I have an account on Second Life, but don’t play as much as I used to. I originally got the account to research an idea for a science fiction novel involving virtual reality. Second Life is odd, and in many ways not a classic game in the sense that there are no hard-and-fast measures of who wins and who loses. Some call it a glorified chat room, and it is that and more. I’ve been a party guy, a club owner, a bouncer, a toy manufacturer, and a t-shirt designer in SL. Mostly I’ve been social and enjoyed interacting with others in a world that is almost completely of the denizen’s making. But, for the most part it is a chat room and the worst elements of high-school level drama come out in SL combined with the telepathy like capability of passing notes in real time that cannot be intercepted (in the form of private chat messages and group tells).
I’ve seen a LOT of weird stuff in SL and a lot of jaw dropping drama. But, the best to date did not happen to me.
A real life friend of mine recently discovered SL independently of me. I showed her the ropes a bit, but she has been way more active than me of late. She’s made some friends online. One of them she began a dating romance with. She entered into the situation cautiously as this other girl had recently lost her SL partner. Partnering is the SL term for marriage. And, when I say lost I do not mean they broke up. This woman’s partner had been killed in a car accident, and the partner’s mother had logged onto the partner’s account to let her online friends know.
Pretty heavy stuff.
My RL friend is a sensitive soul and treated the whole matter with a great deal of respect. She opened herself to this other person, and consoled her while they explored their new relationship. Meanwhile the deceased partner’s online friends erected memorials and went about the grieving process.
Then the ball dropped. The partner came back from the dead. In a move that showcases the limitations of being mired in reality that day time soap operas must labor under, the partner returned. She sheepishly explained that she had pretended to be her mother logging on because she thought that faking her death would make ending her partnership easier. She claimed that she had been feeling like she was spending too much time online and needed to cut back. Apparently, she rethought her decision and decided to return, realizing she missed her online community. Only through the mask of online assumed identities could such a thing have been so convincingly pulled off.
And, the best part? All of this ex-corpse’s friends were ok with it. And, the girl my RL friend is involved with has forgiven the recently un-deceased and gone back to being her partner.
All of this occured over the space of days. Seriously folks, you can’t write material like that. It takes truly magnificent imaturity to put that level of mess together.
The moral of the story? I’m not sure. But, it certainly does highlight nicely some of the ways that SL is NOT RL!
