Camping
I don’t really miss camping. I miss the excitement of camping, although camping, of course, was never in
any way exciting. To this day, I still
can’t quite believe I actually did it; I still can’t believe I voluntarily
stood around doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time in return for three
measly Lindens an hour, thrown at my shoeless feet with contempt by whatever
management it was that was hoping my mere presence in the vicinity of his or
her establishment would bring people with actual money and a desire to spend
it. If camping wasn’t bad enough, there
was also queuing for camping: a wait of additional nothingness for a camping
spot to become vacant, only this time you got paid nothing. And then there was
the wait to get into a sim with good camping spots, because the sim itself was
full to capacity from people a) camping and b) waiting to be camping. Nobody ever even spoke to each other whilst
they were camping because they were so full of self-loathing at having sunk
this low any exposure of personality just made the loss of dignity worse. You came, you sat, you kept your mouth shut
and you avoided looking anyone in the eye.
What was exciting about camping was the thing you wanted
to buy with the money you got from it. This
was your First Big Second Life purchase.
You’d done the rounds on the freebie shops, flirted with trying to
create a more interesting body shape by manually tweaking the slider bars and
experimented with different colours on the lump of plasticine on your head
which Linden so optimistically referred to as ‘hair’. Slowly, but surely, the realisation had
dawned on you that your avatar looked shit.
Slowly, but surely, you started to covet the costing-money things which
would make it look better. I estimate
that the average newbie back then spent no more than a fortnight doing camping,
because by then the desire for costing-money things had overwhelmed the ability
to delay gratification any longer (as delays go, earning money though camping
was a pretty fucking long one). Out went
the policy on not spending any real money on SL and in came the Lindens,
freshly minted from the LindeX. Camping
was exciting because it was one of the things that represented our transition
from ‘I find SL interesting’ to ‘I find SL absorbing’. Camping was when we got hooked.
Exploring
In the early days of my SL, exploring meant walking along
a road and seeing where it took me. An
inventory devoid of landmarks and a friends list empty of, well, people, it was
pretty much the only strategy I had available to me. Through this approach I discovered my first
SL art gallery and had there my first SL conversation with another avatar. There was a sense, back then, of SL unfolding
around me and that I was in control of the pace at which it unfolded. I could explore one sim of an evening; I
could explore two or three or four: it was up to me.
It wasn’t that I was unaware of other distant places, nor
that I was totally ignorant on how to get to them. Back then, before both adult venues and their
advertisements were moved to their own continent, the newbie avatar had virtual
billboards declaring pleasure beyond their hedonistic dreams practically crammed
down their throats the moment they took a step outside of whatever info hub it
was they’d been sent to. I was indeed
curious about ‘cybersex’ as a newbie (chiefly because I thought it sounded
ridiculous), but I wanted to discover such places by myself. The idea of hopping about the grid, from one
random point to another, made SL seem less like a world – less like one big
place – and more like a collection of 3D websites. I wanted it to be a world.
All of which begs the question, why do I no longer
explore SL in this way? In part, I
suppose it’s because most of the really interesting stuff for me tends to be on
private sims disconnected from the mainland; now that my concept of SL as a
world is established, it doesn’t really need protecting any more. But I suspect the main reason is pure
laziness. I’ve established my places and
my people. I’ve grown my avatar
identity. Whilst I do from time to time still
do new stuff, I’m generally ‘settled’ in my SL ways. Is this a good thing? Probably, it’s not.
Performing
I made a ‘stand’ of sorts about 18 months ago. A newcomer to the poetry events I was
attending had various racial hate statements in her profile. She was a perfectly nice person to talk to in
chat before you realised what she had listed in her profile; she certainly never
in my company brought any of these views into conversation. A friend of mine then discovered these
profile picks and stopped attending any events this avatar was present at. She dismissed event hosts’ views that banning
avatars with hate speech in their picks was a restriction of their freedom of
speech.
By coincidence, I attended in RL a couple of days later a
talk given by a black UK celebrity about her life in the 60s in Britain. Her family was one that had moved to the UK
in response to the drive back then to recruit migrant workers, and they arrived
only to be discriminated against in virtually every aspect of their lives. She would go into a shop, for example, and
the shopkeeper would refuse to acknowledge her, far less serve her. I felt ashamed at my willingness to find a
reason to ignore this person’s hate speech.
I decided that my friend was right, that if we’re agreed
that hate speech should not be tolerated – and it’s not like there’s much legal
doubt over that – then profile text should be treated alongside public chat. If I perform in front of an audience knowing
that one or more people there are displaying hate speech in their profiles like
little placards they've sneaked in with them (and, let’s be clear here, I’m not
talking about statements such as ‘Immigration to the UK is a problem’, I’m
talking about statements such as ‘UK SHOULD BE WHITES ONLY’) then I’m passively
endorsing such comments. A very easy way
to not do this is simply to withdraw my performance. Which is what I did.
And I've hardly performed since. And I miss it.
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