Second Life

‘Just log in,’ I heard my friend say, ‘if you still don’t like it, log out again.’
There was a pause, then I heard a woman crying. Even though I did not know the reason for her sorrow, I could feel it penetrate me. It was a poignant moment and I remembered clearly why I had quit the game last time. My friend, who was standing next to me, nudged me impatiently and reminded me that she had a mission to complete and if I was going to help her at all we needed to get going.
‘We’re in a hospital,’ she said, ‘this is where it always starts, have you forgotten?’
‘It’s been a long time, and I don’t remember seeing her. Her tears; she is so sad. Don’t you want to know why she’s crying or for whom?’ I asked moving a little and looking around.
‘Oh please,’ she laughed, ‘stop acting like such a noob! This is a game and new patches are being put in all the time. If a person doesn’t have the tattoo on them they’re just a NPC.’
I looked at the character a little closer, searching for the tattoo that would tell me that her sorrow was not real and that my compassion was unnecessary. Two men entered carrying a bloodstained stretcher on which lay a body that was shrouded in white. On seeing them, the woman shrieked and fell to the ground sobbing as if her heart was truly broken. ‘They have really taken you this time!’ she cried. ‘Why have they done this to me? What have I done to deserve this? You were a brave soldier, you did everything you could, but now you leave me grieving on my own.’ I thought her lines were a little too cheesy and started to feel that I may be over-reacting.
One of the men asked, ‘Is it all right if we put the body on the floor?’
The distraught woman looked at him in a confused manner. She seemed unable to understand what she had just heard, as if the suggestion was either too ludicrous or her mind was in another place. I was equally surprised by such a suggestion and completely related to her confusion. The subtlety and appropriateness of her reaction made me question again whether she was indeed only computer generated or a real player. There were no tattoos. My friend burst into raucous laughter, which I thought would have been very inappropriate if the situation had been real, and would have been too if the woman was also a player because once a character in the game died, it was dead for good. That was why I didn’t like the game. If this was all a game, why did things have to get so serious? And, if it was only for fun, why couldn’t some things be less complicated, less realistic?
A few hours in the game could seem like a lifetime. Relationships could progress quickly, without fear of inconvenient consequences, and many achievements were easily obtainable for those who felt that real life wasn’t regularly rewarding them with things to brag about. In the game, the impatient did not have to have their patience tested and the reckless were often rewarded for the flare that they had for living a second life that was less ordinary.  What people loved about the game was that it opened a whole new world where looks no longer counted, age did not matter and conscience was unimportant. The only thing that mattered was your imagination and how far you could stretch it.
My friend’s ‘mission’, what she wanted me to help her with, was to earn enough gold to ‘marry’ the ‘man of her dreams’. She had been seeing a ‘skier’, a person who had earned all the titles for all the skiing events ever held and who could also ski most of the online players to shame. She wanted to impress him with achievements of her own and since she was good at making money, she decided that she was going to try and become a millionaire. In order to do that, she needed a few ‘reliable’ friends and I happened to be one of them in real life.
At first I thought he was a NPC. Without actually seeing a tattoo, it is very difficult to tell if a character is a real person, since humans could behave like machines as the number of possible actions is controlled to a degree and some behaviour can seem repetitive. However, the reactions of a computer generated character are similar to those of humans because they are limitless, like a person’s response to something may vary according to his personal history and where he is at that moment in time, so the slightest change in a character’s mood or his previous actions leading up to the point where two particular characters interact could trigger a myriad of responses. To make second-guessing a very difficult task, all characters are affected by kaleidoscopic ‘moods’ that occur randomly like the numbers of a lottery. In other words, it is often impossible to predict whether the interaction between one character and another is purely human or human and machine, since there is no pattern to calculate which is which. Hence the ‘realism’ and the ‘apparent’ fun.  To enter a world so similar to life, live it as you please, and not reap the certain consequences of real living. To gamble for fame, fortune or even love, without fear of winning or losing, was tempting to a lot of people who worked hard to maintain a secure, if also sterile, real life. Play itself was the name of the game.
His name was Lancelot and it should all have been good innocuous, virtual fun. He was an excellent warrior and chivalrous like his namesake. If virtual characters could be taken seriously as manifestations of true heroes then he was without a doubt a hero and I somehow got to experience Guinevere’s bittersweet love. It was a pleasure completing missions with his help; I enjoyed chatting to him and receiving messages and gift-wrapped items in the mail. What worried me slightly was the sheer amount of time he spent in-game, even computer generated characters were programmed to log off and be unavailable every so often, but he seemed to be online practically all the time. This made me think he was either a computer and didn’t have a real life to attend to or he was a real person who had no life beyond his machine. So, when he asked me out I accepted. What was the harm? This was a game. He might even be just a computer program. My life was secure, I was a university lecturer without a nine-to-five job, my husband encouraged me to play the game and use it as a de-stressing tool; when my children were in school I had plenty of free time, and it was a good feeling to see how naturally and quickly I completed missions and overcame challenges. In a word, I got addicted; but what was worse, I fell in love. I started having an emotional affair. Slowly, the game took over my life and started to affect the real people around me. I found it hard to concentrate on my teaching, stopped preparing meals for my family, rarely went out to meet friends and got irritable when I couldn’t be online to live a virtual life that seemed more important than the one I was truly in.
I’m in love with him, my heart told me.
But he’s not real, my mind jeered.
I should meet him, said my heart.
How? my mind shot back, you don’t even know if he’s real!
It’s true, my heart cried.
My heart played tug with my mind for many weeks and I agonised at the idea of falling in love with something as surreal as a computer character. I had no idea how to escape that limbo and I knew that sooner or later either my heart or my mind would have to give. Every time I met Lancelot in our virtual heroic world I would face a barrage of ill-formed questions about TRUTH. What did I really know about him? In fact, did I really want to know? He said he wasn’t computer generated that he had a tattoo, but he had chosen to put it in a place where only his ‘wife’ would see. If I really loved him as he loved me, then I should marry him. So, I did.
He said he was twenty four and in college. I had told him I was twenty eight, indeed which woman wouldn’t lie about their age if they could, and what was plus or minus five years here and there? I had also told him I was single. At the time it had all seemed harmless and irrelevant, but now I wasn’t so sure. He told me his real name was Dylan, was it true? Hadn’t he also introduced me to his other ten online characters going by the various names of Moby, Z, Peter, Ganesh, Setsuko, Kenya and even Hermione, for god’s sake. He said he wanted to meet up. How I could possibly toy with the idea of meeting a person who, it may be true, had desperately wanted to marry me on cyberspace, but to whom I had also told a bunch of lies? I had let my avatar marry a man in another dimension and now the real me wanted to know the impossible. Could it be only my avatar that was in love, obviously not. I was in love, but, with someone else’s avatar? And what about him, could he really desire the real me? I wasn’t everything I had told him I was and I certainly was nothing like my gun-toting character.
A few days before Christmas, I finally agreed to meet him. He had pleaded like a child on Santa’s knee and I did not have the heart to say no. The only request I had was that I be the one to identify and approach him. At 3pm, we would meet at a cafe that neither of us had been to and he would wear a red scarf.
Being a teacher and someone who needed to be punctual, I was sitting at the window of the cafe by 2pm. I wanted to familiarise myself with the environment because I knew that I was more than liable to pull out at the last minute because of my nerves. Every person, male and female, that walked by with a red scarf sent my spine crawling. You know just how to steel yourself, I kept reminding myself, imagine walking into a new class at the start of term or imagine what it is like to talk to a room of strangers at a conference.
The cafe was very warm and the sun shone brightly outside, the only way to tell that it was a freezing winter’s day was the amount of clothes that people were wearing and the white plumes that they displayed between their teeth. For fifty years it had not snowed in the city, but unbelievably and almost imperceptibly it started to. I sat up in my chair and watching spellbound completely forgot what I was waiting for. I strained my eyes to catch the little specks, but soon they turned into the size of cotton balls falling like pieces of a cloud from the blue sky. From amongst the crowd I saw a boy with a comic book tucked under his arm and his eyes turned heavenwards; even from a distance I could see the glow in his eyes lit by his wondering smile; he could not have been more than sixteen. His dark hair curled around his ears and down his neck, his skin was smooth and had not come under the razor, his lips were beautifully formed and almost girlish in its pinkness. He bounced on his heels with the energy of an adolescent but stooped slightly lacking the confidence of a grown man. Without really looking, he niftily weaved through the crowds and politely held the door open for me as I left the cafe. I didn’t need the confirmation of the red scarf, I knew it was him. He looked into my eyes and I caught a distant flicker of recognition that quickly mingled with unbridled youthful desire, before I walked by without looking back.
He was the most beautiful child I have ever met. I could not bear to know his disappointment, which was why I committed character suicide. But, for him, I broke my heart.
When my friend asked me to restart the game again, it was not without a lot of convincing. I knew that computer generated characters were all over the place, but I couldn’t play anymore with the uncertainty of their possible humanity. Every character, their every act and every word goaded me to evaluate their authenticity. I knew to what extent it was possible to bond with a character in-game, to what extent mental and emotional attachment was a human weakness. There was no turning back once the mind or the heart was set. This chasm between humanity and machines I did not want to bridge too soon.
‘Kiss him, quickly!’ My friend shouted.
A little harmless fun had come at a great sense of personal loss. I had hurt myself and I didn’t want to do that to someone else too. Besides, I thought, if the man in front of me was real wouldn’t I look like a real ass kissing him for no reason? What chain of reactions might I set off? That kind of frivolity simply wasn’t a part of my personality, either in-game or in reality.
‘What if he’s real?’ I asked.
‘What? Are you stupid? He’s butt-naked and do you see any tattoos? This is computer generated, he’s a rare. How many times have you ever seen a naked guy running around? He’ll drop a great item, bag him! Quick!’
There’s not enough ethics to this game I thought as I ran to kiss him.
He had heard what my friend said and gestured me to stop. ‘I can’t do this again,’ he said, ‘I have a wife and three children.’ He looked sad and sounded genuinely guilty. Wait. A thought started to niggle at the back of my mind. Maybe it is thinking and feeling that generates human actions. But even if this character wasn’t really human, couldn’t the actions and reactions of a computerized character point to its own kind of emotions and mindset? Couldn’t it be simply answering to a different kind of conscience?