Your Mind Makes it Real.

Any serious discussion about Second Life will eventually get to the issue of genuine experiences versus fake ones. Second Life emulates many aspects of real life from an open environment to physics, to money, to avatars. Many people who have an account get engrossed in what they’re doing. Considering the extent to which real life is emulated, there arises the concern about losing touch with reality, with common sense, with one’s own perspective. One can imagine that people try to delude themselves into thinking they are their avatar and their Second Life is their real life.

Personally, I don’t see it as being that simple. Its a false dichotomy of sorts, believing that there is only the acknowledgement of real life or the delusion of the digital experience. The misconception arises from not having taken the time to consider what “real” means and how the word is being used. Sometimes the word “real” is used when a better word would be “meaningful.” I think Second Life has plenty to offer on both terms.

When it comes to these questions of reality and meaning, I was inspired recently by a Ted Talks on “synthetic happiness” versus genuine happiness. When we adapt to the circumstances of our lives, we tend to settle back to a state of happiness equilibrium it seems and are happy or unhappy regardless of whether we have anything to be happy or unhappy about. The question becomes, does it matter if your happiness is manufactured in your head? If you're happy, isn’t that enough? You can watch the above link or skip on ahead. This post isn’t going anywhere.

Its an appropriate note to begin this discussion on. When the speaker refers to “synthetic happiness” it calls to mind many a debate about whats real and whats fake about the Second Life experience.

Inevitably, when I begin to tell people about the SL experience, I’ll get responses like “I like to go outside,” or “I like real interactions with real people.” I get it. Second Life is something that happens on a display monitor. Ultimately, its ones and zeroes organized in a meaningful way, like any computer program.

But the issue really is more complicated than that. One must consider what level of reality matters in what situations. Too, its important to realize that you can deconstruct “Real Life” in many of the same ways that you can deconstruct “Second Life.” It is only a lifetime of habit that keeps us from immediately deconstructing the former.

Consider the phone. When you have a phone conversation, are you having a real conversation? Is that conversation with a real person? Do you even know who you’re talking too?

Strictly speaking, the sound you produce when you speak is converted by a device in the phone, which transmits it though a series of towers, possibly a satellite, and that data is transmitted down to the other persons phone which uses the data to reproduce a reasonable facsimile of what you said. You’re not really speaking to and listening to the person, you’re listening to and speaking to your phone.

IT’S NOT MY DAD! THIS IS A CELL PHONE!!

["Threw it on the Ground" by Andy Samberg source: LiveOrDie.com]

Furthermore, you don’t really know that the person on the other end is who you think it is. Chances are, the sound quality is clear enough that the voice is a reasonable match, but even then, we’ve all been occasionally fooled for a moment and thought we were talking to someone else on the other end.

But this doesn’t matter to you. The vast majority of the time its not an issue and, while the phones are replicating and transmitting your voices, the net effect is a conversation with the person you meant to converse with. It doesn’t really matter that the sound you’re hearing is a reproduction of the person’s voice, the experience is roughly the same as hearing the actual voice.

Even here, though, we lose something from the experience of speaking to each other in person. You can’t see the look on the person’s face as they’re talking. You can’t touch the person, if you wanted to do that. Its important to remember that the experience of calling someone on a phone effectively creates the reality of a conversation within certain limits. But those are limits we have long been conditioned to accept.

It even has some advantages over a conversation in person depending on your priorities. Maybe you don’t want to be near the person you’re talking to. Maybe you’re afraid of what the person might do if they were. Maybe you don’t like how the person smells or you don’t want them to notice how you smell. Maybe you don’t want them to see the look on your face (a very useful feature when you work in a call center.) And of course, it frees you from having to physically travel to the person to talk to them.

You can apply this kind of analysis to any medium of interaction or communication including “real life” itself. Anyone who has seen the Matrix has some familiarity with this concept. The world you know is just the sensory input you receive, your ability to process it, and in many cases, your ability to use your imagination to extrapolate upon what you’ve seen and heard.

Studies have shown that the senses can be fooled (often by influencing your expectations.) Magicians make their living exploiting faults in the way the human mind processes the world around it. When we look at things, and people, are minds categorize the input in terms of concepts we’re familiar with such as “tree” or “woman.” Our minds assign meaning to the world.

How does this apply to Second Life?

You may be ahead of me on this one. Second Life is another medium for exchange, communication, and more. But whats “real” and whats “fake” about it?

Lets start with the people. When you see an avatar in Second Life, you can generally count on it being run by a person. Its true that some avatars are controlled by bots but it’s usually easy to pick those out. But lets leave the “bot” issue for another article.

The bigger complaint in this category is that, in Second Life, the person on the other end is not what their avatar makes them seem to be. It may surprise you to learn, for example, that not everyone in real life is a 7 foot tall woman with a barbie doll figure, glowing red hair and gossamer wings. In fact, it turns out that people in real life can’t even fly.

The more important question is, why does it matter? So you don’t know that the woman you’re talking to is a fat pimply greasy couch potato and possibly a man. Does it matter? You have an opportunity to be able to ignore the person’s unpleasant superficial physical features and get to know them as people. And its not like it’s any big secret. Second Life is a place where you can go to realize a fantasy, this often includes a new fantasy body.

In fact, you will often get to see more of the individual’s true personality here than you do in real life. Its the “online disinhibition effect” in the field of psychology but known to Penny Arcade fans and others on the internet as GIFT, a term which has negative connotations. The more obvious manifestation of this is the internet loudmouth, the braggart, or the jerk. People who would be mild mannered and polite in real life may unleash their darker side in the virtual world.

But you also have people who are shy and afraid to speak up for themselves. Maybe people make them nervous and the distance is soothing. Maybe the confusion, noise and over stimulation of a real life social setting affects their concentration and the still and quiet of the computer room helps them gather their thoughts. Maybe they’re insecure about their appearance which is something you don’t have to worry about when you can make your avatar look however you want, giving you a shield against the unfair standards people in real life hold you to.

These people finally get to open up and just be themselves.

There’s also a saying “integrity is what you are in the dark.” Given the online disinhibition effect, the nice, patient, fair people you meet in Second Life are more likely to be showing you their true character. They’re not just being nice to you so that you don’t yell at them or use violence on them. They have nothing to fear from you. Here in a digital realm of information, some truths are even more evident than they would be in Real Life.


So whats real about Second Life?

A good many things are real about Second Life.

First, the money is real. The Linden is a currency exchangeable with many Real Life currencies. The weight of this reality helps lend reality to other aspects of the game.

Goods and services are “real.” Maybe the phaser you buy isn’t really a phaser but what you’re paying for is an item that emulates the behavior of a phaser. The work that the merchant put into making that phaser for you is real work, the time it saves you in making it yourself is real time, and the fun you have zapping your consenting friends with it is real fun, all of which makes the value of the phaser real.

When griefers do harm, it is often real. Because SL business owners make actual money in SL, the damage griefers do to them can often harm them financially and occasionally they do worse. They often ruin real fun.

When a superhero or other volunteer helps you or stops a griefer, the good they do is real. When groups raise money for charity in Second Life, the good they do is real. In Second Life, “Relay for Life” has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer research, and I’m talking in terms of United States dollars, not Lindens.

As I mentioned, the people that you meet here are real. They may not look or behave the same here as they do in the real world, but people are different under many circumstances. In Second Life, the person you meet is what they are in Second Life. As long as your interactions remain in Second Life, it should not matter what these people are like in Real Life. If you do plan to meet them in real life, it is reasonable to ask for interaction through video and voice which should tell you a lot of what you need to know.

Their feelings are real too, as are yours. Your friendships and relationships with them are real, they’re as real as they are in real life. People can pretend to be your friend in real life too for any number of reasons.

It only requires that you invest yourself mentally in the experience. If its not for you, we get that, but don’t write it off before you try it. You could be denying a new and fantastic world of experiences that are real in some of the most important ways.