The Trouble With Second Life Avatars - Jenn Frank's "All the Spaces Between Us" (Part I)

Originally published in Kill Screen Magazine and now serially featured in NWN with new screenshots and an afterword by the author, “All the Spaces Between Us - Struggling to Connect in a Pixelated World” is Jenn Frank’s deeply personal account of exploring Second Life and what she learned about identity, sex, creativity, life, and death along the way. -- Hamlet Au

“Wow, you must really hate yourself.”

That was Scott, typing at me from three city blocks away.

“What,” I said aloud at my desk. “WHAT,” I typed back at Scott.

“Jesus, come on,” he typed back. “Is that really what you think you look like?”

This was three, maybe four years ago, and yes, I thought it resembled me:

I minimized the chat window and returned to my work. My avatar’s butt was a perfect bubble. She had a gut. Her breasts were wide and low on her torso. I picked at her head with the cursor, trying to squish it. I grew her hair out to her shoulders. I prodded at her dimensions until she was shaped, approximately, like a cheese cube.

Scott had enrolled me in Second Life. We were both living on the same street in San Francisco, close to Union Square, so that I could walk in a straight line from my apartment to his. If we were running late to the office in the morning, Scott would ring my doorbell. When we walked to the office together, I always wanted to take the shortest, steepest trip down Grant through Chinatown. Sometimes, if I walked alone to the office, I would get lost. Scott was my glue.

Now he and I were each sitting at our respective desks at home, separated only by a short incline of cement and cable car tracks and a laundromat. We were conducting an experiment.

Pleased with my avatar, I opened the chat window again.

“You’ve made yourself a troll,” Scott had typed.

I thought I looked OK. Then I looked at Scott. It was an uncannily spectacular achievement: Scott looked like Scott. 

“I think I need to find myself a pair of glasses,” I told Scott. Scott was wearing glasses.

***

Default hair, oh my God. That’s how you can instantly pick out a newcomer. And his walk: newcomers wobble gracelessly, like toddlers, because they haven’t learned how to attach animations to their arms and legs. Their skulls clip through their hair in this macabre way because they haven’t yet discovered they can adjust the wigs on their heads. No one in Second Life wants to talk to newbies, anyway. Newbies never last long.

Second Life is a walled no-man’s-land. Its residents endure; visitors, however, soon realize their mistake. Linden Lab has never reported just how many new users log off Second Life forever —most of them within hours, maybe minutes, of registration—but the anecdotal evidence is damning.

“The technology isn’t intuitive,” TIME’s Kristina Dell wrote in 2007, adding, as a parenthetical aside, “I spent my first hour on Second Life wearing both sneakers and high heels because I couldn’t figure out how to discard one pair.”

And while Second Life’s singly inscrutable user interface has been modified since Dell’s experience— forgone is the pie-shaped context menu I learned to loathe—the virtual world’s inaccessibility runs much deeper than shoes.

The problem lies in trying to make yourself look even passably human:

This particular iteration of my Second Life avatar is all the more grotesque, given her "first skin" and, maybe even worse, the ill-fitting wig.

Any well-adjusted person would concede defeat in minutes.

***

I was sitting at my desk in the office the next day, screwing around on the Internet (because that was my job back then, see), when I heard heavy footsteps stop behind me. I spun around in my plastic rolling chair, spooked.

And there was Scott, all spidery limbs as he propped himself against my cubicle’s frame. He held his paper cup of coffee skyward. He was grinning at me.

 “Oh, please don’t say anything,” I begged. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even look at me.” 

I folded my arms across my keyboard and put my face down into them.

“Oh, come on,” he said, “what’s the problem?” 

“I don’t know!” I said into my keyboard. “Leave me alone!”

 “Okey-dokey.” I heard him tromp away.

 “And don’t tell anyone!” I yelled into my forearm.

Here is what had happened: after I’d finished my avatar, Scott had taken me to the Wastelands. The Wastelands region, a barren, post-nuclear dystopia, was my whole reason for touring Second Life.

There’s this entire sim, OK, where a simulation is—how did William Gibson define cyberspace? “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators”—so Scott and I were visiting this user-generated simulation, a place made by not billions but possibly hundreds of Second Life users, all these creators, each with his own tiny patch of land, everybody committed to building burned-out shacks and crooked towers from tin plates and plywood. This aggregated, makeshift adroitness would make any cyberpunk swoon, all these small pieces, loosely joined, culminating in a Mad Max mud flat.

And because these individual aesthetics and minds thrum in concert with one another, they can produce a consummate apiary that is so much more robust and organic and visionary than you could ever find in some movie or video game. A film set or game location is a small-minded thing, just a room in a dollhouse, hamstrung by its one set designer or its one project lead.

So I’d been admiring the Wastelands sim—I had warmed to this work of a hobbyist hive mind, and now I was singing its hymns—when I realized I was dressed all wrong. I mean, really. Who pairs brown roller skates with feathered black angel wings? And jeggings? My avatar was blithely skimming the dunes in the getup of a 15-year-old Slipknot fan.

“Just a second,” I’d typed to Scott. “Don’t go anywhere. I need to take these stupid wings off.”

Then I right-clicked on my avatar’s wings. A context menu, round and shaped like a pie chart, appeared on the screen. I tried to click on the correct wedge of pie.

One stray mouse-click later, my avatar was completely naked. The wings were gone, but I’d managed to vaporize all my clothes along with them, just like that.

“Um,” I typed then. “What happened?”

And then, on the next line,

“Do I look naked to you?”

And then Scott’s reply,

“HA HA HA HA HA.”

I tried to hide myself behind a tree.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Scott typed.

“God! Go away! Stop looking at me!” I fumbled through the onion of menus, feeling around for a shirt, a pair of pants, anything.

The next day at my job, I could not look Scott in the eye.

But I had learned an important lesson. The embarrassing situation can be completely artificial, yet the humiliation is real.

*** 

Philip Rosedale was just 31 years old when he dedicated his career to haptics, which is even now a nascent discipline.

Superficially, haptic technology is everywhere. When a PlayStation controller rumbles in your palms, letting you know that your car has exploded, you are benefiting from 50 years of scientific study. When your phone’s touchscreen throbs beneath your finger, reassuring you that you tapped the thing you think you tapped, that tactile feedback is totally haptic. 

But Philip Rosedale—Philip Linden, to his fans—had more abstruse aspirations. He wanted to create an environment where visitors could tangibly grope abstractions of objects, could yank or grapple or shunt or hoist or prod three dimensional masses that weren’t really there but felt like they were. And so in 1999, with his own earnings, the cocksure young entrepreneur founded Linden Lab.

In the beginning, Linden World was formless and empty. The Grid was exclusively a scientist’s sandbox, an experimental soil. In it, primitive geometric shapes, or prims, could all be trussed together into ever-more intricate structures.

This strange terrain was accessed not by a browser, but through a ponderous chunk of hardware Rosedale called “the Rig”. No mere VR headset, the Rig was Rosedale’s prototype, his proof-of-concept, a huge steel cage fitted with monitors and bridled to its bearer’s shoulders and head. Within the ballasts of these marvelous constraints the user became, corporeally, the pivot of Linden World’s interactive panorama.

But the medium is the message and all that, and the Rig wasn’t viably the moneymaker Linden World could be. So Second Life, like penicillin and Teflon before it, is just some happy accident.

In 2008, I finally found the right pair of eyeglasses. I spent a few hundred Linden Dollars on them. (The Linden economy and its exchange rates fluctuate every day, but the U.S. buck remains strong: my eyeglasses cost less than a real-world two-dollar bill.)

The glasses were pricy, as virtual glamour objects go, because so many options are built in. I can change the frames’ shape, or the stems’ color, even the lenses’ transparency, using a series of nested context menus. I can make the eyeglasses very large or very small. It is like owning a hundred pairs of eyeglasses.

Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life, did not design my avatar’s eyeglasses.

Second Life’s inadvertent meaning—its intent, its point, if you demand one—is that this entire feckless reality, from your face to your shoes to the weeds under your feet to the birds in the sky to the freckles on your nose, is a mod. It is all user-generated, an amalgam of other users’ needs. The cigarette you’re smoking came from one person who is likely, in life, a smoker. Your cropped pinstripe pants were made by another guy, because he decided he needed too-short pinstripe pants and made himself a pair. Your hoverboard was designed by this other guy who owns both mattes of Back to the Future Part II on DVD. Your eyeglasses came from this other other guy who is squinting amaurotically into his monitor at this very second. Your avatar becomes a meaningful hodgepodge of virtual identities lifted from other users. You are not alone.

One day a woman (or seemingly a woman, anyway) sought me out because I had purchased maybe 15 of her skirts. I had blown all of US$5 on her designs, if that. We remained friends for a long time.

In Part II: Sex in Second Life (of course).

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Comments

[Ugh]

Following the recent changes in Second Life content market, term "User-generated" should replaced with "User-uploaded".

[Arcadia Codesmith]

"Any well-adjusted person would concede defeat in minutes."

Oh dear. If they bail out after a few minutes, they haven't adjusted well at all, have they?

Yes, the whole interface and new user experience desperately needs to be farmed out to a team of MMO design veterans to be rebuilt from the ground up.

I'm just quibbling over the terminology, which is rather dependent upon one's point of view.

[Jenn]

Oh! If I may: The essay was first written in 2010 and published in Kill Screen Magazine in 2011.

This is actually something that will come up in the afterword, but yeah, in the 4+ years since, the UI really has been polished. The prefabricated avatars are great, and I feel like a brand-new user, today, right now, would have it waaaay easier, negotiating her first week of SL. I'm almost jealous!

[NeoBokrug Elytis]

@Jenn Do you happen to know where I could purchase the magazine with the original article? I'm having a bit of trouble tracking it down, I figure you may know best.

Also, come back and visit us some time. ;)
A lot has changed, for the better.