Fantasy Island

In case you missed it, there was an absolutely crazy Wall Street Journal feature earlier this month about online fantasy sites such as Second Life, where people create optimized cartoon versions of themselves (“avatars”), and use them to develop a fictional existence online. For the uninitiated, this isn’t porn or some sort of competition, but an “online, digital world, imagined, created, and owned by its residents.”

According to the Second Life website, nearly 9 million people participate, and a cool million have been “living” online in the last month. There are stats about “land sales” by residents, “islands” owned, metrics available in Excel spreadsheets. And it’s all bulls**t. Except that users spent $64 million on the site last year, according to the Journal. (Feel like a sucker yet?)

Until recently, the media has been besotted with Second Life and its ilk, publishing credulous trend stories, enamored of and celebrating the users who detach themselves from reality.

I’m usually loath to judge something I’ve not tried myself, but Second Life has all the hallmarks of full-grown pathology. The WSJ article describes its subject, Ric, as a middle-aged guy who, months into a new marriage, has lost all interest in his real life and spends hours a day engaging with others online in a fantasy life with an optimized version of himself. He has a fantasy spouse, fantasy business with fantasy employees, he earns fantasy dollars, and owns, wait, wait—a fantasy island! His real-life wife describes Second Life as escapism into an unreality free of aging, failure, and disappointment. Ric’s Second Life wife has good skin, big boobs, and wears fishnet shirts.

His real wife is ready to walk.

That there are folks out there who celebrate Second Life as part of their “lifestyle” or as a form of personal expression is an even stronger sign as to its perversity. I’m gonna sound like an old fogey, I know, but in a world where seniors sit lonely in old-age homes, kids lack attention in broken family units, pets sit caged in facilities waiting to be gassed, and virtually every good cause is wanting for volunteers, Second Life is a depressing sign of our national narcissism.

I know, I know, people read fiction, watch soap operas, role-play with their love interest. Second Life is something entirely different, because it has all the hallmarks of real life, except it isn’t.

Disney just bought a virtual-world site aimed at kids called Club Penguin for $350 million. It has 12 million kid-users who interact with other kids as cartoon penguins. If it’s a gateway to Second Life, I think I’d rather have my son looking at porn. At least he’s learning real-world skills.