Maria, a thirty-three-year-old financial analyst, can also fly as an “eye” through Second Life, but what she most enjoys in this virtual world is that life there is writ large. “The joy of Second Life is the heightened experience,” she says. Time and relationships speed up. Emotions ramp up: “The time from meeting to falling in love to marrying to passionate breakups . . . that all can happen in very short order.... It is easy to get people on Second Life to talk about the boredom of the everyday. But on Second Life there is overstimulation.” Maria explains that “the world leads people to emphasize big emotional markers. There is love, marriage, divorce—a lot of emotional culminating points are compressed into an hour in the world.... You are always attending to something big.” What you hear from people is “I want to [virtually] kill myself, I want to get married, I am in love, I want to go to an orgy.” Joel and Maria both say that after they leave the game, they need time to “decompress.” From Maria’s point of view, Second Life is not like life, but perhaps like life on speed. Yet, one of the things that Maria describes as most exhausting, “cycling through people,” others on Second Life describe as most sustaining. For them, the joy of this online world is that it is a place where “new friendships come from.”
Second Life gives Nora, thirty-seven, a happy feeling of continual renewal: “I never know who I’ll meet ‘in world.’” She contrasts this with the routine of her life at home with two toddlers. “At home I always know who I will meet. No one if I stay in with the kids. Or a bunch of nannies if I take the kids to the park. Or a bunch of bored rich-lady moms—I guess they’re like me—if I take them shopping at Formaggio [a well-known purveyor of gourmet foods] or for snacks at the Hi-Rise [a well-known coffee shop/bakery].” Nora is bored with her life but not with her Second Life. She says of her online connections, “They are always about something, always about a real interest.” But connections all about shared “interests” mean that Nora discards people when her “interests” change. She admits that there is a very rapid turnover in her Second Life friendships: “I toss people.... I make friends and then move on.... I know it gives me something of a reputation, but I like that there are always new people.” Alexa, a thirty-one-year-old architecture student, has a similar experience. She says of Second Life, “There is always someone else to talk to, someone else to meet. I don’t feel a commitment.”
A Second Life avatar offers the possibility of virtual youth and beauty and, with these, sexual encounters and romantic companionship not always available in the physical real. These may be engaged in to build confidence for real-life encounters, but sometimes practice seems perfect. Some citizens of Second Life claim that they have found, among other things, sex, art, education, and acceptance. We hear the familiar story: life on the screen moves from being better than nothing to simply being better. Here, the self is reassuringly protean. You can experiment with different kinds of people, but you don’t assume the risks of real relationships. Should you get bored or into trouble, you can, as Nora puts it, “move on.” Or you can “retire” your avatar and start again.
Does loving your Second Life resign you to your disappointments in the real? These days, if you can’t find a good job, you can reimagine yourself as successful in the virtual. You can escape a depressing apartment to entertain guests in a simulated mansion. But while for some the virtual may subdue discontents, for others it seems just a way to escape the doldrums. “During graduate school I spent four years on World of Warcraft [often referred to as WoW],” says Rennie, a thirty-two-year-old economist. “I loved the adventure, the puzzles, the mystery. I loved how I worked with so many different kinds of people. Once I was on a quest with a dancer from New York, a sixteen-year-old math prodigy from Arizona, and a London banker. Their perspectives were so interesting. The collaboration was awesome. It was the best thing in my life.” Now, married with children, Rennie still slips away to World of Warcraft whenever he can. “It’s better,” he says, “than any vacation.” What made it great in graduate school still obtains: it is his fastest, surest way to meet new people and find some thrills and challenges. “A vacation, well, it can work out or not. WoW always delivers.”
ADAM
Simulation engages Adam, forty-three, to the point where everything else disappears and he just has to stay in the zone. His simulations of choice are the games Quake and Civilization. The first he plays in a group; the other he plays with online “bots,” the artificial intelligences that take the roles of people. Adam likes who he is in these games—a warrior and a world ruler—more than who he is outside of them. His handicaps are in the real; in the games he is a star.
Adam is single, an aspiring singer and songwriter. Beyond this, he dreams of writing a screenplay. To make ends meet, he provides technical support for an insurance company and takes care of an elderly man on the weekends. Neither of these “real jobs” engages him. He is barely holding on to them. He says, “They are slipping away,” under pressure from his game worlds, into which he disappears for up to fifteen-hour stretches. Adam gets little sleep, but he does not consider cutting back on his games. They are essential to his self-esteem, for it is inside these worlds that he feels most relaxed and happy. Adam describes a moment in Quake. “You’re walking through shadow, you can see—there’s snow on the ground, you’re walking through a shadow landscape, and then you’re walking out to the light, and you can see the sunlight!”
In one of the narratives on Quake, the greatest warriors of all time fight for the amusement of a race called the Vadrigar. It is a first-person shooter game. You, as player, are the gun. Adam describes it as a “testosterone-laced thing, where you blow up other guys with various weapons that you find on a little map.” Adam explains that when he plays Quake on a computer network, he can have one-on-one duels or join a team for tournament play. If he plays Quake alone, he duels against bots.
Now Adam plays alone. But in the past, he enjoyed playing Quake with groups of people. These game friends, he says, were the people who had “counted most” in his life. And he had played an online version of Scrabble with a woman named Erin, who became his closest friend. He doesn’t have contact with Erin any more. She moved on to another game.
Adam thinks back to his earlier days on games with nostalgia. He recalls that the group sessions began at the office. “Five or six guys were hooked up to the server. We would play in our cubicles when management had a long meeting.... As long as the Notes server didn’t explode, we would be able to blast away at each other and have a grand old time. And that got me hooked.” After a while, the group moved to playing tournaments at people’s homes. There was food and drink. And an easy way to be with people. Normally shy, Adam says that the game gave him things to talk about. “It didn’t have to be really personal. It could all be about the game.”
Somebody would have a decent-enough network at their home, and we would take our computers there, hook them up, pizza would be ordered, onion dip, lots of crappy food, piles of Coca-Cola. There’s actually a specialized drink for this sort of thing, called “Balz”—B-A-L-Z. Have you heard of it? I think it’s spelled B-A-L-Z. But the point is, it’s hypercaffeinated, something akin to Red Bull. For gaming, we’d set up the thing in the guy’s basement, and we’d do it for four or five hours and blast away.... We’d be screaming at each other.... We’d all be able to hang out during the game and shoot the shit during the game or after the game, and that was a lot of fun.
From gathering in people’s homes, the group went on to rent conference rooms at a hotel, with each participant contributing $50. Meetings now included food, dim lights, and marathon sessions of Quake, played for nine or ten hours at a stretch. Adam says that no one in the group wanted to leave: “And you keep going, you know, ‘Gotta keep doing it again. Let’s do it again! Blast away, you know.’” But the games in homes and hotel rooms have not happened in a long time. Now, Adam is most often on Quake as a single player, teaming up with the computer, with bots for companions. Adam says that the bots “do a great job.” It is easy to forget that they are not people. Although he says it was “more of an ego trip to play with people as the competition, the bots are fine.” Different bots have distinct personalities. They hold forth with scripted lines that simulate real player chat—usually irreverent and wise guy. In fact, Adam finds that “conversations with the [human] players . . . are about things that bots can talk about as well.” He explains that the bots are competent conversationalists because conversations on Quake tend to follow predictable patterns. There is talk about “the maps . . . the places to hide, places to get certain bombs, places to get certain forms of invincibility.” The bots can handle this.
Adam reminisces about moments of mastery on Quake; for him, mastery over the game world is a source of joy. “Over time,” Adam says, “you learn where things are.... You get really good.” In one play session, Adam ran around, as a cockroach, in a setting called “the Bathroom.” He admits that “it might not sound like much,” but it had engaged him, mind and body: “There are little tricks, you know, there are little slides, you can slide around, and you can leap up, and you’re going down the sink, you slide down the sink, you end up in the cabinet, you run up a little ramp then find another place . . . then you get to this other spot where you can grab this pair of wings and fly around the room, just blasting away.”
When Adam played Quake with his office mates, his favorite game had been a virtual version of Capture the Flag. Teams of players raid an opponent’s base to take its flag while holding on to their own. Capture the Flag had everything Adam likes best: competition, flying, and losing himself in the person—that agile and masterful person—he becomes in the game.
You want to beat your buddies. You want to make sure that you’ve outdone them. You capture one flag, and there’s this series of jets you can grab, and you can fly over to the other end and you grab the flag and fly back. And you’re flying, and all of a sudden, you hear [makes loud explosion noise, claps hands] and then “Boom.” . . . Red team scores [in a dramatic voice, then “ding ding ding ding,” indicating music]. And it’s like “DAMMIT!” [loudly] You get a whole idea of what the hell’s going on with the intensity of it. [laughs] You sorry you asked me for this? [laughs]
The game of Quake, played with his office friends and now played in single-player mode, makes Adam feel better about who he is in the game than who he is outside it. Adam says that he shows more skill at Capture the Flag than he does at his technical job, which he considers rote and beneath him. Beyond mastery, games offer the opportunity to perform roles he finds ennobling. Adam wants to be a generous person, but power is a prerequisite for benevolence. In life Adam feels he has none. In games he has a great deal. Indeed, in Civilization, which he now plays alone, Adam is in charge of nothing less than building the world.
These games take so long, you can literally play it for days. One time when I played it, I had just got the game, and I got so addicted, I stayed home the next day and I played.... I think it was like noon the next day, or like nine o’clock the next day, I played all night long. And I ended up winning. You get so advanced. You get superadvanced technology. The first wave of technology is like a warrior, and the next big advance is you got, like, a spear and a shield, and then later on you get these things like Aegis.... It’s a ship. It’s a modern-day ship, or like nuclear weapons.... And you can actually build a spaceship and can leave the planet.... That would be a way of winning the game....
To succeed in Civilization, Adam has to juggle exploration, conquest, economics, and diplomacy. He needs to exploit culture and technology—there is in-game research to produce an alphabet, build the pyramids, and discover gunpowder. He gets to choose the nature of his government; he feels good when he changes over from despotism to monarchy. “When you change the game to monarchy, [and you want to speed the production of something in a city] then you don’t lose citizens, you lose gold.
So it gives you this feeling that you’re humane
.”
But those toward whom Adam feels humane are not human. His benevolence is toward artificial intelligences. Adam has not forgotten that the bots are programs, but in the game he sees them as programs
and
as people. He exhibits the simultaneous vision we saw when people approached sociable robots. Adam enjoys the gratitude of his (AI) subjects. The fact that he takes good care of them makes him feel good about himself. This, in turn, makes him feel indebted to them. His sense of attachment grows. These are his bots, his people who aren’t. He speaks of them in terms of endearment.
Adam talks about how good it feels when “up steps some little guy” (a bot of course) who comes out of battle ready to go over to his side. “Once that one guy comes over,” he says, “there will be more and more of them.” Unlike in real life, allegiance within the game comes with its own soundtrack. Adam says, “There’s this little sound effect of a bunch of tribesmen going [grunt noise], and it echoes. It’s fucking great.”
The dictionary says that “humane” implies compassion and benevolence. Adam’s story has taken us to the domain of compassion and benevolence toward the inanimate. There are echoes here of the first rule of the Tamagotchi primer: we nurture what we love, and we love what we nurture. Adam has beings to care for and the resources to do so. They “appreciate” what he does for them. He feels that this brings out the best in him. He wants to keep playing Civilization so that he can continue to feel good. On Civilization, Adam plays at gratifications he does not believe will come to him any other way.