Hyperrealities and Screens Within Screens

While I really enjoy picking random spots on the map and teleporting to them as a way of navigating and exploring SL, and while the ability to teleport makes this somewhat practical, it does get tedious traveling this way. The majority of sims I pick at random tend to be pretty boring, un-interesting, private (as in, I get ejected out of them) and/or soullessly commodified. So in an attempt to find more interesting places more effectively, I started using the search tool as a way of navigating. I try to keep it random by plugging in random words to see what comes up, and often the places that pop up will seemingly veer away from the search terms I enter, although in the end it is grouped by a non-random algorithm. But it is a good way of weeding out the places I’m definitely uninterested in going to, specifically, places centered around commerce. So far, I’ve been able to find a few interesting places this way. I’ve noticed my exploratory interests in SL are focused a lot on the sims themselves, as opposed to the social parts – in RL exploration, it’s much more of an equal balance. In particular, I like places that are visually interesting and interactive.

One of the places I found by using the search tool was an Alice in Wonderland theme park which I got really excited about (a hyperreality, within a hyperreality, within a hyperreality), only to be let down later. At the entrance of the park, you were instructed to take “the red pill” which allowed you to then access the rabbit hole. After falling through the rabbit hole however, there was little interactivity. Lots of statues based on the literary characters and some decent scenery, but I didn’t really like the visual interpretations of the characters and it was essentially a statue garden more than a amusement park. When I think of an RL theme park, it is by its nature interactive – there wasn’t even a ride at this park, although there were tracks that made me think there might be one somewhere. Eventually I got tired of looking around, and the feeling of being let down made me wonder what it was exactly that I expected from the park. I knew I had wanted it to be more interactive, but did I have expectations based on the story itself? Did I want to act out the adventure (and constructed narrative I so love) of Alice in Wonderland? Not that I didn’t have a reason to think that the park was somewhat lame, but it did make me wonder whether I was unconsciously seeking out a game-like experience in my use of SL; not only that, but what kind of game-like experience? I came to the conclusion that I did expect a game-like experience, not necessarily one like the videogame Alice which is fun but in the end constructed, but I guess something more like a hybrid experience of narrative and open-ended simulation – Hamlet on a malfunctioning Holodeck, to re-phrase Janet Murray.

Interestingly enough, the next place I went to after the park was the “Matrix,” the visual motif based of course on the film. Inside the Matrix, I sat on a talking chair that took me around on a tour matrix-style (I’m thinking movement wise); it told me what kinds of things you could do there, which wasn’t really that much. Basically you could dance (who would’ve thought?), watch TV, buy stuff, get free stuff from the different colored balls floating around, or parachute off the roof. The only thing I ended up doing was parachuting off the roof. Again, a bit of a let down although not quite as much since it wasn’t a theme park so much as a themed building. It was a tiny bit more populated than the theme park (which had been completely deserted), but as with most places I’ve been to in SL – not a lot of people.

Searching under the term “science” brought me to a little theater where you can watch episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I thought was pretty interesting, not just because the show is somewhat obscure but also because of the viewing dynamic. The show is about a guy and his robot friends who are forced to watch (mostly) bad sci-fi movies, and the episodes are comprised for the most part of them sitting in front of a screen watching the film and making culturally referential comments; so then, watching MST3k in SL is particularly interesting because you are essentially watching through 3 screens – the computer screen, the SL theater screen, and the theater screen within MST3k. A lot more could be said about this – perhaps later, but if I am making comparisons between this type of viewing and RL viewing, it begs the question of why I would watch MST3k in SL if I could watch it in RL on a much more visible-friendly screen. Regardless, I did watch almost an entire episode.

The Borgesian nature of my experiences in this session of SL (shifting realities, blurred boundaries, and mirrors, but minus the forking paths) was really fun, despite the disappointments. It only made me wish that SL fulfilled more of its potential – why create scarcity and boundaries? Why remove physical constraints, only to employ cultural ones? Ideally, I’d like to fly aimlessly from sim to sim without running into private property issues or commodified wastelands. I already navigate through search terms, directories and maps in RL – why should I have to do that in SL? I spent several hours in SL this time, stopping the session only because I had RL responsibilities to attend to.

~ by glycerine517 on October 10, 2007.