Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Second life? Try living your first.
I'm relatively addicted to my computer. I probably have a hundred accounts of some sort online. I've owned a series of websites and currently manage three blogs. I communicate with friends and family using various forms of communication, often calling, texting, e-mailing, AIM-ing, and Facebook-ing someone in the same day. Occasionally, I might even actually meet up with that person face-to-face. However, it's safe to say that I need help.
But even I can ridicule this. I stumbled across a blog devoted to this during one of my lunchtime searches today, and while I haven't spent a ton of time researching this, I believe I already understand the concept: you build a second life (hence the name). Instead of running away to Europe or starting three separate families in three different states, you just build your new life online. You can create a completely unrealistic situation in which you can build the perfect body or turn into an animal. The one realistic thing about your new life is that almost nothing is free. And people aren't paying with "pretend" currency either.
Normally, when it comes to making money, I'm relatively liberal. I think consumers should be protected against evil corporations by slightly less evil government regulations. In this case, I blame the consumer completely. Anyone who would be dumb enough to spend real money on fake stuff (like "furniture" for a virtual house or "clothes" for a virtual person) deserves to end up homeless.
This lifestyle reaches a whole new level of stupid. It seems that participants subscribe to a service, and then purchase pictures of things they want to look at (but, obviously, cannot use). I cannot even fathom the thought process that goes into participation in such an activity. There is no reason for someone who is sitting in a real chair in front of a real computer to buy a picture of a chair so that an animation may sit down.
It gets worse: "Players can purchase cyber genitalia that animate with a fellow avatar's touch."* The idea of animated genitalia worries me to begin with, but the notion that your characters actually have sexual relations with one another is downright weird. I'm all for people doing whatever they want to in the privacy of their own homes, but this is a little too private. Sex is no longer something between two consenting adults (regardless of gender), but has become something between a (wo)man and his/her cartoon. But even scarier, you have to BUY your genitals? You actually have to purchase your own penis? Well, I guess most of these people are used to paying for pictures of someone else's genitals anyway.
But aside from the stupidity, this frightens me. Are we so detached from and bored with the real world that we must invent a different world in which we can "exist"? Have we lost touch with reality to the point that we're deliberately ignoring it?
I guess people can do what they want, but don't people have lives anymore? Instead of spending four hours a day pretending to be a cartoon, why not go out and get real herpes on a real wang? In that case, at least, you reduce the risk of populating the Earth with antisocial, digitally-obsessed sex addicts.
*Source
But even I can ridicule this. I stumbled across a blog devoted to this during one of my lunchtime searches today, and while I haven't spent a ton of time researching this, I believe I already understand the concept: you build a second life (hence the name). Instead of running away to Europe or starting three separate families in three different states, you just build your new life online. You can create a completely unrealistic situation in which you can build the perfect body or turn into an animal. The one realistic thing about your new life is that almost nothing is free. And people aren't paying with "pretend" currency either.
Normally, when it comes to making money, I'm relatively liberal. I think consumers should be protected against evil corporations by slightly less evil government regulations. In this case, I blame the consumer completely. Anyone who would be dumb enough to spend real money on fake stuff (like "furniture" for a virtual house or "clothes" for a virtual person) deserves to end up homeless.
This lifestyle reaches a whole new level of stupid. It seems that participants subscribe to a service, and then purchase pictures of things they want to look at (but, obviously, cannot use). I cannot even fathom the thought process that goes into participation in such an activity. There is no reason for someone who is sitting in a real chair in front of a real computer to buy a picture of a chair so that an animation may sit down.
It gets worse: "Players can purchase cyber genitalia that animate with a fellow avatar's touch."* The idea of animated genitalia worries me to begin with, but the notion that your characters actually have sexual relations with one another is downright weird. I'm all for people doing whatever they want to in the privacy of their own homes, but this is a little too private. Sex is no longer something between two consenting adults (regardless of gender), but has become something between a (wo)man and his/her cartoon. But even scarier, you have to BUY your genitals? You actually have to purchase your own penis? Well, I guess most of these people are used to paying for pictures of someone else's genitals anyway.
But aside from the stupidity, this frightens me. Are we so detached from and bored with the real world that we must invent a different world in which we can "exist"? Have we lost touch with reality to the point that we're deliberately ignoring it?
I guess people can do what they want, but don't people have lives anymore? Instead of spending four hours a day pretending to be a cartoon, why not go out and get real herpes on a real wang? In that case, at least, you reduce the risk of populating the Earth with antisocial, digitally-obsessed sex addicts.
*Source
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