ALSO BY LESLIE JAMISON

NONFICTION

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

The Empath;)' Exams: Essays

FICTION

The Gin Closet

MAKE IT

MAKE IT

ESSAYS

LESLIE JAMISON

Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston London

'

Sim Life

G idge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house overlooking a glit-tering creek, its lush banks lined with weeping willows. Nearby meadows twinkle with fireflies. Gidge keeps buying new swimming

pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current

specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway

of stones. Gidge spends her days lounging in a swimsuit on her poolside

patio, or else tucked under a lacy comforter, wearing nothing but a bra

and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed doughnut perched on the pile of

books beside her. "Good morning girls," she writes on her blog one day.

"I'm slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning, but when I'm

surrounded by my pretty pink bed it's difficult to get out and away like

I should."

In another life, the one most people would call "real," Gidge Uriza

is Bridgette McN eal, an Atlanta mother who works eight-hour days at

a call center and is raising a fourteen-year-old son, a seven-year-old

daughter, and severely autistic twins who are thirteen. Her days are full

of the daily demands of raising children with special needs: giving her

twins baths after they have soiled themselves (they still wear diapers,

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and most likely always will), baking applesauce bread with one to calm

him down after a tantrum, asking the other to stop playing the Barney

theme song slowed down until it sounds, as she puts it, "like some

demonic dirge." One day, she takes all four kids to a nature center for

an idyllic afternoon that gets interrupted by the reality of changing an

adolescent's diaper in a musty bathroom.

But each morning, before all that-before getting the kids ready for

school and putting in eight hours at the call center, before getting dinner

on the table or keeping peace during the meal, before giving baths and

collapsing into bed-Bridgette spends an hour and a half on the online

platform Second Life, where she lives in a sleek paradise of her own

devising. Good morning girls. I'm slow moving, trying to get out of bed this

morning. She wakes up at half past five in the morning to inhabit a life in

which she has the luxury of never getting out of bed at all.

W hat is Second Life? The short answer is that it's a virtual world that launched in 2003 and was hailed by many as the future of the internet. The longer answer is that it's a controversial landscape-

possibly revolutionary, possibly moot-full of goth cities and preciously

tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rain-forest

temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs

and trippy giant chess games. In honor of Second Life's tenth birthday, in

2013, Linden Lab, the company that created it, released an infographic

charting its progress: 36 million accounts had been created, and their users

had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding

territory that comprised almost seven hundred square miles composed of

land units called "sims." People often call Second Life a game, but two

years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insist-

ing that no one refer to it as that. It was a platform. This was meant to

suggest something more holistic, immersive, and encompassing.

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Second Life has no specific goals. Its vast landscape consists entirely

of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has

been built by someone else-an avatar controlled by a live human

user. These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up,

get married, and make money. They celebrate their "rez days," the on-

line equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined.

At church, they cannot take physical communion-the corporeality of

that ritual is impossible-but they can bring the stories of their faith to

life. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life

summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or the sudden illumination of

sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces,

"He is risen." As one Second Life handbook puts it: "From your point

of view, SL works as if you were a god."

In truth, in the years since its zenith in the mid-2000s, Second Life

has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told

friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always

followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief

fl.ash of recognition, then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around?

Second Life is no longer the thing you joke about; it's the thing you

haven't bothered to joke about for years.

Many observers expected monthly-user numbers to keep rising after

they hit one million in 2007, but instead they peaked there-and have,

in the years since, stalled at about eight hundred thousand. And an

estimated 20 to 30 percent are first-time users who never return. Just a

few years after declaring Second Life the future of the internet, the tech

world moved on. As a 2011 piece in Slate proclaimed: "Looking back,

the future didn't last long."

But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend

hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven't we found our-

selves inside it? Only it's come to pass on Facebook, Twitter, and

Instagram instead. As I learned more about Second Life and spent

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more time exploring it, it started to seem less like an obsolete relic and

more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us actually

live in. Perhaps Second Life inspires an urge to ridicule not because it's

unrecognizable, but because it takes a recognizable impulse and carries

it past the bounds of comfort, into a kind of uncanny valley: the promise

of not just an online voice but an online body; not just checking Twitter

on your phone, but forgetting to eat because you're dancing at an online

club; not just a curated version of your real life, but a separate existence

entirely. It crystallizes the simultaneous siren call and shame of wanting

a different life.

In Hinduism, the concept of an avatar refers to the incarnation of a deity on earth. In Second Life, it's your body: an ongoing act of self-expression. From 2004 to 2007, an anthropologist named Tom

Boellstorff inhabited Second Life as an embedded ethnographer, nam-

ing his avatar Tom Bukowski and building himself a home and office

called Ethnographia. His immersive approach was anchored by the

premise that the world of Second Life is just as "real" as any other,

and that he was justified in studying Second Life "on its own terms"

rather than feeling obligated to understand people's virtual identities

primarily in terms of their offiine lives. His book Coming of Age in

Second Life, titled in homage to Margaret Mead's classic about adoles-

cent girls in Samoa, documents the texture of the platform's digital

culture. He finds that making "small talk about lag [streaming delays

in SL] is like talking about the weather in RL," and interviews an av-

atar named Wendy, whose creator always makes her go to sleep before

she logs out. "So the actual world is Wendy's dream, until she wakes

up again in Second Life?" Boellstorff recalls asking her, and then: "I

could have sworn a smile passed across Wendy's face as she said, 'Yup.

Indeed.'"

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One woman described her avatar to Boellstorff as a truer manifesta-

tion of her interior self. "If I take a zipper and pull her out of me, that's

who I am," she told him. Female avatars tend to be thin and impossibly

busty; male avatars are young and muscular; almost all avatars are

vaguely cartoonish in their beauty. These avatars communicate through

chat windows, or by using voice technology to actually speak. They

move by walking, flying, teleporting, and clicking on "poseballs,"

floating orbs that animate avatars into various actions: dancing, karate,

pretty much every sexual act you can imagine. Not surprisingly, many

users come to Second Life for the possibilities of digital sex-sex

without corporeal bodies, without real names, without the constraints

of gravity, often with elaborate textual commentary.

The local currency in Second Life is the Linden Dollar, and recent

exchange rates put the Linden at just less than half a cent. In the decade

following its launch, Second Life users spent $3.2 billion of real money

on in-world transactions. The first Second Life millionaire, a digital-

real-estate tycoon who goes by Anshe Chung, graced the cover of

Businessweek in 2006, and by 2007 the GDP of Second Life was larger

than that of several small countries. In its vast digital Marketplace, you

can still buy a wedding gown for 4,000 Lindens (just over $16) or a ruby-

colored corset with fur wings for just under 350 Lindens (about $1.50).

You can even buy an altered body: different skin, different hair, a pair of

horns, genitalia of all shapes and sizes. A private island currently costs

almost 150,000 Lindens (the price is fixed at $600), while the Millennium

II Super Yacht costs 20,000 Lindens (just over $80) and comes with more

than three hundred animations attached to its beds and trio of hot tubs,

designed to allow avatars to enact a variety of bespoke sexual fantasies.

Second Life started to plateau just as Facebook started to explode.

The rise ofFacebook wasn't the problem of a competing brand so much

as the problem of a competing model. It seemed that people wanted a

curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely.

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They wanted to become the sum of their most flattering profile pictures

more than they wanted to become a wholly separate avatar. But maybe

Facebook and Second Life aren't so different in their appeal. Both find

traction in the allure of inhabiting a selective self, whether built from the

materials oflived experience-camping-trip photos and witty observa-

tions about brunch-or from the impossibilities that lived experience

precludes: an ideal body, an ideal romance, an ideal home.

Bridgette McNeal, the Atlanta mother of four, has been on Second

Life for just over a decade. She named her avatar Gidge after what

the bullies called her in high school. Though Bridgette is middle-aged,

her avatar is a lithe twentysomething whom she describes as "perfect

me-if I'd never eaten sugar or had children." During her early days

on Second Life, Bridgette's husband created an avatar as well, and the

two of them would go on Second Life dates together, a blond Amazon

and a squat silver robot, while sitting together at their laptops in their

study at home. It was often the only way they could go on dates, because

their kids' special needs made finding babysitters difficult. When we

spoke, Bridgette described her Second Life home as a refuge that grants

permission. "When I step into that space, I'm afforded the luxury of

being selfish," she said, invoking Virginia Woolf: "It's like a room of

my own." Her virtual home is full of objects she could never keep in

her real home because her kids might break or eat them-jewelry on

dishes, knickknacks on tables, makeup on the counter.

In addition to the blog that documents her digital existence, with

its marble pools and frilly, spearmint-green bikinis, Bridgette keeps a

blog devoted to her daily "RL" existence as a parent. It's honest and

hilarious and full of heartbreaking candor. Recounting the afternoon

spent with her kids at the nature center, she describes looking at a bald

eagle: "Some asshole shot this bald eagle with an arrow. He lost most

of one wing because of it and can't fly. He's kept safe here at this retreat

we visited a few days ago. Sometimes I think the husband and I feel a

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little bit like him. Trapped. Nothing really wrong, we've got food and

shelter and what we need. But we are trapped for the rest of our lives by

autism. We '11 never be free."

When I asked Bridgette about the allure of Second Life, she said it

can be easy to succumb to the temptation to pour yourself into its world

when you should be tending to ofiline life. I asked whether she had ever

slipped close to that, and she said she'd certainly felt the pull at times.

"You're thin and beautiful. No one's asking you to change a diaper,"

she told me. "But you can burn out on that. You don't want to leave,

but you don't want to do it anymore, either."

Second Life was invented by a man named Philip Rosedale, the son

of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot and an English teacher. As a boy, he

was driven by an outsized sense of ambition. He can remember standing

near the woodpile in his family's backyard and thinking, "Why am I

here, and how am I different from everybody else?" As a teenager in the

mid-'80s, he used an early-model PC to zoom in on a graphic represen-

tation of a Mandelbrot set, an infinitely recursive fractal image that kept

getting more and more detailed as he got closer and closer. At a certain

point, he realized he was looking at a graphic larger than the Earth. "We

could walk along the surface our whole lives and never even begin to

see everything," he explained to me. That's when he realized that "the

coolest thing you could do with a computer would be to build a world."

Just as Rosedale was beginning to envision Second Life, in 1999,

he attended Burning Man-the festival of performance art, sculptural

installations, and hallucinogenic hedonism that happens every summer

in the middle of the Nevada desert. While he was there, he told me,

something "inexplicable" happened to his personality. "You feel like

you're high, without any drugs or anything. You just feel connected

to people in a way that you don't normally." He went to a rave in an

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Airstream trailer, watched trapeze artists swing across the desert, and

lay in a hookah lounge piled with hundreds of Persian rugs. Burning

Man didn't give Rosedale the idea for Second Life-he'd been imagin-

ing a digital world for years-but it helped him understand the energy

he wanted to summon there: a place where people could make the world

whatever they wanted it to be.

This was the dream, but it was a hard sell to early investors.

Linden Lab was proposing a world built by amateurs and sustained by

a different kind of revenue model-based not on paid subscriptions,

but on commerce generated in-world. One of Second Life's designers

recalled investors' skepticism: "Creativity was supposed to be a dark art

that only Spielberg and Lucas could do." As part of selling Second Life

as a world rather than a game, Linden Lab hired a writer to work as an

"embedded journalist." This was Wagner James Au, who documented

the digital careers of some of Second Life's most important early build-

ers: an avatar named Spider Mandala (who was managing a Midwestern

gas station ofiline) and another named Catherine Omega, who was a

"punky brunette … with a utility belt" in Second Life, but ofiline was

squatting in a condemned apartment in Vancouver. The building had no

running water and was populated mainly by addicts, but Omega used a

soup can to catch a wireless signal from nearby office buildings so she

could run Second Life on her laptop.

Rosedale told me about the thrill of those early days, when Second

Life's potential felt unbridled. No one else was doing what he and

his team were doing. "We used to say that our only competition was

real life." He said there was a period in 2007 when more than five

hundred articles a day were written about their work. Rosedale himself

loved to explore Second Life as an avatar named Philip Linden. "I was

like a god," he told me. He envisioned a future in which his grand-

children would see the real world as a kind of "museum or theater,"

while most work and relationships happened in virtual realms like

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Second Life. "In some sense," he told Au in 2007, "I think we will see

the entire physical world as being kind ofleft behind."

Alice Krueger first started noticing the symptoms of her illness when she was twenty years old. During fieldwork for a college biology class, crouching down to watch bugs eating leaves, she felt

overwhelmed by heat. One day while she was standing in the grocery

store, it suddenly felt as if her entire left leg had disappeared-not just

gone numb, but disappeared. Whenever she went to a doctor, she was

told it was all in her head. "And it was all in my head," she told me,

forty-seven years later. "But in a different way than how they meant."

Alice was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of fifty.

By then she could barely walk. Her neighborhood association in Col-

orado prohibited her from building a ramp at the front of her house, so

it was difficult for her to go anywhere. Her three children were eleven,

thirteen, and fifteen. She didn't get to see her younger son's high-school

graduation, or his college campus. She started suffering intense pain

in her lower back and eventually had to have surgery to repair spinal

vertebrae that had fused together, then ended up getting multidrug-

resistant staph from her time in the hospital. Her pain persisted, and

she was diagnosed with a misalignment caused by the surgery itself,

during which she had been suspended "like a rotisserie chicken" above

the operating table. At the age of fifty-seven, Alice found herself house-

bound and unemployed, often in excruciating pain, cared for largely

by her daughter. "I was looking at my four walls," she told me, "and

wondering if there could be more."

That's when she found Second Life. She created an avatar named

Gentle Heron, and loved seeking out waterslides, excited by the sheer

thrill of doing what her body could not. As she kept exploring, she

started inviting people she'd met online in disability chat rooms to

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join her. But that also meant she felt responsible for their experiences,

and eventually she founded a "cross-disability virtual community" in

Second Life, now known as Virtual Ability, a group that occupies an

archipelago of virtual islands and welcomes people with a wide range

of disabilities-everything from Down syndrome to PTSD to manic

depression. What unites its members, Alice told me, is their sense of not

being fully included in the world.

While she was starting Virtual Ability, Alice also embarked on a real-

life move: to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee from Colorado,

where she'd outlived her long-term disability benefits. ("I didn't know

you could do that," I told her, and she replied, "Neither did I!") When

I asked her whether she felt like a different version of herself in Second

Life, she rejected the proposition strenuously. Alice doesn't particu-

larly like the terms real and virtual. To her they imply a hierarchical

distinction, suggesting that one part of her life is more "real" than the

other, when her sense of self feels fully expressed in both. She doesn't

want Second Life misunderstood as a trivial diversion. After our first

conversation, she sent me fifteen peer-reviewed scientific articles about

digital avatars and embodiment.

Alice told me about a man with Down syndrome who has become

an important member of the Virtual Ability community. In real life his

disability is omnipresent, but on Second Life people can talk to him

without even realizing he has it. In the offiine world, he lives with

his parents-who were surprised to see he was capable of controlling

his own avatar. After they eat dinner each night, as his parents wash

the dishes, he sits expectantly by the computer, waiting to return to

Second Life, where he rents a duplex on an island called Cape Heron.

He has turned the entire upper level into a massive aquarium, so he

can walk among the fish, and the lower level into a garden, where he

keeps a pet reindeer and feeds it Cheerios. Alice says he doesn't draw

a firm boundary between Second Life and "reality," and others in the

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community have been inspired by his approach, citing him when they

talk about collapsing the border in their own minds.

When I first began working on this essay, I imagined myself

falling under the spell of Second Life: a wide-eyed observer

seduced by the culture she had been dispatched to analyze. But being

"in-world" made me queasy from the start. I had pictured myself de-

fending Second Life against the ways it had been dismissed as little more

than a consolation prize designed for people for whom "first life" hasn't

quite delivered. Instead I found myself writing, Second Life makes me

want to take a shower.

My respect deepened intellectually by the day. I talked with a legally

blind woman whose avatar had a rooftop balcony from which she could

see the view (thanks to screen magnification) more clearly than she

could see the world beyond her computer. I heard about a veteran with

PTSD who gave biweekly Italian cooking classes in an open-air gazebo.

I visited an online version of Yosemite created by a woman who had

joined Second Life in the wake of several severe depressive episodes

and hospitalizations. She used an avatar named J adyn Firehawk and

spent up to twelve hours a day on Second Life, devoted mostly to

refining her curated digital wonderland-full of waterfalls, sequoias,

and horses named after important people in John Muir's life-grateful

that Second Life didn't ask her to inhabit an identity entirely contoured

by her illness, unlike internet chat rooms focused on bipolar disorder

that were all about being sick. "I live a well-rounded life on SL," she

told me. "It feeds all my other selves."

But despite my growing appreciation, a certain visceral distaste for

Second Life endured-for the emptiness of its graphics, its night-

clubs and mansions and pools and castles, their refusal of all the grit

and imperfection that make the world feel like the world. Whenever I

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tried to describe Second Life, I found it nearly impossible-or at least

impossible to make it interesting-because description finds its traction

in flaws and fissures. Exploring the world of Second Life was more like

moving through postcards. It was a world of visual cliches. Nothing

was ragged or broken or dilapidated-or if it was dilapidated, it was

because that particular aesthetic had been carefully cultivated.

Of course, my aversion to Second Life-as well as my embrace

of blemishes and shortcomings in the physical world-testified to my

own good fortune as much as anything. When I moved through the real

world, I was buffered by my (relative) youth, my (relative) health, and

my (relative) freedom. Who was I to begrudge those who had found in

the reaches of Second Life what they couldn't find offiine?

One day when Alice and I met up as avatars in-world, she took me to

a beach on one of the Virtual Ability islands and invited me to practice

tai chi. All I needed to do was click on one of the poseballs levitating

in the middle of a grassy circle, and it would automatically animate my

avatar. But I did not feel that I was doing tai chi. I felt that I was sitting

at my laptop, watching my two-dimensional avatar do tai chi.

I thought of Gidge in Atlanta, waking up early to sit beside a virtual

pool. She doesn't get to smell the chlorine or the sunscreen, to feel the sun

melt across her back or char her skin to peeling crisps. Yet Gidge must

get something powerful from sitting beside a virtual pool-pleasure

that dwells not in the physical experience itself but in its anticipation, its

documentation, and its recollection. Whatever categories of "real" and

"unreal" you want to map onto online and offiine worlds, the pleasure

she finds in going to Second Life is indisputably actual. Otherwise she

wouldn't wake up at half past five in the morning to do it.

F rom the beginning, I was terrible at navigating Second Life. "Body part failed to download," my interface kept saying. Second 69

LESLIE JAMISON

Life was supposed to give you the opportunity to perfect your body,

but I couldn't even summon a complete one. For my avatar, I'd chosen

a punk-looking woman with cutoff shorts, a partially shaved head, and

a ferret on her shoulder.

On my first day in-world, I wandered around Orientation Island like

a drunk person trying to find a bathroom. The island was full of marble

columns and trim greenery, with a faint soundtrack of gurgling water,

but it looked less like a Delphic temple and more like a corporate retreat

center inspired by a Delphic temple. The graphics seemed incomplete

and uncompelling, the motion full of glitches and lags. I tried to talk

to someone named Del Agnos but got no response. I felt surprisingly

ashamed by his rebuttal, transported back to the paralyzing shyness of

my junior-high-school days.

On that first day in-world, I teleported to a deserted island where

there was supposed to be an abandoned mansion and a secret entrance

to a "bizarre circus in the sky," but all I found was a busted lifeguard

station perched on stilts in the sea, where I was ( once again!) ignored

by a man who looked like a taciturn cross between a WWF wrestler

and a Victorian butler, with a silver-studded dog collar around his neck.

I ended up falling off a wooden ledge and bobbing in the gray rain-

pocked waves, under a permanently programmed thunderstorm. This

wasn't exactly the frustration of lived experience, in all the richness of

its thwarted expectations, but something else: the imperfect summoning

of its reductive simulation. It was like a stage set with the rickety

scaffolding of its facade exposed.

Each time I signed off Second Life, I found myself weirdly eager

to plunge back into the obligations of my ordinary life. Pick up my

stepdaughter from drama class? Check! Reply to my department chair

about hiring a replacement for the faculty member taking an unexpected

leave? I was on it! These obligations felt real in a way that Second Life

did not, and they allowed me to inhabit a particular version of myself

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as someone capable and necessary. It felt like returning to the air after

struggling to find my breath underwater. I came up gasping, desperate,

ready for entanglement and contact: Yes! This is the real world! In all its

vexed logistical glory!

At my first Second Life concert, I arrived excited for actual music in

a virtual world. Many SL concerts are genuinely "live" insofar as they

involve real musicians playing real music on instruments or singing

into microphones hooked up to their computers. But I was trying to do

too many things at once that afternoon: reply to sixteen dangling work

emails, unload the dishwasher, reload the dishwasher, make my step-

daughter a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before her final rehearsal

for a production of Peter Pan. The concert was taking place on a

dock overlooking an expansive bay of sparkling blue water. With my

jam-sticky fingers, I clicked on a dance poseball and started a conga

line-except no one joined my conga line; it just got me stuck between

a potted plant and the stage, trying to conga and going nowhere. My

embarrassment, more than any sense of having fun, was what made me

feel implicated and engaged. In wondering what other people thought

of me, I felt acutely aware-at last-of sharing a world with them.

When I interviewed Philip Rosedale, he readily admitted that Second

Life has always presented intrinsic difficulties to users-that it is hard

for people to get comfortable moving, communicating, and building;

that there is an "irreducible level of difficulty associated with mouse

and keyboard" that his team "could never make easier." Peter Gray,

Linden Lab's director of global communications, told me about what he

called the "white-space problem"-having so much freedom that you

can't be entirely sure what you want to do-and admitted that entering

Second Life can be like "getting dropped off in the middle of a foreign

country."

When I spoke with long-term users, however, the stubborn in-

accessibility of Second Life seemed to have become a crucial part

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of their assimilation narratives. They looked hack on their early

embarrassment with nostalgia. Gidge told me about the time someone

convinced her that she needed to buy a vagina, and she'd ended

up wearing it on the outside of her pants. (She called this a classic

#SecondLifeProhlem.) A Swedish musician named Malin Osth-one

of the performers at the concert where I'd started my abortive conga

line-told me about attending her first Second Life concert, and her

story wasn't so different from mine. When she'd tried to get to the

front of the crowd, she'd ended up accidentally flying onto the stage.

Beforehand, she'd been sure the whole event would seem fake, hut

she was surprised by how mortified she felt, and this made her realize

that she actually felt like she was among other people. I knew what

she meant. If it feels like you are hack in junior high school, then at

least it feels like you are somewhere.

One woman put it like this: "Second Life doesn't open itself up to

you. It doesn't hand you everything on a silver platter and tell you

where to go next. It presents you with a world, and it leaves you to your

own devices, tutorial be damned." But once you've figured it out, you

can buy a thousand silver platters if you want to-or design the yacht

of your dreams, or build a virtual Yosemite. Rosedale believed that if

a user could survive that initial purgatory, her bond with the world of

Second Life would be sealed for good. "If they stay more than four

hours," he told me, "they stay forever."

N eal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, with its virtual "Metaverse," is often cited as Second Life's primary lit-erary ancestor. But Rosedale assured me that by the time he read the

novel he'd already been imagining Second Life for years. ("Just ask my

wife.") The hero of Snow Crash, aptly named Hiro Protagonist, lives

with his roommate in a storage locker, but in the Metaverse he is a

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sword-fighting prince and a legendary hacker. No surprise he spends so

much time there: "It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It."

In one study of reported life satisfaction among Second Life users,

researchers concluded that because users reported such a large gap in

satisfaction between their virtual lives and their real ones it made sense '

that "some people may be strongly motivated to take refuge in digital

life rather than try to change their real life." But if you inhabit a happier

Second Life, does that make it harder to find satisfaction offiine-if that

actual life is constantly competing with a realm in which all fantasies

are possible?

Biro's double life in Snow Crash gets at some of the core fantasies of

Second Life: that it could invert all the metrics of real-world success or '

render them obsolete; that it could create a radically democratic space

because no one has any idea of anyone else's position in the real world.

Many residents of Second Life understand it as a utopia connecting

people from all over the world-across income levels, across disparate

vocations and geographies and disabilities-a place where the ill can

live in healthy bodies and the immobilized can move freely. Seraphina

Brennan, a transgender woman who grew up in a small coal-mining

community in Pennsylvania and could not afford to begin medically

transitioning until her mid-twenties, told me that Second Life had given

her "the opportunity to appear as I truly felt inside," because it was the

first place where she could inhabit a fem ale body.

In his hook The Making of Second Life, Wagner James Au tells the

story of an avatar named Bel Muse, a classic "California blonde" who is

played by an African American woman. She led an early team of build-

ers working on Nexus Prime, one of the first Second Life cities, and told

Au that it was the first time she hadn't encountered the prejudices she

was accustomed to. In the offiine world, she said, "I have to make a good

impression right away-I have to come off nice and articulate, right

away. In Second Life, I didn't have to. Because for once, I can pass." But

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this anecdote-the fact that Bel Muse found respect more readily when

she passed as white in Second Life-confirms the persistence of racism

more than it suggests the possibility of any liberation from it. Although

many users see Second Life as offering an equal playing field, free

from the strictures of class and race, its preponderance of slender white

bodies, most of them outfitted with the props of the leisure class, simply

reinscribes the same skewed ideals that sustain the unequal playing field

in the first place.

Sara Skinner, an African American woman who has always given her

avatars complexions similar to her own, told me the story of trying to

build a digital black-history museum in a seaside town called Bay City.

Another avatar (playing a cop) immediately built walls and eventually,

ironically, a courthouse that blocked her museum from view. The cop

avatar claims it was a misunderstanding, but so much racism refuses

to confess itself as such-and it's certainly no misunderstanding when

white men on Second Life tell Sara that she looks like a primate after she

rejects their advances; when someone calls her "tampon nose" because

of her wide nostrils; or when someone else tells her that her experience

with bias is invalid because she is a "mixed breed." She plans to rebuild

her museum somewhere else.

Au told me that though he was initially deeply excited by the premise

of Second Life, particularly the possibilities of its user-generated con-

tent, he ended up disappointed by the fact that most people turned

out to be primarily interested in clubbing like twentysomethings with

infinite money. Rosedale told me he thought the landscape of Second

Life would be hyper-fantastic, artistic, and insane-full of spaceships

and bizarre topographies, Burning Man on virtual steroids-but what

emerged looked more like Malibu. People were building mansions and

Ferraris. "We first build what we most covet," he told me, and cited

an early study by Linden Lab that found the vast majority of Second

Life users lived in rural rather than urban areas. They came to Second

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Life for what their physical lives lacked: the concentration, density, and

connective potential of urban spaces-the sense of things happening all

around them, and the possibility of being part of that happening.

Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Tancred joined Second Life in 2007, after his corporate headhunting company folded during the reces-sion. Jonas was graying and middle-aged, a bit paunchy, but his avatar,

Bara Jonson, was young and muscled, with spiky hair and a soulful vibe.

What Jonas found most compelling about Second Life was not that it let

him role-play a more attractive alter ego; it was that Second Life gave

him the chance to play music, a lifelong dream he'd never followed. (He

would eventually pair up with Malin Osth to form the duo Bara Jonson

and Free.) Offiine, Jonas might stand in front of a kitchen table covered

with a checkered oilcloth, playing an acoustic guitar connected to his

computer. But in Second Life, Bara would be rocking out in front of a

crowd of supermodels and Mohawked bikers.

Before a performance one night, a woman showed up early and asked

him, "Are you any good?" He said, "Yes, of course," and played one of

his best gigs yet, just to back it up. This woman was Nickel Borrelly;

she would become his (Second Life) wife and eventually, a couple of

years later, the mother of his (real-life) child.

Offiine, Nickel was a younger woman named Susie who lived

in Missouri. After a surreal courtship full of hot-air-balloon rides,

romantic moonlit dances, and tandem biking on the Great Wall of

China, the pair had a Second Life wedding on Twin Hearts Island-at

"12 p.m. SLT," the electronic invitations said, which meant noon

Standard Linden Time. During their vows, Bara called it the most

important day of his life. He did not specify which life he meant, or if

the truth of his statement reached across both of them.

After he and Nickel got married, Bara's Second Life musical career

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started to take off. Eventually he was offered the chance to come to New

York to make a record, one of the first times a Second Life musician had

secured a real-life record deal. It was on that trip that Jonas finally met

Susie offiine. When their relationship was featured in a documentary a

few years later, she described her first impression: "Man, he looks kinda

old." But she said that getting to know him in person felt like "falling

in love twice."

Susie and Jonas's son, Arvid, was born in 2009. By then Jonas was

back in Sweden because his visa had run out. While Susie was in the

delivery room, he was in his club on Second Life-at first waiting for

news, and then smoking a virtual cigar. For Susie, the hardest part was

the day after Arvid's birth, when the hospital was full of other fathers

visiting their babies. What could Susie and Jonas do? Bring their avatars

together to cook a virtual breakfast in a romantic enclave by the sea,

holding steaming mugs of coffee they couldn't drink, looking at actual

videos of their actual baby on a virtual television, while they reclined

on a virtual couch.

Susie and Jonas are no longer romantically involved, but Jonas is

still part of Arvid's life. He Skypes with them frequently and visits the

States as often as he can. Jonas believes that part of the reason he and

Susie have been able to maintain a strong parenting relationship in the

aftermath of their separation is that they got to know each other so well

online before they met. In this framing, Second Life wasn't an illusion

but a conduit that allowed them to understand each other better than a

real-life courtship would have. Jonas describes Second Life as a rarefied

version of reality, rather than a shallow substitute for it. As a musician,

he feels that Second Life hasn't changed his music but "amplified" it,

enabling a more direct connection with his audience, and he loves the

way fans can type their own lyrics to his songs. He remembers everyone

"singing along" to a cover he performed of"Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm"

by the Crash Test Dummies, when so many people typed the lyrics that

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their Mmms eventually filled his entire screen. For Jonas, the reality and

beauty of his creations-the songs, the baby-have transcended and

overpowered the vestiges of their virtual construction.

0 f the more than thirty-six million Second Life accounts that had been created by 2013, only an estimated six hundred thousand people still regularly use the platform. (Approximately two hundred

thousand more people try out the platform each month but don't come

back.) That's a lot of users who turned away. What happened? Au sees

the simultaneous rise of Facebook and the plateau in Second Life users

as proof that Linden Lab misread public desires. "Second Life launched

with the premise that everyone would want a second life " Au told me ' ) "but the market proved otherwise."

When I asked Rosedale whether he stood behind the predictions he'd

made during the early years of Second Life-that the locus of our lives

would become virtual, and that the physical world would start to seem

like a museum-he didn't recant. Just the opposite: he said that at a

certain point we would come to regard the real world as an "archaic,

lovable place" that was no longer crucial. "What will we do with our

offices when we no longer use them?" he wondered. "Will we play racquetball in them?"

I pressed him on this. Did he really think that certain parts of the

physical world-the homes we share with our families for example ) '

or the meals we enjoy with our friends, our bodies leaning close across

tables-would someday cease to matter? Did he really believe that our

corporeal selves weren't fundamental to our humanity? I was surprised

by how rapidly he conceded. The sphere of family would never become

obsolete, he said, or the physical home, where we choose to spend time

with the people we love. "That has a more durable existence," he said.

"As I think you'd agree."

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* * *

A licia Chenaux lives on an island called Bluebonnet, a quaint for-ested enclave, with her husband, Aldwyn (Al), to whom she has been married for six years, and their two daughters: Abby, who is eight,

and Brianna, who is three, although she used to be five, and before that

she was eight. As a family, they live their days as a parade of idyllic

memories, often captured as digital snapshots on Alicia's blog: scouting

for jack-o' -lantern candidates at the pumpkin patch, heading to Greece

for days of swimming in a pixilated sea. It's like a digital Norman Rock-

well painting, an ideal of upper-middle-class American domesticity-

an utterly unremarkable fantasy, except that Abby and Brianna are both

child avatars played by adults.

When Alicia discovered in her early thirties that she couldn't have

biological children, she fell into a prolonged depression. But Second

Life has offered her a chance to be a parent. Her virtual daughter

Abby endured a serious trauma in real life at the age of eight ( the

specifics of which Alicia doesn't feel the need to know), so she plays

that age to give herself the chance to live it better. Brianna was raised

by nannies in real life-her parents weren't particularly involved in

her upbringing-and she wanted to be part of a family in which she'd

get more hands-on parenting. Perhaps that's why she kept wanting to

get younger.

Alicia and her family are part of a larger family-role-play community

on Second Life, facilitated by adoption agencies where children and

potential parents post profiles and embark on "trials," during which

they live together to see whether they are a good match. Sara Skinner,

the would-be founder of a virtual black-history museum, told me about

parenting a four-year-old son played by a man deployed in the armed ser-

vices overseas. He often logged on with a patchy connection, just to hang

out with Sara for a few hours while his service flickered in and out.

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Sometimes adoptive parents will go through a virtual pregnancy, using

"birth clinics" or accessories called "tummy talkers," package kits that

supply a due date and body modifications, including the choice to make

the growing fetus visible or not; as well as play-by-play announcements

("Your baby is doing flips!") and the simulation of a "realistic delivery,"

along with a newborn-baby accessory. For Second Life parents who go

through pregnancy after adopting in-world, it's usually with the under-

standing that the baby they are having is the child they have already

adopted. The process is meant to give both parent and child the bond

of a live birth. "Really get morning sickness," one product promises.

"Get aches." Which means being informed that a body-that-is-not-

your-corporeal-body is getting sick. "You have full control over your

pregnancy, have it EXACTLY how you want," this product advertises,

which does seem to miss something central to the experience: that it

subjects you to a process largely beyond your control.

In real life, Alicia lives with her boyfriend, and when I ask whether he

knows about her Second Life family, she says, "Of course." Keeping it

a secret would be hard, because she hangs out with them on Second Life

nearly every night of the week except Wednesday. (Wednesday is what

she calls "real-life night," and she spends it watching reality television

with her best friend.) When I ask Alicia whether she gets different

things from her two romantic relationships, she says, "Absolutely." Her

boyfriend is brilliant but he works all the time; Al listens to her ramble

endlessly about her day. She and Al knew each other online for two

years before they got married ( she says his "patience and persistence"

were a major part of his appeal), and she confesses that she was a

"total control freak" about their huge Second Life wedding. In real

life, the man who plays Al is a bit older than Alicia-fifty-one to her

thirty-nine, with a wife and family-and she appreciates that he has

a "whole lifetime of experiences" and can offer a "more conservative,

more settled" perspective.

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After their Second Life wedding, everyone started asking whether

Alicia and Al planned to have kids. (Some things remain constant across

virtual and actual worlds.) They adopted Abby in 2013 and Brianna a

year later, and these days their family dynamic weaves in and out of

role-play. When Brianna joined their family, she said she wanted more

than "just a story," and sometimes the girls will interrupt role-play to

say something about their adult lives offiine: guy trouble or job stress.

But it's important to Alicia that both of her daughters are "committed

children," which means they don't have alternate adult avatars. While

Alicia and Al share real-life photos with each other, Alicia told me,

"the girls generally don't share photos of themselves, preferring to keep

themselves more childlike in our minds."

For Christmas a few years ago, Al gave Alicia a "pose stand,"

which allows her to customize and save poses for her family: she

and Al embracing on a bench, or him giving her a piggyback ride.

Many of Alicia's blog posts show a photograph of her family looking

happy, often accompanied by a note at the bottom. "Btw, if you want

to buy the pose I used for this picture of us," one says, "I put it up

on Marketplace." In another post, beneath a photograph of her and

Al sitting on a bench, surrounded by snowy trees, cuddling in their

cozy winter finery, Alicia admits that she took the photo after Al had

gone to bed. She logged his avatar hack on and posed him to get the

photo just as she wanted.

To me, posing illuminates both the appeal and the limits of family

role-play on Second Life. It can be endlessly sculpted into something

idyllic, but it can never be sculpted into something that you have not

sculpted. Though Alicia's family dynamic looks seamless-a parade of

photogenic moments-a deep part of its pleasure, as Alicia described

it to me, seems to involve its moments of difficulty: when she has

to stop the girls from bickering about costumes or throwing tantrums

about coming home from vacation. In a blog post, Alicia confesses

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that her favorite time each evening is the "few minutes" she gets alone

with Al, but even invoking this economy of scarcity-appealing for

its suggestion of obligation and sacrifice-feels like another pose lifted

from real-world parenting.

Last year Alicia and Al adopted two more children, but found it

problematic that the new kids wanted "so much, so fast." They wanted

to call Alicia and Al "Mom" and "Dad" right away, and started saying

"I love you so much" from the very beginning. They had a desire

for intense, unrelenting parenting, rather than wanting to weave in

and out of role-play, and they constantly did things that demanded

attention-losing their shoes, jumping off the roof, and climbing trees

they couldn't get down from. Basically they behaved more like actual

kids than like adults pretending to be kids. The adoption lasted only

five months.

There's something stubbornly beautiful about Alicia's Second Life

family, all four of these people wanting to live inside the same dream.

And there's something irrefutably meaningful about the ways Alicia

and her children have forged their own version of the intimacies they've

been denied by circumstances. But their moments of staged friction ( the

squabbling, the meltdowns) also illuminate the claustrophobia of their

family's perfection. In their ability to court the ideals of domesticity

too easily, Second Life families effectively short-circuit much of the

difficulty that constitutes domestic life. Your virtual family will never

fully reach beyond your wildest imagining, because it's built only of

what you can imagine.

0 ~e evening duri~g the earliest days of ~y Second Life ~?lora-tion, I stood with my husband outside a barbecue Jomt in (offiine) Lower Manhattan and asked him: "I mean, why isn't Second

Life just as real as 'real life'?" At first, he said nothing. He just reached

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over and pinched my arm. (Quite hard, actually.) Then he said: "That's

why it's not as real."

His point wasn't just about physicality-the ways our experiences

are bound to our bodies-but about surprise and disruption. So

much of lived experience is composed of what lies beyond our agency

and prediction, beyond our grasp, beyond our scripts. So much

dwells in surprise, in otherness, in missteps and unforeseen obstacles

and the textures of imperfection: the grit and grain of a sidewalk

with its cigarette butts and faint summer stench of garbage and taxi

exhaust, the possibility of a rat scuttling from a pile of trash bags, the

lilt and laughter of nearby strangers' voices. Second Life promises

another reality but can't fully deliver the rifts and fissures that give

reality its grain. In Second Life, landscapes often look like Thomas

Kinkade paintings, sex exists in the imagination, parenting happens

when you choose to log on. A 2011 study found that people attributed

more idealized personality traits to their Second Life partners than

to their offiine partners-ranking them higher in extroversion, con-

scientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. Intimacy between two

avatars isn't "unreal," but its reality is different from what happens

when two people find themselves enmeshed in a relationship in the

physical world-when the self has to stand behind the words she

has spoken or the secrets she has disclosed, when she has to inhabit

the daily constancy of her home.

In the perfected landscapes of Second Life, I kept remembering

what a friend had once told me about his experience of incarceration.

Having his freedom taken from him meant not only losing access

to the full range of the world's possible pleasures, but also losing

access to the full range of his own possible mistakes. Maybe the price

of a perfected world, or a world where you can ostensibly control

everything, is that much of what strikes us as "experience" comes

from what we cannot forge ourselves, and what we ultimately cannot

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abandon. Alice and Bridgette already know this, of course. They live

it every day.

In Second Life, as elsewhere online, aft stands for "away from

keyboard," and during the course of his ethnographic research, Tom

Boellstorff sometimes heard residents saying that "they wished they

could 'go afk' in the actual world to escape uncomfortable situations, but

knew that this was not possible; 'no one ever says "afk" in real life.'"

This sentiment inspired what Boellstorff calls the "afk test": "If you can

go 'afk' from something, that something is a virtual world." Perhaps

the inverse of the afk test is a decent definition of what constitutes

reality: something you can't go afk from-not forever, at least. Philip

Rosedale predicted that the physical world would become a kind of

museum, but how could it? It's too integral to our humanity ever to

become obsolete, too necessary to these imperfect, aching bodies we

use to lumber through it.

Did I find wonder in Second Life? Absolutely. When I sat in a wicker

chair on a rooftop balcony, chatting with the legally blind woman who

had built herself a house overlooking the crashing waves of Cape Seren-

ity, I found it moving that she could see the world of Second Life better

than our own. When I rode horses through a virtual Yosemite, I knew

that the woman leading me through the pines had spent years on dis-

ability, isolated from the world, before she found a place where she no

longer felt sidelined. That's what is ultimately liberating about Second

Life-not its repudiation of the physical world, but its entwinement

with that other world, their fierce exchange. Second Life recognizes the

ways that we often feel more plural and less coherent than the world

allows us to be.

Some people call Second Life escapist, and often its residents

argue against that. But for me the question isn't whether Second Life

involves escape. The more important point is that the impulse to escape

our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life

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always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it-through day-

dreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music,

hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving"

aren't the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its

symptoms-the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance,

and faith contains doubt.

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