Virtual Fashion Economy Helps Imaginary Life Suck, Too

I find that sentence confusing, too. If you want to depress yourself, think about how 15,000 people a week use their fantasy lives in a 3-D computer world to watch television—and the virtual television equivalent of The Home Shopping Network, at that. If you want to depress me, point out how that’s about 300 times the readership of my blog.


In real life she's an utterly empty shrew, too, but kind of fatter.

All this information—okay, not the last sentence—comes from a trend piece in today’s Times about luxury spending in virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com and IMVU. For those of you unfamiliar with the ever-narrowing canyon between geek and sexual fetish culture that is Second Life, it’s a free-form, virtual world in which players own land and consumer goods, run businesses, interact socially and otherwise live out lives of computer-modeled desperation through their avatars, which are invariably both disturbing and attractive in roughly the same way as Angelina Jolie. Membership in these sites is free, but the money you spend there—Lindens in Second Life, Therebucks in There—has to be purchased with actual United States currency. Which—especially after you hear that such virtual worlds enjoy economies whose “avatar-to-avatar transactions [are] estimated at between $1 billion and $2 billion a year in real dollars,”—begs a question: What?

Let’s not even get into why so many people are so fascinated by a world that, as near as I can tell, promises a slightly less visually realistic version of contemporary boredom. There are no goblins in Second Life, which baffles me. Why, when you went to all the trouble of constructing a three-dimensional virtual world in which players can live out richly-detailed fantasy lives, would you not fill it with ravenous goblins that those players can then hack to death with swords? Wouldn’t virtual—or for that matter real—Starbucks be exponentially better if sometimes right when you were paying for your caramel macchiato* a slavering hobgoblin burst through the plate-glass window, and you had to choke it to death with your money still clutched tightly in one hand as you stared into its bleary, ichor-stained eyes? This is roughly the same complaint I have against God, and I don’t understand why you would construct a world without regular and stunning acts of personal heroism/violence. Also it has been many weeks since I have known the touch of a woman, but that’s just a coincidence. Second life does not involve killing monsters, is what I’m saying here. Nor does it allow you to fly spaceships, or shoot a machine gun, or eat approximately 1,000 Kix while running from ghosts. It’s a game the same way Facebook is a game, in that it allows you to live out a simplified version of your real life in which you are approximately 15 percent more brave, because you know that you can delete yourself at any time.


Deleting yourself: You're doin' it wrong.

Yes, that’s true of real life as well, with the asterisk that when you delete your account in First Life, you can’t just sign up for a new one using your Hotmail address—or maybe you can, depending on your views on reincarnation and the afterlife, and here we go off to the theoretical races again. Second Life and its ilk are a pretty much bottomless trove of postmodernist speculation. If your plan for the afternoon is to use your time machine to go back to 1989 and talk to Jean Baudrillard, please make sure you didn’t accidentally leave a copy of today’s New York Times in there, because it will explode his brain. A virtual world in which virtual people have to go to virtual jobs in order to get enough fake money to kill time in virtual coffeeshops is just one more step on our road to a Completely Electronic Life, like in the Matrix or The Possibility of an Island or whatever, and I for one welcome our Virtual Age. I look forward to being part of that 1 percent of the population that is not morbidly obese and, while the rest of America is drinking Mountain Dew Code Red and talking about RobotBall via webcam, spends its time getting real handjobs in the woods. Second Life probably heralds the end of biological life as we know it, and I don’t care. What I want to know is why you would own 60 pairs of boots there.