Is life in a virtual world virtually worthless?

Joined the VTOR bloggers at TD Goodliffe’s place to listen to the weekly broadcast by TDavid and his wife Kara. It was an interesting experience, although it became a bit frustrating in one or two places, when things were said that I disagreed with and wanted to debate, and there was a lag between what was said in the broadcast and TD noticing that Johnny and I had been posting our comments in world. For example: “it’s Prok, not Prof. Prok! Prok!”

Kara gave her opinion that online time spent in Runescape and SL was “worthless”, a point I would dearly have loved to debate. Don’t get me wrong, I think SL needs to be a first hand experience to make sense, and I don’t think that any amount of secondhand experience arguing the case would actually persuade someone. But Kara said that if Second Life shut down tomorrow, the time that had been spent there would be so much wasted time, and I just don’t believe that to be true.

SL is an experience like any other, we are never unchanged by our experiences. People who have entered online worlds and spent time in them often find that they have an experience which is beyond space and time, bringing them a feeling that they have had the experience of being in the same place as a group of people who are physically all over the world.

I have actually given up on explaining what Second Life gives to me, to people who don’t have experience of virtual worlds. There ought to be a name for that … Virtual Virgins? Thing is, I don’t think anything anyone said to me would have prepared me for what I found in Second Life. I found community, challenge, creativity and a lot of other things beginning with c. I have learned more about myself in three years in Second Life that a lifetime of life in the real world … and the things I have learned will stay with me, and have informed my real life already.

In the real world, you may be accepted or rejected because of the way you look. That may happen in the virtual world too, but there you will look the way you want to look. You can change your sex, species and anything about your physical appearance you wish, and therefore can observe the differences in how people relate to you.

In the real world you may be confined to your house by illness, agoraphobia or fear of mugging … in the virtual world you need fear nothing except possibly stumbling over pornography or disturbing ideas. Generally though, you can find what you want to find and ignore the things with which you’d rather not come into contact.

In the real world, people are friends with others for all sorts of reasons. You may have no choice but to see boring Bertha because you like to stop off at the local pub, or you may be saddled with gossiping Gwen, because she invites herself in for coffee. You may have to have dinner with the boss, or lunch with the in-laws and spend a considerable amount of time being nice to people with whom you have nothing in common.

In the virtual world, you can choose to have a lot of friends, close friends or no friends at all. You can be solitary, gregarious, or any combination of the two that suits you. Maybe for the first time in your life, you can find out which does suit you, without worrying that people will be offended, or never invite you for the weekend, or cut you out of their will.

For a while, for a lot of people, they are unbalanced by the virtual world. No matter how much they try to be the same in the virtual space as they are in real life, it is a culture shock which tends to tip you off balance. Many people find it hard to avoid the feeling that the world allows them access to people’s thoughts and minds, in a way that one doesn’t achieve in chat rooms and message boards. I do believe that is an illusion and that in fact people are generally quite as guarded after the first few months as they are in real life. But initially many people will be very open about their lives, thoughts, hopes and dreams.

Nearly everyone who comes to Second Life realises that there is a huge amount of creativity involved in the world. Nearly everyone is creating something, whether building, scripting, texturing, eventing. People look for their niche in the world, and some people are lucky enough to discover something new which not only gives them pleasure and enjoyable activity, but also an income.

Some people learn skills they haven’t had before… everyone learns something, I think, if they spend any amount of time in a virtual world. You have to learn new skills simply to walk, talk and interact with the world, but more than this, you learn in a way which is individual to you things which are individual to you.

If Second Life closed tomorrow, there would initially be a terrible hole in my life, but I can honestly say, hand on heart, that the things I have learned there have enriched my life and will continue to do so, even if I never log on to another computer again.

As for Runescape, some academics at Brunel University, which is close to my home, set out to discover if it was true, as some parents feared, that the game was having a detrimental effect on the socialisation of the children who played it. Their conclusion was that there were a lot of positive benefits to the game. You can read their conclusions here.