In the BBC documentary Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love, a 37-year-old American housewife almost forgets her husband and four children exist as she pursues an online relationship in the virtual world of Second Life. Her online persona is a scantily-clad, raven-haired beauty; her in-game beau impossibly muscle-bound and brandishing twin Uzi sub-machineguns.
It seems inconceivable, but while for many users, virtual worlds — or 'metaverses' — are merely something to dip their toes into, others fall in head first, to the extent that it pervades their waking thoughts even when they are not logged in.
Often touted as a glimpse at the possible 3D future of the web, Second Life, which celebrated its sixth anniversary in June, is a 'sandbox' experience in which gameplay is open-ended and driven by user-created content.
It is often described as an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), but I prefer the moniker MUSH (Multi-user Shared Hallucination) — a journey down the rabbit hole in which deep vein thrombosis is not the only travail that may await the unwary.
The avatar itself, a 3D wire frame swathed in textures and invariably younger than the person behind it, is a kind of projection into the ether with which the virtual realm is experienced.
The word 'avatar' has its origins in Sanskrit and can be taken to mean the 'descent of the god' to earth. This is fitting, due to the manner in which individuals seek to edit and control what happens in their game experience — a potted life that can be micro-managed like a bonsai, right down to the ability to edit the day/night cycle.
Second Life allows that the interior world of the individual to be rendered in a public space in an anonymous and relatively risk-free manner — indeed I have heard enthusiasts refer to it as the 'inside world of people'. (I can't help but think of Marianne Moore's line about 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.)
Devotees distinguish between the virtual world and 'meatspace' — ordinary life — a distinction that presupposes that something is wrong with reality. As with many hidden worlds of the internet, it's a parable of belonging and adulation, with interest group titles displayed above avatar heads, and profiles — which can be accessed by clicking on the avatar's name — detailing their in-world 'friends', 'fathers', 'mothers' and even 'children'.
With no specific site to deal with addiction to this phenomenon, the afflicted googled themselves to The Elliptic Blog's Second Life Addiction thread. The result is a frightening catalogue of neglect and self-neglect, of disintegrating families, foreclosures, relationships ruined, and businesses going belly up as a result of individuals diving too deeply into this online realm.
A teen bemoans the fact that both parents are too busy 'managing' their virtual club to give her any attention. Spouses speak of strangers that were once intimates, lost to an illusion of life. A distraught wife relates how her husband hoards happy snaps of his online romances, prizing them over real ones.
Greek thinkers like Leucippus and Democritus, who first posited the notion of a world composed of atoms, would marvel at people willing to exchange it for one of pixels. Yet the fact that so many adults find themselves lost in here is perhaps more testimony to the power of the human mind, than the medium itself — after all, although in some ways is is an extraordinary creative platform, Second Life is only a kind of advanced 3D chat.
Second Life merely reflects forces at work in the wider developed world — the corporeal one, of flesh and bone, where time ravages our envelope of flesh, and society worships the unravaged. The tweaking of the avatar is cosmetic surgery. The lack of standard game elements such as level progression or any guiding principle becomes a void in which endless consumption becomes the goal — virtual items paid for with real money — mirroring the endless dissatisfaction coded into us by a culture predicated on instant gratification.
In the course of my own investigations — and like a cop infiltrating a bikie gang, at times I wasn't sure if I was investigating or participating — I encountered a circle of avatars dancing in synch beside a blazing pixel fire at a simulated beach on an actual weekend, expressing their dismay that their teenage children were addicted to World of Warcraft (another, and even more popular MMO game).
'My son suffers from an affliction called WOW,' said one, apparently a mother. 'Oh my ... so does mine!' exclaimed another. 'Is he OK?'
The irony was perhaps lost on them.
As we continue to become 'tools of our tools', as Henry David Thoreau warned long ago, we risk mistaking online social networking for social capital (real 'meatspace' connections between people and groups of people). If this phenomenon is widespread it's because humans are essentially social animals, and technology has changed the way we live, interact and seek to interact. It manipulates us, as much as we manipulate it.
Richard Dawkins has pointed out that Moore's Law, which dictates that computer processing power effectively doubles every 18 months, means it is almost inevitable that coming virtual worlds will contain avatars that look like real people. This does not bode well for the future.
And in the present, sharp increases in user hours and economic activity in the first quarter of 2009 (up 42 per cent and 65 per cent respectively over the corresponding quarter last year) perhaps indicate an influx of cyber refugees, sheltering in imaginary worlds from economic storms.
The concept of a digital life is indeed troubling, but there may be a positive side to all of this in that people seem prepared to bare their souls, safely hidden behind a pixel doll. Even if they do wear a mask, to some extent this creates an atmosphere ripe for reasoning about how to live. 'You level-up when you quit the game', a European legal professional and resident told me in-game, 'by realising what you have to fix in your real life.'
Intriguingly, virtual worlds may be a means of reasoning about what is worth doing, by doing something that is perhaps not. Even so, in other cases Alice may need some help in finding her way back from Cyberland.
Adam McKenna works for Mercy Health.