Ordinarily Extraordinary

Filed under: Odds and Ends, Mixed Reality

People, people, people. It's all about the damn people. Second Life as a technology platform is almost incidental to what people do in it. Ordinary, undistinguished, normal people. People like you and me. If anything will make Second Life a success, it's the people. If anything will break the back of Second Life and drive it to ruin, it's the people.

"Second Life is a haven for furries."
"Second Life is a haven for goreans."
"Second Life is a haven for pedophiles."
"Second Life is a haven for the sexually perverse."
"Second Life is a haven for gamblers."
"Second Life is a haven for saddo drama queens."
"Second Life is a haven for gambling homosexual furry vampire gorean nazi lesbian child pornographers."

And so on, and so on.

In essence, Second Life is a haven for people. Real, ordinary, normal people. The folks you go to work with. The folks you live at home with. The folks who taught you in school. The folks who gave birth to you. The folks you see on the street or on the bus or on the train. The ones who serve you at the counters of your favorite stores.

Bob in accounts is gay. Julie on your customer support desk is a furry. Susan on the development team is into Gorean culture (so is Jeremy, the guy who comes to service the photocopier, but she doesn't know that). If you're surprised by what people do in virtual worlds, then you'd really be surprised by the interests of the people around you in your daily life.

You see, in the virtual worlds people are just being themselves. Sometimes they're being the self they're afraid to be in Real Life. Sometimes they're trying to figure out just who the heck they are. Wrapped up inside every psyche is a spark of greatness, like a treasured present wrapped in umpteen layers of wrapping paper, string and nigh-impervious gift-wrapping ribbon. Something extraordinary. We've all got our kinks and our quirks (and sometimes the quirk is that we can't see them in ourselves) and our odd bits of behavior.

It doesn't matter.

We're still all people, trying to make sense of ourselves, of each-other, and of the world (well, more than one world, these days). The only thing we can really get wrong is to objectify the others. To treat them as things. Props, scenery, background, props, tools, toys or targets. That's just not right. Not for you and not for them. It denies the capacity to be extraordinary in yourself and in others. And that's a damn shame.

As long as we treat each-other as people, we'll be okay, one way or another.

Postscript: The image above is from 1845 from "Old England: A Pictorial Museum". The accompanying text reads:

"We cannot greatly compliment our forefathers on the sport called mummings, in which men masqueraded as brutes; but it seems they were determined to have mirth, however they procured it. We, perhaps, err on the other hand, and may be too fastidious to be happy."

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