Second Life: Not a Computer Game But a Social Environment

Linden Lab launched Second Life (SL) in 2003, and today the number of residents registered (players in SL) is around 14 million worldwide, with an average of 60,000 logged in at any given time.7 It is worth noting that residents might have more than one account, so concurrent users represent a fraction of accounts on the basis that one avatar

7 _{Data actualised to Dec 2012 shows a more or less constant average around 60,000 concurrent users, in 24}

hours, 48 hours and 14 days. http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/sl-statistical-charts/. Another site displaying SL total use of hours (breakdown by top 20 countries, language, age and gender group) reads: “Linden Lab’s last publicly released monthly metrics which contained this information. While this information is a bit old, it appears relatively accurate.” Meta Linden’s Last Public Monthly Stats. 2008.

(http://xdfusion.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/know-your-customers-second-life-demographics/ accessed September 2012)

means one login and only one account. SL is not a conventional online computer game; it is more a social environment, an experiment, in which its members, known as residents, are provided the tools and basic knowledge to create content. Since the beginning, in SL, the understanding of identity playing and appearance of avatars, the way they create objects and spaces, and how they develop the capability to relate to others and create narratives is crucial. This dynamic, now four years old, weaves structure, actions, identity quests (and experimenting), social, economic, and emotional exchange, both in actual and virtual life among participants (Boellstorff 2008).

In this ‘world’, the development and maintenance of social bonds and the involvement of residents in the creation and reinvention of their virtual lives occurs through the

mediation of 3D avatars that are digital representations of ‘players’ interacting in a virtual space. Unlike other virtual environments and computer games, SL virtual

characterisations are primarily under the resident’s control and creativity. It is precisely the capability of modifying and constantly reinventing an avatar’s appearance and ‘personality’ that is hallmark of SL’s ability for experimenting with identity and subjectivity. This implies, by extension, the displaying of visual, aesthetic and artistic experiences and objects, whose construction and trade grows in direct proportion to the experience of embodiment, social performance, and presence projected in the virtual person of the avatar.

Figure 1: Lacan Galicia’s Living Room (Personal Screenshot from Second Life)

An avatar’s identity relies on a particular sense of ‘selfhood’ developed through digital manipulation, and filtered by an amplified and mutable subjectivity, a concept referred to by Adriano D’Aloia as Auto-empathy. In SL, the identity is negotiated and shaped

through the exchange between avatars and people in both the ‘actual’ and the virtual worlds, to form a functional ‘personality,’ to the extent that it may have impact in actual reality (Velleman). Interacting with others catapults number of aspects to the surface, related to the way one represents herself on the screen: first to oneself, and then to others, a global set of attitudes, behaviours, emotions and skills that fall under the field of

impression management (Goffman). With all of these aspects at play, a dense dynamic involving in the exchange of symbols, meaning, expressions and behaviour, emerges from the interaction in the virtual environment. Accordingly, in this thesis, a focal ontology of SL’s discourse deals with presence and identity under conditions of

mutability or transference between worlds, granted that in virtual worlds, representation, subjectivity, embodiment and agency all lie in a liminal state, that is to say, in transit from selfness, identity and intra-subjective aesthesia, to interaction, sociability, meaning- making and inter-subjectivity.

These aspects become amplified because their representation and the social interaction they contribute to threading, are heavily manifested across media because the

environment in which avatars ‘live’ is interpenetrated by powerful digital communicative tools that, ultimately, contribute to (re)shaping presence, interaction and identity within SL. Of course I am not suggesting that just because an arsenal of hypermedia tools is at hand for communicating within the virtual world and outside with the actual world, that bigger or better communicational patterns necessarily produced. I certainly think that, due to liminality, communication becomes an aesthetic component ready for

experimentation, a pattern playing a role in the overall quest of being immersed and acting as another ‘self’.

In that sense the relevant aspect is that, in fact, the potential to communicate through digital hyper media contributes to the sense and the shaping of the ‘self’ in virtual environments because it favours and enhances practices of psychological/affective agency and transference through affective embodiment of personalities and narratives for both the avatar and the actual person, right in the transitional state of liminality. Dwelling in world and out may or may not be interesting depending on the feasibility of creating and using psychological/affective temporal markers such as ‘today’, ‘last month’, ‘next week’. Under these conditions, planning and performing your virtual existence as another self becomes effectively and affectively stimulated by the persistence of a virtual world like SL. Interactivity, persistence, hyper communication and the capacity to share with others in a common virtual space while AL personae may be located in opposite ends of the earth contributes to the feeling of ‘oneself’ being immersed in a three dimensional space.