It's rare that I feel fascination and excitement so strongly mingled with an urge to throw up.
What I'm talking about, exactly, is the online world of Second Life. If you haven't heard all the hot buzz, Second Life is a massively multiplayer online game world run out of San Francisco by a company known as Linden Labs.
Like the Matrix, to truly understand it you must see it for yourself, but my paltry words may shed some weak light on its grisly fullness.
Second Life is a game in which players create digital alter egos for themselves. With these avatars, they move through and interact with a virtual environment and other players. But it differs from most games in that there is no objective but play.
On that note, players of Second Life, known as "residents," can script programs, create objects and tweak their own appearance. They can walk, run, fight, fly, have sex, teleport or re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg as anthropomorphic Viking mermaids.
Even more bizarre, there's an economy based on "Linden dollars," and a going exchange rate with U.S. dollars. You can buy land and whatever objects residents construct, from gothic castles to rocket launchers.
The "economy" has been touted as a bottomless pit for online creativity, and does big business as people buy and sell Second Life creations outside of the game. No joke: go to the site and check the cash barometer for the last 24 hours ($624,334 USD exchanged, when I checked).
Second Life has been around since 2003, so if you're Internet-savvy, this is probably old news; forgive me for being so slow. But if you're not a nerd, you might demand to know why I bore you with this spectacle of dorkery.
The simple answer: Linden Labs is convincing everyone that Second Life is not just for gaming enthusiasts. It has been crossing over into the mainstream big time, with extensive media hoopla, declarations that it's the next incarnation of the Internet and people saying that having a Second Life account will be as common as having an e-mail address.
And did I mention the big business? Companies as diverse as Starwood Hotels, Adidas, Reebok and Disney are all hawking their polygonal wares with gusto, and Ailin Graef, aka "Anshe Chung," is already famous for being the first virtual real estate millionaire.
Second Life even has newspapers.
Meanwhile, the possibilities for this game are pretty fantastic. There are abused children learning social interaction, cerebral palsy sufferers who thrill in the nonjudgmental online relations, and people with autism communicating in ways they don't in real life.
Classes can be taught by pixilated professors to students around the world. Nonprofit organizations can train people cheaply and effectively. And, as the code changes and grows, it seems the bottom of the rabbit hole is not yet visible.
So if it's really that great, why am I so disgusted? Because Second Life is escapist. So, so escapist. It's forsaking real life for a fantasy.
The residents will tell you otherwise: their politically correct term for reality is "meatspace," and it's not a game, it's a "metaverse."
But that is such crap.
That people have so willingly thrown their time and money into building false, illusory idealizations of themselves while they are probably sitting in their basements eating Pringles shows exactly how unhappy they are, and prescribes that they live a lie rather than do anything about it.
However realistic Linden Labs brags their world is, it still captures only a fraction of the richness of reality. Second Life is to real life as Lego is to the Sistine Chapel.
Look, I don't presume to think that I could convince you not to join this site, and I'm not unaware of the irony in decrying virtual reality when our society is already halfway there.
But before we pitch ourselves headlong into the warm narcotic embrace of the net, we should ask if the painlessness of Plato's cave is really the happiness we think it is.
I guess we'll find out, won't we?
Matthew Neff is an English literature major. He can be reached at: matthew.neff@asu.edu.
