Alt

Short for: alternative account, a second name under which to log into Second Life.

I suspect that most people who embody strongly in SL have alts: that the experience of embodying in this particular shape/gender/species would make them curious about how it would feel to embody in a different one. That is how Wol came to be, and I can confirm that the embodiment is very different.

(There are of course other reasons too: builders and store-owners and famous people often use an alt as a stealth account for times when they want to be in-world without interruption; people with intensely busy social lives have alts as a way to get around the 25-group limit; invested roleplayers and the sexually adventurous use alts to segregate their "fun" persona from the habits and conventions of their "normal" identities.)

A successful alt is a minority personality, the virtual incarnation of a piece of yourself which doesn't get expressed in your usual lives. Wol has abilities and attributes that aren't easily available to the rest of my identities, and we are trying with some success to learn from her.

Given this, it's not really surprising that alts start as "just a name" but develop into distinctive personalities who are in meaningful ways not your usual "you." This has been confirmed nearly unanimously by people I've spoken to about their alts.

Alts generate a great deal of unhappiness in people who don't have one: they are felt to be deceptive or fraudulent. There is an overlap between the fear of alts and the fear of "false genders" i.e. that the attractive female you just met is really your gaming buddy Fred in disguise. (Actually it occurs to me that the word "disguise" is a very revealing one in this context. To me alts are not disguises, they are something different. When Wol wears silks and a mask, that is her-wearing-a-disguise; when her typist logs in as an alt, that is not her: the alt is a different person. To be discussed.)

Identity

It is interesting and highly significant that almost everyone who blogs about SL or posts photos from SL on Flickr, does so in their avatar's name. [More later, it's 3:30am and I am happy but exhausted after seeing Grace McDunnough perform at SL Pride.]

This is of course simplistic and reductivist, and intentionally so. These posts are not meant to be fair and balanced essays to be delivered de haut en bas, I am gathering talking points for a workshop. However, the observation stands — with one qualification: it depends on the speaker's relationship to their audience.

When [Botgirl|Grace|Dusan|whomever] blogs about SL-ness and identity, they are by and large speaking as one of us, peer to peer, within a community and a shared culture. They can assume that we will to a large extent share their experience (by being inworld) and interests (by being curious enough to be reading their blog) — though this does not mean that we necessarily share their values (cough Prokofy Neva cough).

When they talk to "outsiders," they often do so in their RL names, for example Hamlet Au's New World Notes lists both of his identities. [more later]

Anonymity

Tabitha Eichel made a great long comment on the Linden's drive to link our SL and RL identities, which was republished by Hamlet Au on his New World Notes blog. Here's the heart of the matter:

Why is it so hard for some people to believe that a large portion of the Second Life community is there for escapism and not to interact with real identities? This escape was what made Second Life desirable for many people. Not everyone is beautiful, popular, confident or whatever in the real world. There are many difficulties interacting with real people, that were negated in Second Life. It didn't matter what you looked like or where you were from. That made Second Life great for us.

But now, just like in real life, the beautiful, confident, fully-abled, popular people are calling the shots.

Quite right*, and it's why the Lindens are absolutely wrong to force this integration. Read the rest here.

I'm not quite as happy with the word "anonymity" though, because I think that our identities in SL are not truly anonymous but rather pseudonymous: I don't know the RL name of the person behind the SL avatar "Agatha Macbeth," but after talking to her for half a year, I feel that I know that person quite well.

We are not blank pages. We have identities in SL, we have reputations and histories and connections here. I'll expand on this idea later.

* I'm a bit uncomfortable with "escapism," but that may be just a question of vocabulary.

Augmentationism

Dusan Writer wrote a really interesting piece about the direction that the Lindens seem to be taking SL: integrating it into our offworld-but-still-digital real lives. I find this direction really worrying, because I do not wish to have my lives commingled in this way. There are some people offworld whom I tell about my time in SL, just as there are some people inworld who have also met my meat avatar, but that's as far as it goes. Right now, I control who knows what about me, and I wish it to stay that way. The Lindens' new plan feels like it will take that out of my hands.

Augmentationism is one of a set of words describing people's opinions (or opinion-driven actions) about what SL is for. Augmentationists believe that so-called real life is the only valid reality, that anything that happens outside of RL cannot possibly be other than a more-or-less meretricious form of entertainment. Hence they believe that SL exists to enrich and enhance our offworld lives. They believe that SL has no separate existence, no culture of its own, and no community.

I suppose there's no reason why an augmentationist could not have a differently-gendered avatar or be another species, but those whom I have met tend to believe that these things are false, morally wrong. Some even reproduce their RL appearance in their avatar (though these too are often suspiciously tall and fit and beautiful).

(The opposite of augmentationism is immersionism, but that's a subject for another day.)

Tutorials

There should be many of them. Yes.

Windlight
Graphics preferences
Animations
AO
Appearance editor
Building
Textures

Actually, it's probably not a good idea to make a list of topics, let us rather let them arise as needed.

What is it that I remember, when I remember SL

I was thinking about memory, about the Me-component of my memories, about how my body is part of many memories: its position, actions, movements, experiences. That made me realize one of the defining effects of embodiment in SL.

When I remember communicating with a fellow resident of SL — I'm deliberately framing this awkwardly, all will be revealed — I do not remember what my RL body did i.e. sitting in my home office with a typewriter* under my fingertips and a cup of tea on the desk, looking at a screen.

I remember being in SL, not my home office: I remember sitting together at the Playgoda, or dancing together at Fracture, or trying on clothes at AVid, or lying in hammocks on the beach at whatever that place was called.

I remember talking, not typing: I remember the words we spoke and the feelings that they brought forth.

I remember the outfit I wore in SL, rather than my RL sweater and slippers.

I remember the glass of red wine I held in SL, rather than the cup of tea on my desk.

Second Life is a place in its own right. It's neither here by me nor over there where you are, but in some neutral zone at right angles to the RL distance between us. In that place, there is no separating distance and no timezones**. This is another distinction between SL and many, perhaps most, "games:" no matter how many hours I spent playing the Sims or Civilization IV or Blades of Avernum and the like, they never became places that I could be in.

The key is immersion, and in my experience flat games on a screen don't offer that.

Actually, that reminds me that we could try to get some WoW players to talk to us. That would indicate whether the place-ness of SL is specific to it or perhaps a more general attribute of MMOWs.


* Sic, what a marvellous slip that is. I wonder when I last used a true typewriter? Probably when I left college in 1984. One of the first programs I wrote was a typewriter emulator, which sent keystrokes directly to a dot-matrix printer. Such were the joys.

** Time itself does still exist, remind me to talk about lag.

Game

1. Second Life is a game, according to Linden Labs, because that places it in the category of "online entertainment" for taxation and general legal purposes.

2. Second Life is not a game, according to almost everyone who visits it regularly. I have never heard a SL resident refer to it as a game or an entertainment.

Discuss.

Gender

"OMG most of the women avs in SL are males in RL."

For starters, that is not true, at least not everywhere. Almost all of the women who attend Kira and Play as Being are also female in RL, for example — and they are a third to half of the attendees at most events.

But the larger question is, why does it matter? Why do people not say "OMG did you know that almost all of the lions in SL are human in RL?"

Soul

"For me the avatar is the 'physical' embodiment of the mind that controls it. The avatar is in this sense a more acccurate portrayal of one's soul than is the arbitrary real-life body."
Darwin Mizser

Helpfulness

Among the most striking features of SL sociability is the widespread culture of helpfulness that obtains here. Most people are very generous with time and information, and will go out of their way to assist others. Newbies are encouraged in SL to an extent that is virtually unheard-of on the Internet. In all other online togethernesses that I have experienced, newcomers are assumed to be socially inferior and are often told so explicitly: "you're new here, sit down and shut up" or "aw hell, another fucking n00b."

Where does this come from? Can it last?