When I joined Second Life, I was asked to choose a name for my avatar. I have often imagined having a name other than Sherry. It has never seemed quite right. Is it the Four Seasons song of the early 1960s that keeps it stuck in the world of junior high? But when I finally had the chance to be known as something else, I was confused. It was easy to dislike the name Sherry but not so easy to know what name I wanted. Fortunately, the system offered me choices. Once I chose, I felt relieved. Rachel. Something about this new name appealed. What was it? And with a question that simple, life on the screen became an identity workshop.
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Online worlds and role-playing games ask you to construct, edit, and perform a self. Yet, in these performances, like the performances we saw with sociable robots, something else breaks through. When we perform a life through our avatars, we express our hopes, strengths, and vulnerabilities.
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They are a kind of natural Rorschach.
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We have an opportunity to see what we wish for and what we might be missing. But more than this, we may work through blocks and address insecurities. People can use an avatar as “practice” for real life. As I’ve said, our lives on the screen may be play, but they are serious play.
Of course, people don’t forge online identities with the idea that they are embarking on a potentially “therapeutic” exercise. Experimentation and self-reflection sneak up on you. You begin the process of building an avatar to play a game or join an online community; you imagine that it will be a simple matter, but then, suddenly, it is not. You can’t, for example, decide on a name.
Joel, twenty-six, has given much thought to such questions of identity and online representation. For him, Second Life is quite literally his second life. In person, Joel appears far younger than his years. He is slender, casually dressed, with a slash of dark, tousled hair. Only a few years ago, his youthful appearance bothered Joel. He felt it was hard for people to take him seriously. Now, happily engaged to be married and settled down in a job he enjoys, Joel has made peace with his appearance. He still wishes he looked older but admits, “In the end, I suppose it can be helpful. Underestimation has its uses.” Joel grew up hoping to be an artist, but practical considerations led him to study computer science. He is a programmer, talented and sought after.
Joel runs a software-design team at an elite biotechnology firm. He is challenged by the work, but his search for more creative outlets in programming brought him to Second Life. This is where Pete, whom we met earlier, had his virtual love affair with the beautiful avatar Jade. Joel has no interest in a Second Life romance. He wants a place to explore his potential as an artist and a leader. In real life, he does not feel confirmed in either. But both are integral to who he wants to be. In the safety of the online world, Joel performs them to become them.
Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal life routines, places that are in some way “betwixt and between.” Turner calls them
liminal
, from the Latin word for “threshold.” They are literally on the boundaries of things.
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Thomas Mann’s imagined world in
The Magic Mountain
is a place out of time and place; this is what Second Life is for Joel, a place on the border between reality and fantasy. While many in Second Life build an avatar that is sexy, chic, and buff—a physical embodiment of a certain kind of ideal self—Joel goes in a different direction. He builds a fantasy version of how he sees himself, warts and all. He makes his avatar a pint-sized elephant named Rashi, a mix of floppy-eared sweetness and down-to-earth practicality. On Second Life, Rashi has a winsome side but is respected as an artist and programmer. That is, Joel creates beautiful buildings and virtual sculptures by programming at his keyboard; his avatar Rashi gets the credit in Second Life. More than being an artist, Joel (as Rashi) also takes charge of things. He organizes virtual building projects and gallery installations. Rashi is the kind of manager Joel wants to be: strict but always calm and nonthreatening. Although an elephant, Rashi offers many possibilities for identity exploration to a man trying to bring together his artistic and managerial talents.
On Second Life, Joel could have built a tall and commanding avatar. He could have given his avatar a military bearing, or an Einsteinian “genius” allure. Instead, he crafted an avatar that faces the same challenges he does in the physical real. The avatar, like the man behind him, often has to prove his talent and self-discipline. For although he can be formal in manner, Rashi does, after all, resemble Dumbo more than the man in the gray flannel suit. So, like Joel, the elephant Rashi often works on teams whose members expect a lack of seriousness when they first meet him and then are taken aback by his dedication and technical virtuosity.
From the earliest days of online role-playing games, there were those who saw virtual places as essential to their life off the screen because online experiences were helping them to grow. One young man told me how he had “come out” online and saw this as practice for coming out to his friends and then to his family. A young woman who had lost a leg in a car crash and now wore a prosthetic limb felt ready to resume a sexual life after the accident but was still awkward and anxious. She created an online avatar with a prosthetic leg and had virtual relationships. Online, she practiced talking about her prosthetic limb and taking it off before being intimate with her virtual lovers. She grew more comfortable with her physical body through the experience of her virtual body. Another dedicated player described himself as a too-timid man. Online, he practiced greater assertiveness by playing a woman he called “a Katherine Hep-burn type.” Over time, he was able to bring assertiveness into his day-to-day life as a man. This is the kind of crossover effect that Joel is trying to effect. In the virtual, he cultivates skills he wants to use in the real.
In thinking about online life, it helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical real and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, you use the materials of online life to confront the conflicts of the real and search for new resolutions. This is how Joel uses Rashi. He has made a space for learning how to combine whimsy and gravitas.
Ever since high school, Joel has earned money building websites. He takes pleasure in beating deadlines and saving clients’ money through clever design. Joel credits this to teenage experiences in what he calls the “hacker” culture. Then, Joel felt part of a community of technical virtuosos who worked within a strict ethical code. Using the computer, hackers would play tricks on each other—these were the “hacks”—but they never played tricks on people outside the group, who could not defend themselves. (A classic hack might be to make a computer seem to crash, only to have it revive when a hacker in the know touched it with a particular keystroke.) If a young hacker did not play by these rules, senior hackers would step in and make things right. Joel mourns the passing of the hacker ethic. In today’s virtual worlds, he says, “there is more mischief.” Clever people who don’t feel a commitment to the community are in a position to do real damage. On Second Life, through Rashi, Joel has become an enforcer of “old-school” hacker standards. His elephant is there to keep people in line. Property is to be respected. People’s work is not to be destroyed. Rashi, with his elephant ears and mournful eyes, is a disheveled superhero, but he gets the job done.
Joel joined Second Life as soon as it was announced. He became a beta tester, meaning that he worked in the world before it was released to the public. His job was to help remove programming bugs, to make the environment as good as it could be. Joel’s first impression of Second Life was negative. “I didn’t like it. It was silly. Predictable. Good for techies.” He dropped out for a while, but then came back in search of a creative space. He had heard about a group of “builders,” artistic people who used the Second Life programming language to construct extraordinary and irreverent virtual architecture and art installations. In Second Life, these builders have status; they have made Second Life a significant destination for artists. Over time, Joel found a more welcoming community of artists in Second Life than he could in the real. Joel threw himself into the work of the group. He says, “If I was going to do it, I was going to do it well.”
LIFE ON THE SCREEN
In Second Life, Rashi is a master builder who adds a subtle design vision to any project. He is also very kind. This means that through Rashi, Joel has a rich virtual social life. It brings him into contact with a range of people—artists, intellectuals, writers, businesspeople—he would not ordinarily meet. Rashi is often invited to parties where avatars eat, drink, dance, and chat. Whenever he attends a formal function, Rashi makes an elegant (online) scrapbook of the event and sends it as a gift to his avatar host or hostess.
The week before Joel and I meet, Rashi attended a Second Life wedding. Two avatars got married, and Rashi was asked to be ring bearer. Joel accepted with pleasure and designed an elaborate elephant tuxedo for the occasion. Since the dress code listed on the wedding invitation was “creative formal,” Joel rendered the tuxedo in an iridescent multicolor fabric. He shows me the screenshot album he created after the event, the one that Rashi sent as a gift to the bride and groom. Rashi’s generosity draws people to him, as does his emotional composure. In real life, Joel is a contented man, and this state of mind projects into the game. Perhaps it is this calm that attracted Noelle, a Second Life avatar who presents as a depressed Frenchwoman. Noelle has most recently been talking to Rashi about suicide, that is, suicide in the real. Joel and I sit at his computer on a day after he, as Rashi, has spent many hours “talking her down.”
Noelle tells Rashi that their talks help her, and this makes Joel very happy. He also worries about her. Sometimes he thinks of himself as her father, sometimes as her brother. But since their entire relationship takes place in Second Life, the question of Noelle’s authenticity is unclear. Recently, however, it is very much on Joel’s mind. Who is she really? Is he talking with a depressed woman who has taken on the avatar Noelle, also depressed? Or is the person behind Noelle someone very different who is simply “playing” a depressed person online? Joel says that he would be “okay” if Noelle turns out not to be French. That would not seem a betrayal. But to have spent hours offering counsel to a woman who says she is contemplating suicide, only to find out it was “just a game”—that would feel wrong. Although delivered from Rashi to Noelle, the advice he gives, as Joel sees it, is from him as a human being to the purportedly depressed woman who is Noelle’s puppeteer.
On the game, Joel makes it a rule to take people “at interface value.” That is, he relates to what an avatar presents in the online world. And this is how he wants to be taken by other people. He wants to be treated as a whimsical elephant who is a good friend and a virtuoso programmer. Yet, Joel has been talking to Noelle about the possible death of the
real
person behind the avatar. And even though he doesn’t think Noelle is exactly as she presents—for one thing her name is surely not Noelle, any more than his is Rashi—he counts on her being enough like her avatar that their relationship is worth the time he puts into it. He certainly is “for real” in his hours of counseling her. He believes that their relationship means something, is worth something, but not if she is “performing” depression. Or, for that matter, if she is a he.
Joel is aware of how delicate a line he walks in his virtual relationship with Noelle. Yet, he admits that the ground rules are not clear. There is no contract stipulating that an avatar will be “truthful” to the reality of the person playing it. Some people create three or four avatars to have the experience of playing different aspects of self, genders other than their own, ages different from their own. Joel knows all of this. But he is moving in another direction. Most recently, Joel’s real-world business cards include his avatar name on Second Life.
We can guess why Joel doesn’t like the telephone. When he makes or receives a call, he feels impatient and fidgety. He says that a call is “too much interruption”; he prefers to text or instant-message. Second Life avatars are able to communicate with each other in real time with text and speech, but because players are so often in and out of the world, this is a place of asynchronous messaging. As I watch Joel on Second Life, he moves through hundreds of messages as though gliding in a layered space. For him these messages, even those sent hours or days before, seem “of the moment.” He experiences the asynchronous as synchronous. He has mastered a kind of information choreography. He speeds through pop-up messages and complex exchanges, surfing waves of information, graceful and in control. He only has to read one or two sentences of a message before he begins his response. Working without interruption, he feels both connected and pleasurably isolated.
Joel is in the same zone between connection and disconnection when he “parks” his avatar and flies without a body through Second Life. When he does this, Joel’s “self ” in the game is no longer Rashi. Joel explains that when he flies this way, he becomes a camera; his “I” becomes a disembodied “eye.” Joel jokingly refers to his ability to fly “bodiless” through Second Life as an “out-of-avatar experience.” He brings up an ethical issue: only some people can fly as he does, people who are experts. And when he flies this way, other people can’t see him or know he is looking at them. Joel acknowledges the problem but is not troubled by it. He is comfortable with his privilege because he knows he does not abuse it. He sees himself as a benign caretaker. His “eye” belongs to a superhero surveying his city on the hill. And besides, says Joel, this isn’t life. This is a game with a skill set that anyone is free to learn. Flying as an invisible eye is one such skill. He has paid his dues and this gives him the right to an activity that in another context might be thought of as spying.