Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Home is Where the Heart Is

When I talk to friends who aren’t in Second life about Second life, the only question I get more frequently than “are those real people you’re talking to?”  is, “Why do you own a house?” 

Which got me to thinking….why do I own a house in Second life?  I’ve known people who don’t…they just set home to some public area and use public sandboxes to rez things.  As for myself, I own a couple of parcels, each of which has a house on it…none of which I ever use except to land at when I first login.  Truth be told, I actually don’t even land inside my houses. I land outside them on the patio or out in the yard.  I rarely go inside unless it’s to find something I can delete to save a few prims.  Other than that, the only time I really go into my Second life house is to show it to people. 
So why have a house?  There are a couple of obvious answers to this. I own a house in Second life so that I have a place to; change clothes; have friends over; rez things; build; have sex; chill out; to show my creative side.  But really, all of those things can be accomplished without owning land or a house of one’s own. 

If you’ve spent any time in Second life, then you’ve known people who didn’t have a house.  In my experience, these homeless avatars hover on the fringes of Second Life.  They never seem to develop connections or friends or a reason for being there.  Mostly these are people who are gone.  They left as quickly and quietly as they arrived.  While I’m not suggesting that owning a house would have kept them there, I think the fact that they didn’t has implications about why they left at all
Time and space are odd concepts in a virtual world.  Like everything else in Second Life, there are multiple definitions of time.  Each of us exists in two time zones, our own and Second Life time.  Each of us has the ability to control time there.  In a day that spans a brief 3 hours, if you don’t want it to be in nighttime, with just a few clicks you can change night to day.

In Second Life, our concept of reality and fantasy is continuously challenged.  We exist there and yet are not there.  The emotions  you feel and the people you meet are real but that pretty swirl of electrons that is your avatar vanishes as soon as you or they turn the power off.

In a world with so few real boundaries, I believe we are drawn to things that give our Second Life existence definition and meaning.  I believe our houses become connected to our identities in much the same way as our avatars do.

Houses give our Second lives form, definition and a base of operations.  They allow one to carve a small haven of normalcy out of a vast confusing grid.  They give you a place to impose your own stamp of order and meaning.  It’s your part of Second Life so it can look and feel however you want.  It’s your personal construction of reality.   It comes to represent you there, and in doing so, it becomes, in some odd way, the place that connects you most to Second Life and to other people. It's why we like to show them to people.  They allow us to share ourselves with others.   In some odd way, ones’ Second Life home truly does become the place where one’s heart is. 
















2 comments:

Unknown said...

Very good blog post Nick.
I love seeing other peoples homes. Maybe a part 2 and 3 are in order hehe!

Rocky Constantine said...

Great post. I am adding this to my feed reader. *tips hat to Ziggy* for alerting me to this one.

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About-me

Nicholas Patrono has been a denizen of Second Life Since January 2007.

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