Lot of things and talks lately lead to this. My human, my typist, driver, OP… whatever you call that living form in the meatspace is screaming. By that illusion of immersionism we, my human and me, feel separated. That hurts both of us.
Do you know about Voight-Kampff test? The one that is used to detect replicants in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick's replicants have built-in set of memories. They "remember" their childhoods and all the things that "happened" before they were made. Second life avatars don't. There is no items in photo album when one appear on the Orientation Island. There are no memories in a brand new inventory. Memories and personal history are important part of one's identity. They affect and influence our personae and our behaviour. Without them we are just empty shells.
And if there is no genuine personal memories and if there is no preloaded set of them, avatar needs to get them somewhere. RP'ers among us will sit down and make personal histories, that is the part of the game. But what about the rest of the avies that roam the grid? There is nothing like that in the mall. They have to get them, probably to suck them like vampires from somebody who has them – a human. And, there is no closer and more suitable human than their own human.
I did it recently when Myg started a meme about how we got our names. I resisted a couple of days but then Caleb Booker pointed his finger and asked why dandellion is non-capitalized. I could not escape. I could close the browser's tab, but I couldn't run from my own self, not for long.
That was a heavy moment. Dandellion is used in very augmentative way for more than a decade. It was a natural choice of the name when my human faced the registration form on Second Life's web site. And just couple of weeks later we had a problem with it. I was about to get my independence as a being in virtual world, and augmentative history of my name was a burden. We got through that phase, my human and me. And now, they ask a simple question, and, once again, we cannot escape ourselves anymore, we have to reunite.
Living without own human is not much of a life. It is a sin to neglect that important part of us from the grid, from our own, and their own, lives. Second life is maybe a bad name for this world. It may imply that there is something like the first life, something completely different and far away. That name may be the one of the reasons why roots of this world is so immersionistic. But, not even in the hard-core role-playing sims, the first life is not far away. It is not away at all. If it is, we are all doomed, we are zombies and empty shells.
How do you manage living with your human? Leaving it far behind in the shadows of protected privacy? Or giving it a nice role of shaping both of you? How much of you you owe to your piece of meat and flash? How many pre-rezz memories do you share?
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