strategy.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Second Life demographics – a brief review

April 5, 2010 by 3 Comments

We received a rare response to our last piece, from T Linden himself no less. True, T had descended from Olympus to tell us that we were wrong about everything, but still, some attention is better than no attention.

Anyway, one part of his comment caught my eye – “Second Life is a diverse community”. This is a sentiment that is often heard around the SL blogosphere, but how true is it? I did a quick review of the literature to see if there was much evidence one way or the other.

There are three metaverse-related publications that I read regularly (or semi-regularly) – the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and Game Studies – but I couldn’t remember ever having seen a quantatative study focussing specifically on the demography of SL in these journals, and sure enough nothing turned up when I searched their archives. A further search through the biomedical, psychological and sociological databases that I have access to drew a similar blank. The closest thing to a scientific study on this topic that I could find is this piece of work presented back in 2007 on the SL Survey blog. The Second Life wiki does have a page entitled “Demographic Studies”, but this is marketing data rather than academic work.

There are quite a few studies that look at other MMORPGs; three that are often cited are Griffiths et al (2003) Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming, Griffiths et al (2004) Demographic Factors and Playing Variables in Online Computer Gaming and Yee (2006) The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. Yee’s study is particularly impressive, drawing on data gathered from over 30,000 players over 3 years in his epic Daedalus Project.

The earliest qualitative work that I’m aware of in this area are the case descriptions of MUD users (who were mostly also psychotherapy clients) in Sherry Turkle‘s 1995 book Life on the Screen. A work focussing more on interpersonal and group dynamics is John Suler‘s 1996 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, particularly the section covering his in-depth study of the early graphical MUD The Palace.

More recent qualitative studies include Yee (2006) Motivations for Play in Online Games, Bessière et al (2007) The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft, Hussain and Griffiths (2009) The Attitudes, Feelings, and Experiences of Online Gamers: A Qualitative Analysis and Williams et al (2010) Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs. Good qualitative work dealing specifically with Second Life is harder to find; in fact I couldn’t find any at all. [Update: There is a good qualitative study; I had unaccountably overlooked Coming of Age in Second Life by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff.]

This brief review is not terribly systematic and certainly not comprehensive, but, having read these papers, as well as some of their references and citations, and a load of other work that I haven’t mentioned because it seemed only tangentially relevant, I feel I can hazard a qualified opinion on the question of diversity within the Second Life population, the qualification being that my impression is an overview based on a general familiarity with the source material rather than a rigorously evidence-based analysis.

SL residents may well vary along several dimensions, such as age, gender, nationality, education level and occupational status, but I suspect that a cluster analysis would resolve this seeming heterogenicity into a much smaller number of discrete groupings. Furthermore, I think that below this apparent diversity there may well be a large degree of psychological similarity; in other words, although residents may be different in terms of the demographic categories listed above, when one looks at their internal mental functioning they may have much more in common than one might expect.

If this last proposition is true then it should be possible to draw up a psychological profile of a typical Second Life resident, and to devise some sort of scale that would measure how likely it is that a subject would take to the SL experience, then see if that correlated with any particular personality types. I’m not aware that anyone has published any work like this, though I may well have overlooked it.

I’d be surprised if Linden Lab didn’t have a psychologist on their staff researching this kind of thing, since it would be very useful for marketing purposes, but I guess they wouldn’t want to put it into the public domain.

I have some ideas about the psychological features that one might expect to find in an average Second Life resident, and I’ll expand on these in a future post.

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , ,

The Linden Principle

March 24, 2010 by 2 Comments

Towards the end of last year the BBC aired a documentary on the Great Banking Crisis of 2008, which featured various bankers, government ministers and officials recounting the emergency meetings where the decision was taken to nationalise large parts of the British financial system. The Royal Bank of Scotland, once one of the most successful institutions in the world, had, by late 2008, been reduced by an ill-advised expansion strategy to a virtual basket-case, and was only hours away from total collapse. Faced with the prospect of millions of citizens waking up to find their accounts frozen, the government called the RBS management into the Treasury to finalise the details of the deal that would eventually see the state acquire 84% of the bank. During the course of this meeting, officials realised that Fred Goodwin, RBS Chief Executive, seemed to have only the flimsiest grasp of the trouble his bank was in, believing that a modest cash injection would be enough to stabilise things. Goodwin retired shortly afterwards, with a generous pension, leaving the taxpayers to contemplate the lesson that, as Chancellor Alistair Darling ruefully noted, when it comes to running banks it’s a good idea to hire people who know what they are doing.

We tend to assume that, when someone reaches a position of responsibility, this must be as a result of some rational process that evaluated their competence for it. However we are often faced with evidence, like the poor decision making that led to the financial crisis, that contradicts this, and suggests that other, unknown factors must play a part in the selection of our leaders.

Laurence J. Peter, who died in 1990, is best known as the author of the Peter Principle, which states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” Workers who are good at their jobs are promoted until they are in a job they can’t do, at which point they get stuck. Since big organisations tend to find it difficult to get rid of people, eventually every position will be filled by someone who is incompetent to manage it.

I was thinking of all this when I read about Linden Lab’s latest marketing wheeze; an advertising campaign that seeks to dispel a supposed “Fat Naked Guy in a Basement Anti-Second Life Meme” by showcasing the attractive people behind selected avatars. This seems to me to be wrong-headed on so many levels that it does raise doubts about how well the Lab management understand their own product and what makes it attractive to their paying customers. One only has to google “Linden Lab incompetence” to come up with plenty other examples of Lab strategy that have proved unpopular with the resident community.

On the other hand, Mark Kingdon has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and years of experience in senior management, whereas I am an embittered loser with a blog (though, I must point out, reasonably slim, fully clothed, and currently resident above ground). Who would you trust to run a successful company?

Filed under Economics, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Falling into the chasm

March 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

It was reported yesterday that Facebook had overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the US last week. The social networking site gathered 7.07% of total hits (up 185% on last year), marginally ahead of Google’s 7.03%.

Pundits are suggesting that this is an indication of how people are increasingly using the internet in a different way – instead of searching for information, the theory goes, we are now looking more for social connections.

As we’ve noted before, this type of thinking seems to be driving Linden Lab’s corporate strategy, as they try to market Second Life as a social networking application. They clearly have some way to go to compete with Facebook though, both in the raw numbers – FB has a user base of 400 million, and concurrency of up to a million, against SL‘s figures of 18 million and 80,000 respectively – and in terms of cultural penetration. Major newspapers are still publishing articles that assume that the majority of their readers will never have heard of Second Life, while Facebook references can be found even in traditionally conservative media like legacy comics.

Grace McDunnough posted an interesting piece (illuminating comments too) on the Lab’s marketing strategy a couple of days ago. Referencing a recent Harvard Business School case study, which itself draws on Geoffrey Moore‘s influential 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, Grace concludes that the educational market is a bust, the “adult” market is an embarrassment, and that content creators are being slowly sidelined. What does this leave? A 3D chat service, or, as Grace puts it, “playing house with paper dolls”.

This rings sadly true to me, and seems a terrible waste of the platform’s potential, but I guess there’s no arguing with market forces. It seems that the early adopter community (in which I count myself spiritually, if not strictly speaking temporally) is going to find itself increasingly marginalised. We can only hope that the Facebookisation of Second Life turns into a complete fiasco, M. Linden gets his cards, and a more enlightened management goes back to the original, steady (if limited) business model of taking money from people like me, who are willing to pay a few bucks a month to live out the life of the mind in a virtual world.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with , , , ,

On Second Life and addiction

March 17, 2010 by 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to say anything on the sad story of the Korean couple who allegedly left their baby to starve while they spent time in the virtual world Prius Online, because, you know, it seemed a bit exploitative, but I noticed that a few other blogs had referred to the issue directly or indirectly, and of course I couldn’t resist putting my two cents worth into the comments, (though it turns out that last post wasn’t inspired by the Korean incident after all), so I thought I might as well draw a few thoughts together and post them here.

Actually I’m not going to address the Korean story directly, since all I know about it is what I’ve read in the papers, and in cases like these one really needs to have all the facts before formulating any opinions. Instead I’ll say something more general about the concept of internet addiction – whether it exists at all, and, if so, what can be done to help those suffering from the problem.

My personal opinion is that problematic use of the internet should be regarded as a pathological behaviour, and that it is best thought of as an impulse-control disorder. I first became interested in the topic after reading Caught in The Net, by Kimberly Young, who did a lot of the early work in this area, and who runs the Center for Internet Addiction. Her book is aimed at a lay audience – she does tend to throw around terms like “obsession”, “compulsion” and “addiction” a bit freely – but her conceptualisation of dysfunctional online activity, drawing on the model of pathological gambling, is basically sound.

The existence and nature of internet addiction is still the subject of academic debate though. I thought Jerald Block made a good case a couple of years ago in an editorial in the AJP, Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction, but the draft DSM V, out last month, fails to include it. Interestingly the draft also proposes to move pathological gambling out of “Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified” and into “Addiction and Related Disorders”, a move that has been labelled one of the “The 19 Worst Suggestions For DSM5“.

This argument about classification may seem a bit arcane, but it reflects a division of opinion that was also evident in the discussion of the Korean case; to what extent does labelling a particular behaviour an “addiction” absolve the person concerned of responsibility for their actions?

When it comes to MMORPGs (which for the sake of this argument we’ll take as including Second Life) there is a tendency among pro-game writers to deny that virtual worlds have any addictive properties at all, and to focus instead on the personal characteristics of the “addicts”, and especially their “personal responsibility” or lack thereof, when seeking to explain the problem. This is evident in the posts I linked to above, and more so in the comments, and is understandable when one considers that politicians and the media are quick to stir up moral panics about the supposed corrupting influence of games on society.

It’s true that impulse-control disorders are rooted in individual psychopathology, which in turn develops from the complex interaction of neurobiology, psychodynamics, cognition, social factors and environment. However I think it has to be acknowledged that games, and especially MMORPGS, have features which may promote problematic use in vulnerable people.

What are these elements? The ability to produce feelings of mastery, to increase confidence in social interaction and to explore hidden aspects of personality, which can combine to boost self-esteem. (These are of course the same things that make the worlds attractive in the first place.) Add in the variable reward schedules that are designed into the games to a greater or lesser degree, and you have the potential to set up cycles of dysfunctional behaviour.

This doesn’t mean that games are inherently dangerous, since clearly the vast majority of players manage to use them without coming to any harm. It does suggest though that there is a particular subset of players for whom over-use of games might become a problem, and raises the question of whether game developers like Linden Lab should be responsible for raising awareness of the possible hazards among residents of their worlds. I would argue that there should be some material about recognising the signs of internet addiction included in the orientation process, and perhaps a timer built into the viewer that that pops up after, say, two hours on the grid and suggests that it might be time to take a break. I can’t see this happening though, since steps like these could be construed as an admission by the Lab that they are aware of the potentially harmful nature of their product, which would presumably expose them to some sort of liability.

What of treatment? In general terms, my experience of treating this sort of problem has convinced me of the importance of taking a non-judgemental approach. Although therapy for impulse-control disorder does focus on the choices that the client makes in certain situations, with the aim of helping them regain a feeling of control, over-emphasising “personal responsibility” is usually not helpful. These clients start with low-self esteem, and the condition further erodes their confidence in their ability to take charge of their lives, so reminding them that they could have avoided the mess by making different choices tends not to make them feel any better. Instead it’s more useful to focus on the positives, the areas of their lives that they feel they can manage sucessfully, and try to build on these.

It’s interesting that discussion of addictions, and particularly process addictions (which, as mentioned above, I prefer to conceptualise as impulse-control disorders, though plenty of people would disagree with me), often takes on a rather moralistic tone, with implicit, or sometimes explicit, condemnation of addicts for failing to take “responsibility” for what they do. I tend to think that this position represents a defence against acknowledging the extent to which everyone is a potential “addict”, a projection of intolerable unconscious “irresponsibility”. I think it’s healthier to recognise that we are all fallible humans, and we can all make bad choices, and remember that when we do mess up it’s nicer if people treat us with sympathy and compassion, rather than going on and on about “personal responsibility”.

In internet addiction specifically the treatment with the best evidence base is CBT – Young published a paper on treatment outcomes in 2007. There was also an interesting paper last year from the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University last year looking at various treatment approaches to videogame addiction, including 12-step, CBT and Motivational Interviewing. 12-step programmes for internet addiction are widely available – at On-Line Gamers Anonymous for example – but I’m not aware that these have been rigorously evaluated. I’m not as familiar as I would like to be with the published work coming out of South Korea and China, where they take this problem very seriously, but what I have read suggests that behavioural and family therapy approaches are useful, in younger populations especially. I expect there will be a lot more research into treatment of internet addiction published in the West over the next few years, and the best therapeutic options should become more evident.

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , , , ,

A Radical Game

March 5, 2010 by Leave a comment

Readers may be wondering what has happened to my grand plans to launch a grid-wide insurrection to bring democracy to Second Life. I haven’t forgotten about it completely, but I have been distracted by some real-life political activity; I realised that if I had time to spend on agitation in an imaginary world, then I had no real excuse for dodging my responsibilities in my local community, where the issues are rather more pressing.

I was also a bit discouraged when I read Annabelle Boyd Jones’s B.A. thesis (OK, when I read the abstract of Annabelle Boyd Jones’s B.A. thesis) The Disconnect Between Journalism and Governance; A Critical Analysis of the Interaction of Journalism and Governance in the Virtual World Second Life, in which she concludes that journalism (and what is SLS if not citizen-journalism?) has had “negligible influence over the structure and direction of governance”. Ms Jones was awarded first class honours, so I guess her work is fairly robust, though I felt her selection of SL sources was a little restrictive, taking in the usual suspects like the Herald and New World Notes, plus the now-defunct AvaStar and Reuters SL, though also Your 2nd Place and Second Thoughts, the latter amusingly characterised as “incendiary”.

On the other hand… My re-engagement with local politics isn’t entirely attributable to guilt-tripping; thinking about democracy and radicalism in the context of Second Life reminded me how stimulating political activity can be, and primed me to get back into it. I ended up re-reading most of Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution, which really catches the excitement of the times, as the old order collapsed and a new world of limitless possibilities opened up. (John Reed‘s Ten Days that Shook the World, and Warren Beatey’s epic film Reds, based on Reed’s life, are equally inspiring.)

It can be argued that Second Life is a similarly fresh political landscape, and the challenges faced by anyone trying to build a progressive movement on the grid would be comparable to those in front of the Bolsheviks as they sought to galvanise the population of Russia around a new ideology in 1917. It would follow that, just as there are lessons for revolutionaries today in the events of October, agitating in SL might teach us something about organising in real life. Role-playing revolutionary games in Second Life could provide the intellectual space where ideas about engaging people with radical politics can be tried out and refined, before being fed back into offline experience.

For example, I was thinking about how I might go about recruiting members to an SL Communist Party, and naturally I fell back on my fairly extensive experience of doing similar things in the real world. Thinking about how to translate this on to the grid forced me to consider what worked and what didn’t, what were the really essential steps and what was just habit, what was outdated and what still applied. All this was still in my mind the other day when I met with some people to talk about what kind of intervention we can mount around the forthcoming UK General Election, and my contribution to that discussion was certainly informed by the thoughts I’d had about Second Life. Time will tell how useful these grid-derived insights are going to be of course, and the process would undoubtedly have been more valuable had I started it about a year ago, so that I could have gone through a few iterations of virtual party building and generated more feedback, but it felt as if I had been able to look at things from a new angle.

Does this mean that I am softening on my immersionist position and coming round to a more augmentalist viewpoint? Not really, because I still think that what happens on the grid has no direct significance outside of the game world, and that no matter how good a virtual simulation might be, the lessons learned only become valuable if they are applied to action in the real world.

The idea that games can be useful in preparing us for more serious affairs is hardly new of course; it’s something we have been doing in one form or another since the dawn of humanity. Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, (though Orwell thought that the opening battles of all subsequent wars had been lost there.) Perhaps the outcome of future conflicts will be decided on the sims of Second Life.

Filed under Politics, Second Life Tagged with , ,

Discordant Thinking

March 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

Here’s a classic social psychology experiment: recruit a bunch of college students and split them into two groups. Have them all spend a couple of hours doing some dull, repetitive task, but give the first group $50 each for their trouble, and the second group only $1. Then ask them to report how enjoyable the job was; the high-paid group will tend to rate it lower than those who received only a pittance.

This may seem paradoxical, but is easily explained. The contrast between the subjects’ image of themselves as smart, successful people and the menial task they have been assigned causes them to experience an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance; the first group can resolve this by reasoning that they’re doing it for the money, but the second group have to try to convince themselves that the job itself is intrinsically interesting, and that they’re not stupid for wasting their time with it.

I thought of this when I read the story of the businessman who dramatically cut his document-translation bill by getting SL residents to do it for L$50 (US$0.20) a go, rather than the going rate of US$50. (I learned of this via a tweet from Wallace Linden, who seems to think that it’s a great advert for the platform; “Do business in Second Life – our residents are morons who will work for buttons!”) I can’t imagine that the people who did the work really believe that their time is worth only 0.4% of their real-life equivalents, so they must be thinking that, because it’s happening in SL, it’s actually fun, and not work at all. (Of course they may be ripping the guy off by cutting and pasting his documents through Google translate, but even that would take a couple of minutes, so we’re still talking sub-minimum-wage labour).

It makes me wonder if a similar psychological process is behind my own enjoyment of Second Life. I spend a lot of time wandering around deserted landscapes looking at rather dull virtual architechture, and even more time reading (and commenting upon) the boring tittle-tattle that makes up the SL blogosphere. When I think about it, it does seem a bit pointless (which is probably why I keep it a secret from just about everyone I know.)

On the other hand, virtual worlds are the brightest stars in the technological heavens, aren’t they? They must be, or all us smart people wouldn’t be wasting our valuable time with them…

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with ,

Monetising SL 2.0

February 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

I feel that I should download the SL 2.0 viewer, just so that I can have an opinion about it, and join in the general excitement, but I’m finding it hard to get enthusiastic about what is, after all, just a gateway to the really interesting part of Second Life, that is the content and the community. When I first signed up to SL a couple of years ago I downloaded the alpha build of the Linux client, and I was happy with that until fairly recently, when the Lab started restricting which viewers you could log in with and it stopped working. I switched to the then-current version of Snowglobe, which I have had no major complaints about.

I’ve never been entirely convinced that making the viewer more user-friendly was the key to broadening SL‘s appeal. I guess the Lab did some consumer research that told them that the viewer’s rather steep learning-curve was contributing to SL‘s woeful retention rate, and I’m sure that the new version makes it a bit easier to get through the first hour, but I would have thought that keeping people on board for months and years would depend more on the nature of the virtual world and its residents than the bells and whistles of the client software.

Though maybe I’m overstating the importance of content. The BBC are currently running a series The Virtual Revolution (which you can watch online if you live in the UK), which is taking a look at the impact on society of the growth of the internet in the last 20 years. It’s necessarily broad, and there’s been nothing terribly surprising, but it’s still interesting, particularly the discussion of how Web 2.0 has been monetised. Services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter may get their user-generated content for free, but most of it is worthless junk. That doesn’t matter though, the theory goes, because as users post, search, rate and comment on all those videos, updates and tweets, they reveal a mass of valuable data about themselves and their social networks, information that can be profitably mined for targeted advertising.

One can’t help but wonder if the Lindens have some similar plan in mind. They have certainly been talking up the social-networking aspects of SL, with their purchase of Avatars United, and Wallace Linden’s suggestion that we should all link our real identities to our avatars. If they could find out all about us and our interests, they could turn that into a revenue stream, provided they could figure out how to serve up the ads in a way that wasn’t too annoying. Perhaps the much-touted URL-on-a-prim functionality of the 2.0 viewer is part of the Lab’s plan to sneak pop-up advertising into the virtual landscape.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with , , , , ,

The Kid With The Replaceable Head

February 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

People who know how I dress would probably refuse to believe this, but I am a regular reader of the fashion pages in the newspaper, especially when there is some big event like London Fashion Week on. I don’t update my own style, such as it is, with any great frequency – an observer with only my wardrobe to go by would conclude that there had been no major developments in male couture since Richard Hell started wearing ripped T-shirts in 1976 – but I do like to keep in touch with the latest trends, so that when I meet someone new I can judge how much of a fashion victim they are.

LFW has of course been overshadowed this year by the death of Alexander McQueen. Fashion is by its nature ephemeral, but there is no doubt that McQueen was one of those designers who deserves to be thought of as a serious artist, and whose influence on popular culture went far beyond the catwalk. The tragic circumstances of his passing, with so much of his career still in front of him, only adds to the feeling that the world has lost a major talent.

Anyway, I mention this because I was reading an article about Swedish designer Ann-Sofie Back’s new collection, which apparently has been inspired by her experience working as a stripper in Second Life. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to rate SL, or the virtual fashion industry, very highly, describing it thus: “Second Life is quite a shitty, slow game where nothing much happens, but people do make an effort with clothes, hair and make-up. The weird thing is, you have the chance to really create something fantastic – you know, with rabbit ears or you could be green. But most people want to look like Katie Price and Peter Andre, and wear clothes like people on Big Brother. It’s even more conformist than real life.”

I won’t pretend that I know enough about the SL fashion scene to say whether or not Ms Back’s opinion is accurate, though my limited observation has made me think that there is quite a degree of conservatism operating, with most of the items available being a variation on a few themes, so she may well be on to something.

The assertion that SL in general is essentially conventional does seem more counter-intuitive, when one thinks of the myriad of character types one meets around the grid. Sometimes outward rebelliousness masks inner conformity though, and the rules governing a subculture can be as rigid as any in more mainstream society. Someone needs to do some anthropological work among SL‘s Furries or Tinys or Vampires or whatever to see if this is the case.

Considering all this has led me to reflect on the way I have been leading my virtual existence, on the grid and in this blog, and how much I have used SL to break with convention and explore facets of my personality that I normally keep hidden. Sadly, I must admit that I haven’t really taken up the opportunity to reinvent myself to any great extent. My avatar looks pretty much like I do (or did 20 years ago at least), and my activity is a similarly unadventurous echo of the ineffectual political agitation and low-powered cultural and psychological rumination that passes for my day to day intellectual life.

You may think that the fact that, faced with the limitless possiblities for self-expression offered by Second Life, I have chosen to create an alter-ego that is at most a slightly polished version of my real self, is a sign that I have a dreadful lack of imagination, and you may well be right. I however prefer to recall the research in this area which suggests that it is the people with the lowest self-esteem who are most likely to idealise their virtual existence, and to conclude that my rather boring cyber-identity proves that I must be supremely well-actualised in real life, and that my personality has only a little room for improvement.

And talking of Richard Hell…

Filed under Culture, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →