My name... is ChauncyQ Wrigglesworth.

I’d like to agree with Ken’s earlier post, however I concur from the perspective of one who has never been a gamer. I was an outdoor kid. I spent much of my adolescent years throwing mud at girls, falling off a skateboard, and lighting things on fire. I never played a lot of video games and my knowledge of computers (as well as recreational activities) remains frighteningly close to what it was ten years ago.

When I started with Second Life this week, I found myself saying: “This is nothing like reality. Get me out of here.” I immediately realized that I didn’t know what I was talking about. How did I define reality? There is such an obvious rift between what I conceived as “reality” when I was saying that and what I actually know as my daily existence, and the latter was surprisingly close to Second Life.

A good example: when I sat down, the first while was spent designing the visual appearance of my avatar. After about five minutes I realized “Hey! Who the fuck cares? You’re in Second Life!” and now I’m the androgynous nudist dancing underwater by himself. (Did someone say “RL”?) But it dawned on me that even my first activity in Second Life was representative of my daily existence. When you wake up in the morning, you dress and fix yourself until you recognize “you” as your own pre-conceived self-image.

My second action was figuring out where the hell I was—this is about right.

My third series of actions were just interacting with my environment—wandering (or flying) around, learning about myself (tutorials), meeting other people ( / dance7), observing the (un)natural world. Save my closet obsession with Billy Ray Cyrus, this pretty closely resembles my day-to-day, even down to the / dance7.

But my point in highlighting these actions is partly to credit Second Life as being more realistic than I thought it would be, but more to highlight that these actions are not what I consider reality to be. When I use the word “reality” as an abstraction, I do not think about doing my laundry or walking to class. “Reality” to me is voice, it is emotion, it is exhaustion, it is celebration. This very notion of reality is often veiled by our daily routines, but remains what we strive for—a human experience.

I can understand the fascination with Second Life as an alternate reality and I will be the first to admit that I probably don’t understand a lot about it. However, to me, Second Life is little else than a magnifying glass for an already subsuming mundane reality. If I need better graphics, I can always take some mescaline—but Second Life is a poor excuse for daily routines, and daily routines are a poor excuse for reality.