Miss Ophelia's Metaverse Manners: Balancing Your Real and Virtual Families, and Other Holiday Headaches

Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's take on etiquette and ethics in virtual spaces

This week I'm answering four festive questions, just in time for the holidays:

My SL family wants me to spend time with them on Christmas day, but I think I should be with my RL family. What should I do?

- Home-Position for the Holidays

What you should do really depends on how close your are with your SL family. While I know some people might balk at the idea of spending precious holiday time with a "pretend family", relationships developed over the Internet are increasingly being recognized as real relationships. And why not? The bond between us is more mental than physical, so it makes sense that tangible relationships can develop in worlds completely free of physical presence. You should feel free to spend the holidays with friends and family whether they're on or offline. Consider very carefully who you're closest to, and the impact those relationships have on your life. Just like juggling different sides of your family, those that you're closest to should take priority, but for the other sides of the family, you can set up a time to all get together, like the day before or after Christmas. Even if you don't feel as close to your SL family as that, getting together on the 24th or the 26th is a good compromise that should be able to keep everyone happy without cutting into the festivities.

Keep reading for three more Christmas quandaries!

Hey Iris, I was wondering, I have someone who spams me with SL greeting cards every holiday. I usually ignore them but should I be sending her anything in return?

- Carded to Death

If she's so consistently enthusiastic about sending the cards, it doesn't seem likely that she's expecting anything in return. That doesn't mean you should ignore them, either. It's a good idea to say thank you, to at least show her that you both received the card and appreciate the sentiment. If she is quite literally spamming you with cards, sending multiple cards for the same holiday, it's fair to ask her to consolidate all those cards into one. Be sure to tell her that you do enjoy receiving the cards, and that you really like that she wants to share them with you, but that you find the volume can be overwhelming.

I want to get a gift for one of my friends, but he's so unbelievably picky about everything. Is it really so bad to give gift cards instead?

-Anonymous

Giving a gift card is better than just giving someone Linden Dollars -- the real problem is seeming like you have no idea what your friend would want. A gift should demonstrate how well you know someone and their tastes, and if your friend's tastes are so difficult to pin down, then there's no shame in giving him a gift card to a shop that you know he likes. Sometimes, knowing the particular store someone loves is just as good as knowing what they would want from that store. While it's pretty common to feel guilty about this, there's really no shame in it, especially since it's so hard to tell what someone may already have buried in their inventory, and there's no such thing as a gift receipt in SL!

If you find that you still feel a little guilty about giving him a gift card, package it with something sweet and simple and transferrable, like a cute piece of home decor clutter-- if nothing else, he'll appreciate the sentiment, and you'll feel more at ease with your gift!

I always dread Christmas because my family is so nosy. What's the best way to avoid discussing my current job (in Second Life) with them? I know they won't get it.

- Keeping a SLecret

This is a position I'm sure a lot of SLers are in, whether they can call SL their job or not. I'm not an advocate of lying to friends and family, and I myself tend to proselytize about virtual worlds whenever the platform is provided, but I'll admit that there are some situations where it's perfectly reasonable to want a degree of privacy. There are ways that you can make what you do in SL seem more mainstream without going into too much detail. If you're a designer, you can always describe what you do as creating game or software models. If you're a builder, consider explaining it as creating digital architectural and/or landscape models. These are both things that some older family members might struggle with, but they're still fairly non-threatening. For other metaverse jobs, try to think of what your job would be called if you were doing it completely in person, in the real world, and use that as the starting point for your explanation.

Do you have your own virtual world etiquette quandary? Email me at ophelia.iris [at] gmail [dot] com, or submit anonymously to the Metaverse Manners Formspring.  Be sure to include a pseudonym (i.e. "WTF from the Welcome Area") so you know when I'm addressing your query!

Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Seymore]

I just received a gift in the mail from an SL friend, granted I've known this person before SL existed, but still I've never met him. Rereading what I just typed makes me either sound girl or gay. Oh well. I'm not either.

Anyway, the picture at the top of this article is excellent. I'm on a two year old macbook and have been since I first logged on to SL. I know the graphics are crap on this thing but are those the level graphics under normal use I could expect from a newer system? If so. Wow.

[Iris Ophelia]

Coincidentally, I took that pic on my own 2 year old MacBook, Seymore! Moving isn't as smooth as butter with shadows enabled, but good enough for a few snapshots.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Exactly. I up the graphics to make snapshots and move around with less beauty to look at. Especially when flying or driving, and i do that a lot, the info comes way too fast to be processed properly if you don't set the standards a bit lower.

[Fogwoman Gray]

Have to chuckle a bit about the question of explaining SL to friends and family. I have discovered if you wax lyrical about 3D graphics, content creation, social networking and spend some time describing the intricacies of a really good graphics card - eyes begin to glaze in about 1 minute and nobody will voluntarily ask you about your virtual life again!

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

What Fogwoman said. Nearly everyone I know under 70 and still lucky enough to have a roof over his or her head uses a computer. But there are "users" and "geeks," and most of us in SL are the latter.

Most academics are geeks, but even their eyes glaze over quickly because SL enjoys near-zero respect among non-SL colleagues and OpenSim is hard to explain. I found that for colleagues it's a lot easier to say "my research focuses on online communities and gaming" and that "I'm making a 3D simulation of Poe's House of Usher as a reading-lab for my classes."

Happy Holidays all.

[Yuri Xootfly]

Just a different angle on the SL job question/answer.... There are some SL jobs that either don't exist in RL or have an entirely different meaning. I am possibly the only SL escort I know whose parents are aware of her SL work. I compared it to phone sex. They don't love it, but I'm glad I can be honest with them.

If you're, oh, for instance... a slave auctioneer in SL? You'd probably have an even tougher time.

If you don't make your RL living on your SL work, there may be no reason to bring it up at all. But if you do, or you feel like you need to explain why you spend so much time in-world, I kinda like the idea of taking the geek angle and seeing how quickly they change the subject. :)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I have to dissent. If you have a real world spouse and/or children, NEVER EVER EVER spend one SECOND of time online on a holiday that you could spend with them.

It doesn't matter if your kids drive you nuts and things with your partner are strained and the guy you've been hanging out with online makes you feel like a million bucks.

There is no clearer or crueler message to send to your family than the message that strangers they see only as text and pixels on a screen are more important than they are.

Real friends understand that real life has priority. And anybody who wants to compete with your real life is not your friend at all.