Hiding from One World While Exploring Another: Jenn Frank's "All the Spaces Between Us" (Part 3)

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. In Part 1, she wrote about the difficult of creating a new identity in-world;, in Part II, she explored the challenges of avatar sex with a real world lover -- Hamlet Au

Second Life isn’t Sex Life, no; it isn’t all orgies and sex workers. I have kept myself occupied with plenty of other activities, thanks.

 I have lost innumerable scavenger hunts.

I have camped at a simulated bonfire, listening to actual 1950s radio serials.

I have jammed myself into the bleachers of a crowded auditorium to watch celebrity game designer Raph Koster speak live from Georgia Tech.

I have dawdled in a Lovecraftian seaside village, have danced at a Prohibition-era-themed bar, have gone scuba diving in an ocean modeled after a pirate’s cove.

I have meticulously created a rollerskating airship pilot character for a steampunk MMO.

Certainly I have hoverboarded through a skate park.

I have worn a powdered wig to visit the Palace of Versailles. I have disguised myself in an Ultraman costume expressly to annoy patrons of the virtual Gion district. I have holstered guns beneath my bustle and canvassed the Old West.

I have complimented another avatar’s dress (“Thank you,” she replied, “it’s an Ivalde”).

 Not only have I visited every house of horrors, I have toured that one haunted house specially designed to promote the 2007 Spanish horror movie REC. It’s provisional in glitchy ways, but it deliberately appropriates those shifting, tilting camera angles a scary Japanese video game would use.

I’ve even ridden a Ferris wheel with a teenaged boy. The carriage was so enormous, we were able to sit at opposite ends. If it had been a real carriage on a real Ferris wheel, we would have really slipped out, really splattered onto the planks of a real boardwalk.

Sitting on any virtual barstool anywhere, my toes cannot touch the floor. My hands clip the sides of pinball machines, my arms too short, evidently, to reach the flipper-buttons. And in most haunted houses, where I’d expect narrow tunnels and low ceilings and claustrophobic unease, the architecture is, instead, cavernous. Hallways yawn, almost as wide as they are long. Lofted ceilings vanish, stretching high above Second Life’s draw distance. Shopping malls are the same way. So are many homes. Doorways gape. Every window is a picture window. It’s easy to topple out from under balcony railings. Sofas seat eight. Lampposts illuminate the cosmos. Streets are eight lanes wide. Even the Chryslers are—to borrow a song lyric—as big as whales.

All this extra space for movement can be unnerving, perhaps scary. Awesome bitmapped expanses divide every home, tree, and davenport, so that I have to teleport, fly, or sprint to get anywhere in good time.

Maybe part of the trouble is, steering an avatar is more cumbersome than it looks. But here is the rest of the problem: my avatar is, in true-to-life measurements, 5’4”, or 1.63 meters. This is a white lie, of course, but it’s a real-world lie that my state-issued driver’s license will substantiate. In my virtual life, I like to uphold certain aesthetic principles about shortness and fatness, and these stalwart ethics are enough to get me excommunicated from many Second Life nightclubs.

I feel like a Lilliputian intruder because I am a Lilliputian intruder. I am a tiny troll. The average Second Life avatar’s height hovers somewhere between seven and eight feet.

***

I zipped my blue hooded sweatshirt and sat down. I opened my laptop computer.

“Oh, no. No.” That was Zachary from across the living room. “No. You aren’t.”

“Huh?” I looked at him. The login window filled my laptop’s screen.

Zachary was on my couch, craning his whole body over the back of it, looking at me. He was wearing my headset. He’d been online talking to friends, but now his microphone was muted. “You’re doing it. You’re doing Second Life.”

How did he even know that?

Oh. The sweatshirt. 

“What about it,” I said to him. “I have friends here. You go right ahead onto Halo, you visit your friends there.”

Zachary looked mad. I could understand it, in a way. Hadn’t I moved back into my apartment in San Francisco? Hadn’t everything turned out fine? Why did I continue to visit Second Life? Couldn’t I ring a friend instead?

He repositioned himself and again faced the TV, but he was stewing.

I rolled my eyes and logged into Lloyd.

Lloyd is probably the only region in Second Life where its residents—girls, mostly—dress like Vice Magazine’s Do’s and Don’ts. They buy and sell bruises, barf stains, crude hand gestures, short-shorts, and hamburgers.

I watched myself render. When you first reenter the Grid, you are a walking, talking fog of particles, fundamentally indeterminate and waiting to be realized. The landscape, too, starts out murkily, competing with itself to whet its pixels into anything remarkable. Slowly, all things jag into focus, one at a time.

“You guys! My boyfriend’s playing Halo!” my cloud typed to no one at all.

“Oh, no,” all the women in Lloyd replied.

 Across the living room, Zachary grunted.

The worst part of it was, he knew the truth. The truth filled all the spaces between us.

That summer, I had been diagnosed with agoraphobia.

 

Finally, finally-finally diagnosed with onerous, paralyzing go away don’t look at me! Stop looking at me! Can’t go out, doesn’t phone, won’t write I’m too ashamed! Two hours’ pacing before making it to the front door, always lost, everyone can tell something is wrong with me, hiding on the toilet in a public stall, microwavable mail-order diet food, have another drink, honey, I’m drowning, I’m dead, no future, I’m finished. And he knew it all along! I had metastasized into an unremitting social cripple, and Zachary knew it. 

He knew why I was zipped up in my blue hooded sweatshirt, hiding in Second Life. He knew, he knew.

Zachary was my last safe person. If he vanished, I vanished, too.

He was tired.

In the middle of our sixth year of dating, I left him.

Next: Inside the noiseless dream vacuum.

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[Ugh]

Lesson is: SL wrecks shit.

[Mikyp]

Love it, rite MOAR soon.