Virtually Forever, originally uploaded by GoSpeed_Racer.
Normally I write this blog as if I am speaking as GoSpeed. For this post I step back and adress you as the person behind the avatar.
To me, GoSpeed is a virtually manifested construct of my mind. She has a shape, is textured, accessorized, and is mobile. She also has a “life” of her own that is unique from the Keyboardist who drives her around the grid. I experience Second Life through the eyes and ears of my avatar. The world is presented on my screen and the sounds and music come through my speakers. I interact with others via text and sometimes voice chat. When I am GoSpeed in world I behave differently than I normally do in RL. In most cases for the better and maybe in a few for the worse. There are some who play their SL avatar as if it was themselves. What they do, how they look and what they say is a near mirror image of their real selves.
In the last case I would think that if their avatars were taken away by force or simply abandoned out of boredom then the users don’t seem to lose much. But for the rest of us our avatars are like friends or family. We make them different enough that so that they begin to “feel” like another person when viewed from a distance. To further their identities we make blogs for them, take pictures of them, create an email account with their avatar names, etc… At some point they reach a point where the number of hits on Google is more numerous than your real life name!
So at what point does your avatar become eternal (in a relative sense)? If Second Life were to disappear or if you quit SL, what becomes of your avatar? Your creation in SL is gone for good. The body will die, but perhaps the spirit will survive? Will you migrate to other worlds? Will having to recreate a new avatar in a new world be traumatic when you can’t get it to look like your SL avatar? Trying to recreate GoSpeed in There.com, Twinity, Open Grid, or HiPiHi would be an exercise in frustration, even if Sezmra Svarog were to provide the textures for the new worlds. GoSpeed’s appearance, clothing and other items go a long way to defining who GoSpeed is. Losing those in a move would most likely redefine GoSpeed to a certain degree.
GoSpeed, along with many fellow SL users do live outside SL in active communities like Twitter, Plurk and Ning. There’s no avatar per se, but for the most part we all seem to conform to our regular behaviors.
Is there an afterlife for GoSpeed? Perhaps, but no doubt she’ll be a changed entity as a result. New worlds dictate new rules and new behaviors. How Go adapts will reveal how much she changes.
GoSpeed
I think about that sometimes too…especially with the Grid becoming more and more unstable by the moment. I enjoy the life and friends I’ve made inworld as much as I do the ones I have in RL. If SL finally implodes, then what next? It really is something to think about…
I hope some sort of more functional SL-alike will come along, but it may not be in the near future. I think we’re looking at at least one generation of VW failures before we get a platform that’ll let us do again what we’re doing now in SL.
So much of me is tied to the functionality of SL, the culture, and the freedom of expression, that it would be difficult for me to exist anywhere else. Sure, I poke my head into the internet, but my actions there are based on my experiences and personality inside SL, and the things I do there serve me, not my human.
In the long run, it’s more likely I’ll have “sisters” in other worlds, like reflections in a funhouse mirror, each a bit different from the next.
Still, I would miss “me” very much. So many good memories (and bad) tied up in this body. So many things I’ve seen with these eyes.
Thanks for a thoughtful post.
I wonder about, and sometimes obsess, from the academic perspective of post-modernism; Eco,Derrida,the deconstructionists, and the Buddha inside me, about what these identities mean and how they are as ephemeral as our RL selves…moments..
but the boundaries fascinate me, between the you and i and the individual and the community, the avatar and the driver, the avatar and other avs..
I’ve reached back to a concept that my psychedelically influenced mind caught a glimpse of as a pre-med wannabe who was enchanted with connective tissue and chemical and electrical communication across membranes. These are usually selective (voluntarily) permeable membranes that are a staple in Terran physiologies..sometimes not of course!
and these are the thin veils that I believe we adress/acknowledge/construct/build in everyday life as we decide what is the “me” and what is the “other”, and contemplate the locuses of control and influence. Shinran Shonin, a 13th century bodhitsadva, said all this was completely incomprehensible to humans. We are most likely completely ignorant to the the reality that drives us…as we drive our avatars. We are “bonbo”; stupid deluded creatures with little understanding of our place in the narrative.
And so the permeable membrane becomes the object of my desire, the invisible but profound boundary that i must accept and understand as the limiting film of tissue that my face keeps whacking into whenever I try to see something new.
and so the relationships we have with our avs, and between our avs, and the complex tapestry of relationships between the uses and the thems and the now that is only for the moment is what interests me.
let’s talk more…:) all of us.
Excellent, thought provoking post.
Movement of avatars between worlds is on the horizon as the very earliest steps occured this week. Read about it here. http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/happy-jumpy-ruths-interop-takes-a-step/
Chestnut, the moment your inventory can follow you to other grids or worlds, then it will be an AWESOME occasion. There is more to an avatar than just the name.
In response to GoSpeed. I am one of those people who would not miss my avatar that much. I may reuse the name for sentimental value, but what makes Rav is me. Ravishal is basically me in action, word and thought. In my case I treat SL similarly to RL so there is no built up “fake” persona. Up until I joined SL in February 2006 I did have an online identity that was prevalent in IM and various online multiplayer games like Interstate 76, Close Combat, Total Annihilation, and Medal of Honor. If you ran across a “Captain_Avatar” then it probably was me. Who Captain Avatar was depended on the environment. When I walked away from an online game or the multiplayer service folded then that particular expression of the Cap’n went away only to be reborn in some form in a new game.
Rav
Ravishal of course there is more to an avatar than just the name, that goes without saying. The baby steps toward interoperability that Zha and others were able to take this week are clearly the beginning of something much bigger. Rather than focus on what has not happened yet, I am marveling at the promise of being able to go from virtual world to virtual world in the not too distant future.
Enduring a forced “holiday” from SL, I have come to realize that parts of my avatar’s character have entered my RL in thought and deed. Which is a weird experience, as it has never before happened to me with online personae.