The Shanachie

This is my essay for a Pop Culture course I’m taking:

Second Life is an online game which is supposedly exactly what its name states. It is a virtual world where gamers can recreate themselves, their appearances, and their interests. One can visit Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Live music events are free to attend, as are strip clubs bars, restaurants, and the McMaster library. One can visit giant playgrounds designed by NASA engineers, or the McMaster Mills Library. Users refer to their offline lives as their First Lives. Second Life has an economy based on what are called Linden dollars, which can be bought with or exchanged for US dollars. A Second Life gamer can run a business, sell their artwork, or prostitute themselves for Linden dollars which can then be exchanged for real currency. This paper will assert that even in an environment that has the possibility of being an atypical society, Second Life mirrors the real world’s Reality Effect, Myths, and interpellation.

Second Life is almost like viewing Reality Effect in effect, having a pre-established economy that already functions much like the real world’s economy does, although there are probably more options to barter for goods, and there are a few individuals who create goods and give them away at no cost. Gamers can also create their own items, but the code is not open source, so there are limitations to what one can produce. What is interesting to note is that in a virtual world where almost anything could happen, the world is populated with casinos, bars, and strip clubs. One of the only phenomena that is not part of the Reality Effect is the fact that gamers can set their avatars (visual representations of themselves) to fly. The visual representations vary. A gamer can set their avatar to fall on a spectrum of skin tones, sizes, heights, eye colour, hair, and even fairy wings. Second Life offers miles and miles of malls, of shopping opportunities, for clothing, accessories, pets, and even real estate. The reality effect is that what appears to be a game, of playing virtual house, is actually making people money in real world dollars, and ties in with the interests that hegemonic powers wish us to have, and set us up to spend our money on.

Second Life user avatars are ubiquitous in their representations, as if they came from reality TV or People magazine. There are virtually no fat or disabled avatars, nor are there any seniors.  Even if the gamers themselves are all physically fit and young, if groups like seniors and the disabled were not marginalized in our first life world, they would choose to represent themselves as seniors, in wheelchairs, or as overweight if they considered those to be viable options. What is the reason for this lack of representation?

Barthes elaborates Saussure’s theory of how meaning is encoded in signs to take account of the fact that, in addition to their denotative, or literal, meanings, signs also assume connotative, or mythological, significance. That is, they take on additional associations that are more clearly subjective, charged with a culture’s dominant, often unspoken, beliefs or values. (O’Brien, Szeman, 84)

In light of who is represented in Second Life, and the above quote, clearly this suggests that some of the unspoken messages or mythologies in our society tell us that senior, disabled, and obese people ought not to be seen.

The proliferative strip clubs in Second Life illustrate the myth that women’s worth in society stems from their sexual accessibility and exploitation. It also illustrates the commodification of sexuality. There are almost no male sex workers, reflecting their invisibility in the real world, where female sex trade workers often unwittingly find themselves the subjects of photographic “art” and are the subjects of email jokes and television crime shows. Strangely, male sex workers are never seen or represented in Second Life or in our first lives. In Second Life, strip club owners will screen the avatar applicants gender, and some even go so far as to require a personal phone call to determine that the sex worker is indeed a woman. After all, who wants to exploit a man playacting a woman online? Clearly, this is not acceptable to gamers.

To respond to interpellation by accepting the hail… is not simply to capitulate to power, but to actively engage in the construction of a self … To self-identify even by a racial or sexed designation is not merely to accept the sad fact of oppression but to understand one’s relationship to a historical community, to recognize one’s objective social location, and to participate in the negotiation of the meaning and implications of one’s identity. (Alcoff, 340)

If a female gamer wishes to consume virtual products, and participate in the economy of Second Life, she is limited to working in a strip club, unless she has hours of time to put towards coding products that others may never buy. Stripping, on the other hand, is a sure bet in the online world (and sadly, often in the offline one.)

Second Life is a game that has more to offer than rampant consumption and commodification, but these are significant aspects of the game, and often, new users can’t see that there is much else to the game. Doing some digging will reward a user with a more robust experience, as there are some philosophical discussion groups, art galleries and other events to get involved in. The point of this paper was to highlight how the users of the game illustrate Reality Effect, certain mythologies and interpellation through a brief examination of their representations, and negotiations of their own virtual identities as fit, beautiful, and young, which is a reflection of the mythologies of our society. The reality effect of the economy displays what users value; that is, what hegemonic powers assert they should be, such as ownership of land. Being a very occasional user of this game, and being a student of Cultural Studies and Critical theory, the presenting images in Second Life have always struck me as being odd, and somewhat eerie. It is not a reflection of our real society, but what is dismaying is that it is a mashup, or construction, of what hegemonic powers wish it to be, and that people as a whole, must on some level, be subscribing to as well.