Avatars fulfill our fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else. Adult users return to childhood, by definition a comfort zone. The virtual world is also a comfort zone. Adult users of Second Life experience life free of risk or consequence — they fly without falling, have unprotected sex, make risk-free acquaintances, and teleport themselves free from the risk of forever remaining in a virtual world. Users have the world under absolute control; they are Gods, able to connect and disconnect at will. Through this simulation game young users of Second Life learn about the world of adults. A young girl made her Second Life avatar a prostitute. It wasn’t so bad, she said. And besides, she wasn’t prostituting herself, her avatar was.
Can we live two lives? The American documentary Second Skin follows the lives of several players of the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is a “massively multiplayer online role playing game” (or MMORPG) situated in the fantasy Warcraft universe. Statistics suggest that some fifty million people, of whom sixty percent are between twenty and thirty years old, play the game. The documentary follows four addicts who live together; each spend about sixteen hours a day on the game. Asked why the “synthetic world” is better than the real one, the gamers reply that in the synthetic world the starting line is the same for everyone and that everyone has equal opportunities. They maintain that with their avatars they feel a greater freedom (the word they use most frequently) than they do in the real world, that the game is an extension of themselves, and that in the world of the game they are more than they are in the real world. Coming from someone who is confined to a wheelchair, these reasons would be understandable, but they are terrifying when offered by healthy adults. Most of the gamers live with the consequences of their obsessive connection to a fantasy world and disconnection from the real world — unemployment, divorce, suicide, alienation — the very things that accompany any kind of severe addiction. Obsessive gaming changes one’s perception, hearing, sensation, sense of color, and perspective — one addict confesses that in his first days of abstinence it was the real world that seemed fake. Other gamers say that in the virtual world they’ve struck up partnerships and friendships that are more enduring than those they have had in the real world. “We’re alienated,” says one gamer, “but connected, because the game is a safe place to get more intimate.” The gamers band together, meet new people, set up associations and virtual unions, and sometimes even meet in real “parallel” life. Gamers share an intimate bond with their avatars, which they experience as the better part of themselves.
A Wired Magazine article entitled “How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” and published in mid-2007 claims that eighty-six percent of Second Life users have abandoned their avatars, and that corporate investment in the venture has been a fiasco.[2] “It’s really the software’s fault,” said the president of Linden Lab. Users returned to their First Life, impatiently waiting for better software solutions in their Second Life. In the now deserted Second Life a user could only have a single avatar. But Sybil had sixteen.[3]
Who’s What to Whom?
Woody Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode” revolves around a middle-aged professor of humanities who teaches at The City College of New York. Bored with his life and marriage to Daphne, Kugelmass wants a romantic escapade. At Kugelmass’s request, and assisted by a magic cabinet, the magician Persky teleports Kugelmass into the virtual world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Kugelmass meets Emma Bovary, wanders the streets of Yonville with her, and falls in love. Emma, however, wants to see New York, and with the help of Persky and his magic cabinet is teleported there. After a while she starts to tire Kugelmass, and so he asks Persky to send her back into the novel. Insatiable, Kugelmass soon requests Persky to get him into Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. There is an explosion during transmission, the cabinet catches fire, Persky dies of a heart attack, the whole house goes up in flames, and Kugelmass is forever stuck — not in Portnoy’s Complaint, but in a Spanish language textbook, chased by the irregular verb tener (“to have”).
Allen’s story was first published in The New Yorker in 1977. Today, thirty years later, its anticipatory charge is startling. Like Kugelmass’s, our time is stuck, hounded by the irregular verb tener. In the story, as in interactive virtual worlds, no one is left unaffected. Every time Kugelmass is magically transmitted into Flaubert’s novel, anyone reading the novel anywhere in the world has to read pages of bizarre dialogue between Emma Bovary and a character that wasn’t even in the novel, a certain Professor Kugelmass. In his little comic caper Woody Allen has neither the time nor inclination to ask questions about the nature of the interaction, which in the intervening time has become known as “participatory culture.” Allen’s story was written in a different, pre-Internet context, when postmodern artistic practice (film, literature, visual art) toyed with the concepts of metatextuality, intertextuality, citationality, and the canon. Artistic and aesthetic canons still existed back then, their subversion a legitimate part of artistic practice. Today, thirty years later, the Internet, like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucks up absolutely everything, including the canons. The complex dynamics of turns and shifts take place in the interaction between the marketplace, the Internet, and the Internet user. In this process the market isn’t a producer of goods, and neither are Internet users passive consumers. One feeds the other, and one feeds itself on the other. In spite of their incompatibility, Emma Bovary and Professor Kugelmass are still “old school” lovers. Today they both are Wikipedia entries. Whether anyone will ever bring them together or separate them depends on the good will of AA, the anonymous author. Because AA is this beginning of a new cultural alphabet. Whether this alphabet will also be called “artistic” is hard to say.
Incidentally, as far as karaoke goes, there’s a new gizmo on the market, the Vocaloid, a vocal synthesizer application that was developed by Yamaha. For the time being the anemic digitalized voice seems best suited to anime characters whose eyes are twice as big, round, and moist as Bambi’s. But, any day now, imitating cutesy synthesized voices will no doubt be all the rage, all over the world. Maybe some plastic surgery clinics already offer clients eye-enlargements and socket sculpting so they can look like their anime heroes. Professor Kugelmass on the other hand — he’s out of luck. He lived in postmodernism, in the pre-Internet age, at the very dawn of the digital revolution.