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?
A long, long reply got eaten –
I copied it, but accidentally overwrote it when I went to open the comment form in another browser to try again.
Out of time, will try to reply tonight…
I feel terrible everytime that happens. I think I fixed that, two plugins were fighting around comments form, so they are both out. I hope everything will be ok now.
Both of us are pretty similar… at first my SL self was shaped after my RL one, but with time it evolved by itself (mostly in a naugthy, forward way).
Of course, I think in my RL self whould evolve in the same way if exposed to the same kind of enviroment, and free from RL responsabilities, but maybe not.
Anyway, sigh, the meatspace is so exigent (family, sleep, work… :-p).
dandellion – I’m *really* looking forward to your thoughts on the Identity Verification announcement. It’s got me really upset…
hey! it worked!!! :D
Great post and some fascinating ideas here. My avatar started out as being just myself, or at least as close as I could get to the way I look in RL (although the haircut was a few years out of date). Then one day I found a horse avatar and because my RL nickname has been “horseboy” since year dot, I bought it and wore it for a joke. That joke became a permanent fixture – I never intended to be a furry but it stuck, and I’ve not been back to human more than once in a whole year (and that once was only because the lag was so bad I couldn’t teleport with attachments on). Despite the appearance of a big blue horse though, my avatar isn’t really a seperate character or personality from myself. He IS me, just me wearing a funny costume. My personality, interests, even my work, mirrors my real life, so there isn’t really any separation between myself and my avatar. So I haven’t needed to create an elaborate history for my avatar because my avatar’s history and memories are exactly the same as mine.
I have been tempted to run an alt though, a pure roleplaying character with a totally different background, but I never really have the time, and now with all the recent changes happenning in SL, I don’t even know if I’m going to be staying at all.
I guess most of us starts wiith an attempt to recreate RL human as an avatar. It is a new world and most of us are not aware of the posibilities when we come. And sure, in those hard days when we are trying to get into the world (not to mention interface) it is easier to stick with the look that is familliar.
Role-playing character is completely other story. Role playing takes hell lot of time. It is not just creating a character and its history, it is knowing the history of the sim, many ppl and their histories there, following the things that happens there….
I am currently testing the hypothesis that our so-called “RL” selves are the replicants, so to speak, and that our avatars are a downgraded version of our real selves. That is, I believe that a real, material “second life” exists in which we move about, change appearance, and create matter from thin air. I believe this world has existed for millennia — and that our avatars are as old as this or older. I suspect that some four years ago, an unknown force or entity wiped out or hid our memories and has caused us to believe in the delusion of RL.
Thus, to answer your question, I have attempted through arcane meditative practices, to detach myself from the illusion of my meatself — so that I might glimpse a flash of some lost avatarain memory: rainclouds over Topgol, laughter in a crowded room, the soft ear of a kitten.
Esteban, keep us updated of your wanderings through the lost memories. I could join your sect :)