[-empyre-] Being a Second Life newbie - uncanny interactions

[Kathy Cleland <kathy.cleland@arts.usyd.edu.au>]

As I mentioned in my first post, I'm still a bit of a newbie in SL and I 
find the whole experience alternately fascinating and frustrating. I can 
still remember the first time I entered Second Life and how clumsy and 
stupid I felt. Going into SL for the first time is a bit like entering a 
foreign country where you don't yet know the language and customs. You  
have to learn how to walk and how to get around in this new environment 
- there are menus and keyboard shortcuts to learn - it's not simple and 
it takes work!

The experience is even more frustrating if you have a slow graphics card 
(as I did on my previous computer) or a slow connection. It's 
humiliating (although quite funny I do admit) to be constantly walking 
into walls or water and missing doorways and falling off stairs. For a 
while I was constantly relying on more adept avatar friends to teleport 
me to locations I couldn't get to on my own! I went from being a 
competent and adept adult in the real world to a clumsy and 
accident-prone klutz in SL ... a salutary experience ... it makes you 
understand a bit of what it must be like to be a foreigner in a new 
country or an infant learning how to control its control its body and 
move around in the adult world.

The experience of not being totally in control of your avatar body is an 
interesting one though, and one which doesn't go away even when you do 
get the hang of operating your new virtual body. There is an interesting 
tug of war between what you want your avatar to do, and what the 
animation software (and technical constraints) allows. Even now, I often 
feel like my avatar's actions are out of my control, controlled as much 
by the software environment and constraints of SL as by my own 
intentions. These default animations, such as the weirdly uncoordinated 
default newbie walk or the clumsy fall to the ground when you stop 
flying, can be overriden by setting your own animations but this is not 
an entirely simple process!  Although I hate it when my avatar Bella 
Bouchard becomes a possessed zombie puppet, her head stupidly swaying 
from side to side and her arm spastically twisting behind her back, I do 
find it kind of intriguing and humorous as well. Avatars walk through 
each other (sometimes getting stuck together in the process), clothes 
re-arrange themselves in strange ways when you sit down on strange 
objects ... trickster avatars trap you in cages when you're innocently 
shopping and not paying attention (well, it happened to me anyway!) ... 
and then good samaritan avatars help you to escape :) And even the most 
experienced SL resident and skilled animation designer can still fall 
victim to the vagaries of the SL environment as their animations load in 
unpredictable ways or stall halfway through due to network congestion.

But the constraints,  glitches and gremlins in the SL environment are 
part of what I find most intriguing about the SL experience. One of the 
things I most enjoy is the ghostly and uncanny quality of avatars when 
they arrive somewhere after being teleported and their grey shapes get 
filled in with faces, hair and clothes  (sometimes arriving all together 
and sometimes piece by piece). I love this breaking of the illusion as 
the environment and its inhabitants are drawn and animated in real-time. 
While sometimes frustrating, these technical constraints due to network 
congestion and other glitches are an integral part of the SL aesthetic 
and experience and I'll kind of miss them when all the kinks get ironed 
out and the illusion become more seamless.

I'm curious to hear about other participants experiences of being a 
newbie  ...

Kathy

--

Lecturer, Digital Cultures Program

S316, John Woolley Building A20

University of Sydney

phone: + 61 2 93514721

mobile: 0411 474 551

www.arts.usyd.edu.au/digitalcultures