Saint Patrick’s weekend was a blast, events were great and the amount of people! For the parade, I think it averaged out at 90 Ava’s where I was hosting on O’Connell’s Bridge. And the lag wasn’t as bad as I thought it would have been. The floats were excellent, a lot of work had gone into them, and the weekend even got a mention on the BBC website which is a huge boost for Dublin in SL.
On a more sombre note, I have been doing some reading into SL relationships. There was a story in the paper yesterday entitled “Second Life destroyed my Family”. Basically, there are people out there who are taking their SL relationships out of SL and into the RL. In this particular story, the man had met another ava in SL, struck up a partnership and eventually got so taken up into the fantasy of it that he flew across the world to meet her in RL, leaving his wife and child behind. If you type in the words “Second Life Partnership” into Google, up comes a multitude of stories of Second Life Widowers or Widows, people who have been left out of RL time with their other half’s because of SL.
Now, I have a theory about this. I talk to a great variety of people in my SL travels, and a lot of people are like me, I go onto SL to provide a distraction when my RL gets on top of me. I have many problems in RL and SL gives me a release. However, if it started to affect my RL relationship with R in the way that these people have left it, I know I would have to cut away from it completely (yes, cold turkey, imagine the pain). Second Life Ava’s and even LL themselves have been sued in RL for the breakup of RL partners, for the emotional trauma SL can inflict on someone and for all sorts of other stuff, and if thats the way people feel they need to go then they should.
But it is a game of sorts, there may not be a start middle and end to SL, but it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all of RL too…
Which brings me onto another point.. Everyone knows about the underlying Sex Trade of SL, you cant go many places without seeing attachable penis’ and what not, even a fairly innocent search will bring up a multitude of “Free Sex” places… However, there is a darker side to it, a lot of places offer Rape, Violence, Murder and some even offer Pedophilia fantasies. Now, you can argue that its probably better for people with these tendencies to keep them within the Virtual World as they are less likely to spill out into the RL… but, I don’t think that any such fantasy like that can be kept solely to the fantasy SL, people that have those urges may have them fulfilled for a short while by SL, but what happens when the urge gets greater and they need more?
There doesn’t seem to be any sort of legislation on SL to prevent these RPG sims from being operational. I just hope that some day SL doesn’t get sued by a victim or a victims family for allowing the predator to live out his fantasy first on SL… I predict there will be some nasty repercussions from this. I know LL work to try and keep Adults away from the Teen Life pages, and vice versa, but can they really stop either lying about their age to gain access to either SL? If they had to make the Age Verification by way of a passport of driving license compulsory instead of an optional part of the Sign Up process hopefully that will keep each age group to each world.
I’m not saying cut out the RP aspect of SL completely, I’m just wondering why, if these things are illegal or a crime in the RL they are allowed to be committed freely in the SL…
More on this another time
Re: Relationships – there’s a lot of fuzzy ground here, where there’s a lot of ambiguity. Some people think of SL as a computer game, others think of it as a communications medium, others somewhere between a roleplaying game like D&D & a communications medium. It all depends where you’re coming from. Saying “SL destroyed my family” is bullshit & just an attempt to shift the blame – any time a new medium comes out it gets demonised. Witness VHS in the ’80’s with all the “Video Nasty” headlines it generated, then it was all “Internet porn” this & “Internet porn” that. This is just an extension of that. The essential problem with relationships in SL as with RL is where people don’t communicate their needs & boundaries effectively. Of course, as with war, the moment the battle begins, the plan is obsolete – things change dynamically, but essentially any time you engage in communication with another person you engage in some kind of relationship with them, be it one of friends, lovers, employer & employee, colleagues, customer & vendor, etc, etc. When you get a situation in Sl or in Rl where one person wants more in the relationship than the other, you have a problem. When you have one person ascribing more importance to a relationship than the other, you have a problem. In my case, the other party swore they loved me. I’d been with her over 18 months, going on 2 years, and we’d had what I’d thought was a passionate, wonderful relationship. Turns out she didn’t think it was like that (or maybe she changed her mind, as her change of heart came rapidly following a change of medication), but whatever, she left me. If I’d known what the situation was earlier, I would have been spared much heartbreak – I could have limited my commitment to her & carried on with a fairly lightweight, shallow kind of thing, but I was operating only with what she told me, essentially flying blind with faulty instruments, and I crashed badly. I don’t blame SL for this at all – I blame myself for not being more inquisitive, and I blame her for serving me up whatever bullshit she thought I wanted to hear. That won’t happen again.
As regards roleplaying things in SL that are illegal in RL, people already do this when they play pretty much any computer game. Killing is illegal. You play Quake3D or Unreal Tournament or WoW, you’re killing people & creatures with gay abandon. The difference in SL is that whatever you do is done with consent. On th Adult grid, you’re supposed to be 18+, and there are, weird as it may seem, people who get off on all kinds of things. As long as they’re not harming anyone, surely that’s ok? What’s wrong with being a vampire or a werewolf? If you started behaving like a RL wolf in RL, you’d get locked up as a nutter, but it’s something you can do in SL perfectly safely. That’s the thing – it’s safe, at least in comparison to RL. You tie someone up & beat them with a whip, they’re not really tied – they can get out at any time – and you’re not really hurting them – it’s just pixels. But you can connect with people who want to do whatever you’re into.
Also, SL’s a place where the ugly can be beautiful, where the disabled can run, jump & fly, and the cripplingly shy & lonely can come out of themselves & be a star. It’s all safe – unless they take it to RL. In my case I was so devastated by losing my SL gf that I was prepared to do anything to get back what I’d lost, I’d have said & done anything. You do these things in the heat of the moment, when you’re depressed & coming off meds suddenly, trying to preserve what you feel slipping away from you. It’s an act of desperation, and an act of despair. I’m back in my right mind now. Never again.