The Normals
Chapter 2 of:
Abuse, Sex and Addiction in Online Communities
Copyright Lee Baldwin 2009
@ArtOfSilence
Sleep
“It is 11 pm in Hawaii. Asleep in bed, my eyes snap open. Where are my friends? What are they doing? What has been posted in the forums? Who is on now?
“As these thoughts pass through my head, I am not thinking about people I know in real life, I am thinking of people I know only as avatars in an online chat environment known as IMVU (an avatar-based social network and virtual world).
“It is seven hours before I need to get up, but my friend in Australia will be on now. I so love spending time with her. I drag myself to my computer, switch it on. I can nap later. If I’m tired in the morning, I’ll get someone to fill my shift at work. But my day has begun.
“Lately I cannot sleep more than 4 or 5 hours. I wake up in a state of blissful anxiety, ready to see what is happening in the online world I occupy whenever I can make time. How much time? Usually I can manage six hours a day, but I have done twice that in a day more times than I can remember. I do mean every day, seven days a week. My online life has become my only life.
“I have IMVU friends in a dozen time zones around the world. I have a time zone map I look at when I come on, to know what time it is in various places, the UK, Europe, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia. The U.S. is easy because I live in Hawaii, 3 hours to the West Coast (2 in the winter), 3 to Arizona, 6 to New York, Florida, South Carolina…
“There she is, I see her on and send an invite, the day begins. It is 11:20 pm for me, in IMVU it is no time and anytime… “
~ StephanieStarlite, May 2, 2009
This is Normal?
Why begin a chapter extolling normalcy with an extreme example? First, this statement from a chat player is in fact fairly typical. Throughout the worlds of online avatar chat, it is common for players to mention that they have not slept, that they will catch a nap later, that they have taken a personal day or called in sick at work. Being heavily distracted by one’s online existence is the new normal at least.
A Brief History of Avatar Chat
The most basic element of online avatar chat is instant messaging or IM. IM has been around for two decades, and is these days exemplified by MSN, Yahoo, and similar popular chat clients. The client (messaging software) that runs on your PC can be aware of which of your contacts (buddies, friends, etc.) are currently signed on, and can display whatever typed messages are sent to you, literally within seconds of when your correspondent keys them in and clicks the SEND button.
IM is virtually immediate. Unlike email, you don’t have to wait and reload your mail client to see new messages. You can carry on a full conversation in real time, no matter where you or your chat partner are located.
In the beginning, or almost so, was The Sims, which began as a stand-alone computer game, but grew into an online multi-player version and a way of life for some. First shipped in early 2000, The Sims and its various titles have become a cultural phenomenon, the best selling PC game of all time. Largely the work of one designer, Will Wright, the first version, SimCity, let players act as a combination of mayor, city planner, and creator of the universe. An early title was SimAnt, where players controlled ants in an ant colony, performing the social and constructive activities ants engage in. SimAnt provided one of the first controllable avatars.
Later with SimTown, players could create and manage specific Sims, or avatars, that explore the town. This was a departure, as these Sims had customizable personalities (clothes, favorite foods and personal mottoes). The individual placement of buildings, roads, and gardens, plus random disasters and other problems, was a generative idea leading to future avatar worlds.
In The Sims you build a home, add landscaping with swimming pools and gardens, then live there, having conversations, creating characters, families and careers, developing friends and relationships.
The game spawned online discussion forums where players shared what they were doing with their various Sims versions. This online fan community spawned the idea of taking The Sims game environment online, where your Sim or avatar could interact with other Sims controlled by other real people over the Internet, literally around the world.
This development made of The Sims a massively multi-player online role play game (MMORPG), still with Wright’s goals of rewarding player creativity and emphasizing the social community. The Sims Online came out in 2002, allowing people anywhere to play a game where a real person motivates and makes decisions for every Sim. Sims meet, chat, and explore in multiple environments designed to some extent by the players themselves, including houses, night clubs, jungles, beaches, airplanes, and so on, all while chatting with other real players through their Sims avatar.
So the fusion of IM and avatars in visual environments through The Sims and other games, mostly first-person shooter (FPS) games, evolved into various chat themes. There is a complex taxonomy of computer games, including online games. Most people are aware of the FPS games, where the player controls an avatar that basically tries to blow up everything in sight. The 3D avatar chat worlds are sometimes termed Text Role Play (TRP), or online text-based role playing games. Both FPS and TRP are MMPORGs, but the text role play has little to do with keeping score and is much more social, where conversation and social interplay are the core values and activities. Chat sites seem to fit the general description of autonomous role play wish fulfillment fantasy.
Where is Virtual Reality, Really?
MMPORPGs (sometimes abbreviated as MMO) are not necessarily games per se and are not exclusive to personal computers. The PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii and others can access the Internet and may therefore run MMO games. The Apple iPhone plus mobiles and smartphones running Windows Mobile and Google’s Android have MMO games available and in development. So in this sense, virtual reality is becoming pocket-sized and more ubiquitous, perhaps heading toward the wireless, molecular-level ‘Nanex’ posited in the 2009 film, Gamer.
Online Avatar Chat Sites and Environments
Chat environment, chat site or service, chat URL, host company and so on are interchangeable labels for what has historically been called a chat room. There is a long list of chat sites available on such services as chatterhead.net. Some of the foremost in quality and popularity are Second Life, Red Light Chat, IMVU, Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, Maple Story, and so on. Online avatar chat is an immersion rather than a game, not played so much as experienced, and popular due to its autonomous role play nature. In avatar chat, people become accustomed to projecting the needs of their personalities into a new social structure. Those needs can be anything imaginable, from ordinary fun-loving chat about RL topics (politics, entertainment, sports, etc.) to fulfilling every human desire, whatever that may come to mean.
IMVU as an Example
IMVU, Second Life, etc. somewhat resemble The Sims Online mixed with social networking aspects such as MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and so on. On IMVU for example there are four basic actions: use the IM client to exchange typed messages in real time, conversing with other players; interact on a simulated physical level, by moving your avatar to one of many locations in the scene; participate in the social network by inviting others to be your friend, exchanging private messages and gifts in the form of clothing, homes, furniture and so on; contributing to group forum discussions.
The Kinds of Problems Chat Can Solve
Avatar chat does facilitate social situations for several classes of players. Someone who is crippled or disabled can get by perfectly well in an online environment. Players often confide that they are shy in normal social encounters, and these people can overcome that shyness in avatar chat as no one can see their hesitations or failings. People who are unhappy with their physical appearance can interact on the same level as anyone else within the game, and the same can be said of a long list of social difficulties from acne to deafness and body odor.
In Second Life (SL) there is a scene called “Wheelies”, a focus for disability issues, coined for people in wheel chairs. Some create SL avatars completely unlike their RL selves, while others’ avatars represent the truth. This opens possibilities for those who struggle with mobility and dexterity. I’ve heard of one avatar ‘team’ comprising several disabled patients and one caregiver, who handles inworld navigation and speaking (typing).
While IM activity is often based on existing workgroups, friends and acquaintances, avatar chat is quite inclusive, and a player can, through the persona of the avatar, develop a group of friends or pseudo friends who don’t care who is behind the avatar so long as the persona is a match and the conversation and ongoing relationships are interesting. This can become quite riveting for players who feel isolated or disaffected in RL. Their online life and friendships take on much more importance, pushing online play beyond a mere compulsion to an outright need.
Chat rooms generally facilitate meeting like-minded others. A player’s small town or restrictive moral or social context may prevent contact with those interested in roles and behaviors such as bow hunting, race car chassis tuning, homosexuality, or darker role play such as vampirism or lycanism, submission and domination, transgender and so forth. In the online world with millions of participants it is generally easy to place those attributes in a search profile and be matched instantly with others who may share your particular dream, nightmare, or hallucination.
The best virtual worlds provide the ability to create unique avatars and living spaces. To keep virtual visitors coming back, sites must also offer compelling activities, such as games or competitions with other avatars. For the host network, it is all about increasing the allure, and thereby income. What makes avatar chat unique is lack of particular goal or quest; people simply form social fabrics in real time and participate in them.
Ordinary People
Alright, if you are like most you’re ready to skip to the sections on abuse, domination, sex, and addiction. After all, what is life without drama? That will be fine, but those discussions will be more clearly rendered if there is first a good grounding in what passes for ‘normal’ in avatar chat.
On the surface avatar chat is just… chat. However, in environments like Second Life, Red Light Chat, Vivaty, IMVU and the many others, the scene trappings and appearance of the avatars, the dress, hair, makeup and so on are powerful visual cues to the persona the player is wishing to project. Even with the lightest commitment, these environments are immersive wish fulfillment fantasies. If you or I can chat from perfect puppets, we can create perfect lives for ourselves as well, whch underlines the autonomous role play aspect.
But why am I present in a chat environment? Am I interested in meeting and learning about other people, or am I interested in impressing others with my fabulous existence? Many folks desire the former, meeting others, and the Internet’s many motifs including email, forums, IM and avatar chat provide means to interact with others who share your interests, no matter how small your local community or how specialized your focus. There are tens of millions of people online at this moment engaged in chat and many would be interested to discuss your topic.
Where it begins to get sticky for some is simply the ability to elaborate the personality, to create and project an improved persona to other people. That is the center of the compulsion and addiction discussions we will engage later.
Friends
It is not necessarily easy to make friends in online chat, though the mechanics appear simple enough. You talk to others randomly, topics and opinions come up, bonds are made, or not, and everyone moves on. It requires a fair amount of work to identify each new friend. You can set search criteria for random chat partners including age, gender, general interests, location, language spoken and so forth, but that will not guarantee a mesh of personality or of interests. People who respond to your random chat invitation may not be aware that they have been selected randomly by the system, so becoming oriented to one another takes a fair bit of doing. As in parlor games, such as Pin the Tail on the Donkey or Twenty Questions, there is a generous amount of hit-or-miss.
But as you develop friendships and add them to your friends list (for easy location in later sessions) you begin to learn things about the chat environment, its language, cultural patterns and mores, and your persona may adjust to fit with the people you meet and take on as friends.
At some point – horror of horrors – you discover that some avatars are more popular than your avatar. How do they do that? How do they receive so many page visits, gifts, and have so many friends? This too can be an illusion. How well do you know the standards of that so-popular avatar? Have they merely placed every avatar they’ve spoken with on their friends list? Or have they taken the time to evaluate the quality of each relationship, and actually have things in common?
Popularity derives from a number of factors, and one is the avatar name. Naming one’s avi is a science in itself – it is the name appearing in the scene’s chat log that first establishes the essence and mystique of the persona. Most telling is the large number of avatar names that include the word sex, or references to sexual actions or body parts. Names such as bigmeat, hornypussy, sexygirl, sexigurl, sexxigurrl, smexygirll, sexyellen, 269kathie, etc. (Not real avatar names, so far as I know, but constructed from the usual parts and misspellings. Given the popularity of the root words, there eventually may be actual avatars going by such labels.) These names may suggest the mindset of the player. Or not. A rose by any other name…
Avatar naming is another illustration of how chat is accepted as autonomous role play by the participants. The lowest common denominators are physical appearance and sexual power. Since the coin of the realm is primarily words, players select and define their personas via description and naming. You see endless repetition of claims to be the ultimately sexiest person in the entire world. There are numerous claims of “No matter how hard you try you will never be me”, “I’m a bitch but I’m so damn lovable”. Of course there is the ever-popular, “Sorry I’m taken!” If these were in some way unique I would not quote them. All are cheap characterizations that attempt to illustrate their uniqueness, but after the 10th time you see the same idea expressed in near-identical words, it appears ludicrous and shallow.
Then there is the factor of time, the true coin of online life. Many who seem well connected are that way because they have been on for a year or more, and spend considerable time and cash online to maintain and grow those connections.
Relationships and Romance
As nearly any chat user will attest, the avatars and scenes may be an illusion on the monitor, but the emotions are all too real in person. People laugh and feel joy, experience loss and sorrow, and sometimes, somewhere at home, shed real tears. People find attraction, begin to experience affinity and bonds, and perhaps feelings of infuation and love.
It is relatively simple to declare another avi as somehow special to your own avi, declaring a personal relationship or admiration. It is another matter to declare one’s avi as married to another avi. There is no church, no city hall, no hall of records. But two people can invite friends’ avatars to a social function and call it a wedding, recite vows, and proceed from there as a married couple. Limited to the world of avatars, there is no cohabitation, no children (unless another player agrees to have their avatar act as adopted by the couple), no joint ownership of property, or any of the customary benefits or burdens of a joint life. At this juncture the autonomous role play becomes more structured, heading for more formal role play such as in a family or other interest group.
Indeed, being married as an avatar provides little actual restriction, there is plenty of freedom to roam around as though single, subject only to being caught out by a mutual friend. Do people create multiple avatar accounts do this purpose? Yes they do. I was aware of some with as many as five separate accounts.
Some of the other ways players can heighten their online relationships include using other IM clients, webcam (cam), phone, email (outside of the chatroom messaging), and f2f (face to face).
Some friends and couples use a secondary IM client simultaneously with their chatroom client so they can stay in sync. This separate channel fills the role of significant glances, kicks under the table, hand squeezes and so on, and is simply a private IM between the two. With this they can ‘mind read’ one another and so act more as a couple in the public chat.
Cam or Webcam is a direct form of visiting that can serve as a secondary channel while the avatars chat in public, or as a primary channel through which the players speak and view one another directly. Cam carries voice and video over IP, and can be taken over and the images viewed by hackers unless properly secured.
Phone or mobile texting is another supplementary channel that can be the primary channel when avatar chat is not possible, such as when the players are at work or with RL partners and families.
Face to face (f2f) meetings are of course the most fundamental. The friends have agreed to meet in RL and after this the avatar chat becomes secondary. If the meeting goes well and there is a relationship, the avatar chat may be simply the preferred way to stay in touch when distance intervenes. If the meeting does not go well then the avatar relationship may well cease to exist.
There are numerous stories of players meeting in RL that did not go well. I heard one story of a man who traveled hundreds of miles to meet his paramour, only to find her caring for an ex-husband who had just suffered a paralyzing stroke. The demands placed on the woman were so extreme that she ended the relationship on the spot. I heard of a couple who knew each other by avatar chat and phone. When one of them died, the other was contacted by the decedent’s family, and invited to the funeral several states away.
In many chat systems each avatar can add images to a personal photo gallery. Most commonly these are snaps of the avatar in various clothing or surroundings. Significantly, although less frequent, are those players who post actual photographs in their profiles. These players may be seeing the online experience more as a step toward RL hookups. The majority of players I chatted with did not mix the two. Occasionally there would be an exchange of email addresses or even phone numbers; providing location information is much more rare and quite risky… you don’t really know who you are talking to.
Needless to say there are many opportunities for predators to lure young or unsuspecting players to meetings that are not for the best. All chatrooms have some stated minimum age policies, although most are weakly enforced. And, most teens know very well how to get around such restrictions, how to lift mom’s credit card and so forth, and in general pose as adults in the online world.
Through one of my avatars I found myself chatting with several people who, while quite bright, did not seem the ages their profiles stated (22 and 23). After several chats, I got each of them to admit their real ages as from 13-15. (This may or may not have been the truth.) I told them to be careful and they seemed to know the risks and were completely self-confident in the avatar world. They were geographically separated over several southern states and had not known one another prior to playing on IMVU. They were, however, connected through other IM clients and phone and had plans to meet given an opportunity.
In usual circumstances, players can chat one-on-one, join public rooms and encounter whoever might be present at any time of the day or night, create public rooms devoted to some members-only interest group, show off their clothes, animations, music, furniture, and poses, and in general act like artificial people operated by real ones off stage, a kind of flat screen puppet show.
In the online world, the usual activity is a dress-up role play fantasy in which the players may resemble what they say about themselves in terms of gender, age, location, RL relationships, employment and social status, and a good deal more.
Or they may not. And that is normal.
These stories are all over the Internet, but this one in particular about a judge who called in sick after a night of intense gaming is an interesting glimpse.
Glossary this chapter
MMORPG: massively multi-player online role play game
MMO: abbreviation for MMORPG
FPS: First-person shooter game
TRP: Text role play (one categorization of avatar chat)
Partial list of avatar chat sites requiring no client download.
