The life cycle of a successful massively multiplayer online game, like any breakout offline or single-player game, always follows the same trajectory: It grabs some headlines, eventually gets oversaturated, maybe gets parodied by South Park, and then eventually fades from the mainstream's point of view. Unlike offline or single-player games, online and MMO titles have a built-in shelf life. Sooner or later, they're getting ink in gaming mags or blogs again -- but this time, it's because their servers are getting turned off. And with that, an entire world vanishes for all eternity, when it was there just a moment before. In Abandoned Ware, one gamer becomes a field reporter for these once-huge MMOs, before the inevitable eradicates them forever.
Meeting People Isn't Easy
It's 1:30 AM, early on a Sunday morning. The air is still, and I'm riding a giant beach ball. Well, riding is a bit generous; I sat on the ball, and it tipped over. If I could see under the table that's in front of me, it wouldn't surprise me if wads of virtual gum were stuck there. The only reason I'm here at all is because I've been playing Second Life for a month -- I'm starved for something resembling human interaction from it, and a girl with a tail wearing an altered white flower-girl dress with a pink-bunny doll strapped to it told me to do this. Even though her first language is Spanish, and Second Life is translating her into English, I just know she wants me to ride this ball for some reason. I'm stuck here, and the girl starts using me as a prop. I go lurching up and around the stratosphere before touching back down, when a man comes by to watch. He leaves without saying anything. At this point, I'm bored... and before I can ask her for the fifth time why she wanted me to do this, this little girl gives me $100 in Second Life money and leaves. Great; now I'm a virtual whore. And I'm up way past my bedtime.
In my real life, I go to bed completely unfazed. For in the past few weeks, I've gone from knowing only what The Office had shown me of Second Life, to having countless experiences like the one above. I'm not even sure I actually crossed paths with an actual human, ever. I know Second Life has its virtues; its premise, being a virtual world accessible free of charge to anyone on Earth, is a noble pursuit. Though that's one of the Internet's greatest assets at large -- uniting us all -- Second Life is intent on trying to infuse interactions, hand gestures, and human relationships with streaming technology.
Self-proclaimed "Internet superstar" singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton held a free in-game concert in 2006. Last year, the Chemistry Central Journal published a paper weighing "the benefits of the social networking affordances of Second Life for both chemists and chemistry students." Basically, can it be used to collaborate on and coordinate scientific research? They really didn't need to bother writing that paper -- of course it can.
But, like the Internet's capabilities at large, Second Life's output is bent to what consenting and extremely horny adults want. For a nominal fee a month, you're told upon registering for Second Life that you can gain access to the adult continent, Zindra. I have no idea what happens in Zindra, but I can tell you that within minutes of firing up my free account, I saw walls plastered with images of tattooed, pierced dongs and boobs. Without even trying to.
Spend any amount of time in Second Life, though, and it's to be expected. Although the game is painted as a virtual world, it's basically a picture-in-picture microcosm of the Internet at large -- more specifically, the worst parts about the Internet. It's a wasteland of pop-ups, unwanted messages from people you don't know, and chat-room bullies who seek only to make you their puppet. No offense is intended to the people using Second Life who don't match this description, but in four weeks, I only met people matching this description. The sole exclusion to this was a rowdy pack of girls of indeterminate age shouting at their entourage with their microphones; an anthropomorphic teddy bear with a digitally enhanced high-pitched voice got the worst of their abuse. I wish I had my tape recorder handy for the following exchange so you could hear it, but, verbatim, this is what I heard.
"I know you guys are fucking bored on a Saturday night," says one woman, before she has an epiphany. She turns to the bear and says, "Maybe you should eat my vagina."
"Right now?" He asks. "OK, let's go."
She laughs and says, "OK, put your little bear face in my vagina.
If I had high hopes for Second Life, I would've been depressed at this exchange. Instead, I just laughed and took a picture -- and can hear two guys in the background, talking about how one of them is having a cancer-suffering friend moved to the ICU. When my camera goes off, everyone around me calls me a loser.
The next morning, I get up early and sign back on, desperate for signs of sane life. I make my way through a forest and meet a girl named Cissy, who says she just joined Second Life. I ask her what made her join, as I've asked everyone I've come across. And like everyone else, she doesn't offer much in the way of a concrete answer. "I don't know," she offers. She's stopped in her tracks and seems to want to talk. She says she's from England, but offers no other knowledge of the details of her life. I sigh, stare out my window, and concoct one last Hail Mary pass in at least having small talk on Second Life: I ask her what her favorite food is. Several minutes pass, and she offers, simply, "idk." I barely have time to fathom how someone doesn't even know what their favorite food is, when I get an unsolicited invitation from some random stranger to come check out a nude beach.
If Second Life is meant to be a superior parallel universe, a chance to completely reinvent yourself and meet anyone -- irrelevant of who and where you really are -- I certainly didn't see any evidence of that. While I liked being granted the ability to fly, all I ever saw were people whose avatars were left in an endless and unattended dancing loop. It's a playground without consequences or people to push you on the swing. It's a chat room where nobody has anything to say... and when they do, you have to shout over someone's blaring Mudvayne MP3s and contend with IM-trivia contests about The Nanny. Are our first lives really that bad that we need a second one filled with lifeless dancing robots that don't acknowledge our existence?
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer based in Chicago (not the suburbs). He's written for Adult Swim, Comedy Central, Wired, and the family newsletter.
