LONDON: “The futurist in me says that the real world will become like a museum very soon.” These are the words of Philip Rosedale, chief executive of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. Like many of its competitors in the paraverse of virtual gaming, Second Life is mushrooming exponentially. In his book, Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds, Tim Guest provides some statistics. There are, he writes, 30 million regular virtual gamers across the world; a report this month put the population of Second Life alone at six million, and it is growing at a rate of 800,000 members per month. IBM’s Irving Berger likens the current status of virtual gaming to the presence of the internet in 1994: we are merely on the cusp.
In Second Lives, Guest explores the machinery, meaning and potential of these worlds, interviewing a range of real-world and virtual characters, with the help of his avatar, Errol Mysterio (‘avatar’ derives from a Sanskrit word meaning incarnation). As Errol, he befriends Wilde Cunningham, the embodiment of a group of special needs patients in Boston (like ‘multiple personality disorder in reverse’), who are now able to ‘function’ as they cannot in the real world. He meets sufferers of Asperger’s Syndrome who have been helped by virtual gaming and wonders whether these worlds, ‘with their reduced range of expression, make us all feel a little autistic’.
An avatar may be an escape from self, but it is also a personification. The influence can work both ways. American soldiers are trained on military versions of MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) to help desensitise them to war.The prevalence of an economy in these spaces intensifies the seepage between the real and the virtual. Virtual cash can be bought with real cash (itself a second order reality). Avatars can design (or ‘script’) objects and animations within the games and then sell them: sunglasses, hairstyles, outfits etc. Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef), an avatar real-estate dealer in Second Life, became the first person to amass a virtual fortune worth a very real $1m. According to one economist, the game EverQuest has a per-capita GNP on a par with Russia.
With an economy comes crime. Viruses cause rare objects to be stolen or copied; mercenaries destroy virtual players for profit. ‘Griefers’ (saboteurs) wreak havoc with virtual bombs, destroying weeks of craftsmanship. As Guest intelligently argues, ‘in the real world, time is money; in the virtual world, money is time’. Death is a minor setback, but mobsters have other ways of intimidating people.
Corporations are resistant to their games becoming true economies (the red tape would be prohibitive); but a Wild West culture is developing within them. It is only a matter of time before virtual objects have legal value. Korea has a Police CyberTerror Unit dedicated to real-world crimes related to online gaming. Earlier this month, an investigation into virtual child pornography was launched in Germany. In the US, such material is not yet illegal.
Guest has produced a decent primer, but he could have delved deeper. He briefly considers the ‘heightened potential for surveillance’, touches on the prospects for advertisers and the environment and skirts around the sinister degree of power and influence that gaming corporations are acquiring. In these worlds, it is Sony or IBM that decide policy. In Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, being openly gay is forbidden ‘because it might incite people to openly dislike gays’.
Guest grew up in a sect (he recounted his experiences in his previous book, My Life in Orange), so he is particularly attuned to the menacing coltishness of virtual gaming. He observes the ‘messianic zeal’ in Philip Rosedale’s tone.
Second Lives could have been more thoughtful; but Guest must be commended for investigating this topic. It is an area of digital culture ripe for further serious study as we continue to emerge from post-modernity into an era perhaps better described as the meta modern.
