PHILOSOPHY OF SECOND LIFE: THE BODEGA DIALOGUES, PART I

A real life philosopher joined the Second Life community, in recent months, and as strange it may seem, interacting in an online world is partly a vocational pursuit for him. A full professor in the philosophy department of a major Midwestern university, Urizenus Sklar is also the editor of a blog called The Second Life Herald (formerly The Alphaville Herald), which documents the goings on within various online worlds, from a decidedly literate, highbrow perspective. (His SL name "Urizenus" is inspired by poet William Blake's Book of Urizen.)

After he was situated in Second Life, I invited him to lead a conversation of fellow cogitators, early last month, and strange as it may seem, there's quite a lot of them in-world. A few months after its inception in April, Thinkers is ranked among the top twenty most popular Second Life groups, boasting 105 members, as of this writing.

"Never in my wildest imaginings did we have over one hundred members," says group founder Jinny Fonzarelli. Jinny's a philosophy and theology student in the UK, and, she says, "[I]t struck me as the only thing SL was missing-- for me, anyway." Not philosophy per se, she adds, smiling. "[M]ore the space to have big long chats about it. It's what I've been doing on the Net since '97." She did get some flack in the beginning, she says, from a resident who believed that philosophy and theology were fundamentally irreconcilable, and accused her of creating the group as a cover for religious proselytizing. (This may be the first case on record of griefing someone over metaphysics.)

However, says Jinny, "There's as many out-and-out atheists [in our group] as there are Christians, for sure. But I'd say we're all an open-minded bunch of moderates, on the whole."

Besides getting the group together for deep chat, Jinny has also created the avatars of at least two philosophers-- George Berkeley, and W.V. Quine. During our conversation with Urizenus, she suddenly transformed from a goth girl into the latter, Harvard's rumpled, recently deceased professor of analytical philosophy. (Quine died in December of 2000, and it's a shame he didn't live just long enough to see how he'd live on, in Second Life.)

At the time of our talk, the Thinkers met with Urizenus in a placid, leafy clearing on a hill in the Bodega simulator, along with grande dame Baccara Rhodes and myself (Philosophy BA, University of Hawaii, '90). Since chat logs already sort of resmemble Plato's writings (once you clean them up a bit), I hereby institute the Bodega Dialogues, a series of conversations on the ideas provoked by online worlds.

In part one, we discuss Urizenus' own entrance into the odd niche of academic writing on the subject, leaping over to the topic of what is real and unreal, then skipping lightly over to the ethics of griefing.

Urizenus Sklar: I had edited a couple books on cyberspace issues, legal and ethical issues, and I was due to put together another one, and the thought was to do something with the economist Ted Castronova… You guys know about him? He's the guy that did the study on the economy of Everquest. Ted wrote a famous monograph analyzing the economy of EQ; he studied it as if it were a real economy, calculated that its per capita GDP made it the 77th largest economy in the world… 77th is just behind Russia and ahead of Bulgaria.

Anyway, I was interested in how virtual things could become real. How can EQ platinum pieces come to have an exchange rate on eBay?

So when New York city is a character in a Woody Allen movie, I assume that it is really NYC and not a virtual NYC, and when I talk to you now it is really me, not a fictional me. So there is a two way flow between real and fictional worlds, and real things can inhabit fictional worlds and vice versa. But I rant...

Hamlet Linden: Of course, real money is virtual too, right-- Alan Greenspan says how much the dollar is gonna be worth, and we all say, ‘Okay!’

Jinny Fonzarelli: I've been thinking about that... is ‘Jinny’ me, or is she someone else? [laughs] Especially in relation to adultery.

US: It’s really you enjoying virtual adultery.

JF: No, I've never done it, I'm just dead curious about the mechanics of Second Life shagging.

HL: Or, are our avatars more real than our material selves, in the sense that we get to will ourselves into being [when we create an avatar]? Especially the essential aspects that are most important to us?

JF: What I think is much the same as I think about chat: People are their real selves on here. Even the griefers.

Baccara Rhodes: I agree with that... I don't think people can alter their personalities that much and keep it going.

US: I've been talking about this with my colleague David Velleman, who works on this stuff. His idea is that we are constructing little narratives for ourselves all the time. In the real world, here, etc. Well, basically the idea about constructing our identities out of little narratives-- this idea is also in Daniel Dennett’s stuff.

I agree about the griefer point, too. [Griefers] try to draw a distinction between how they behave in real life and how they behave in virtual reality. But the distinction is dishonest. You can't say, ‘I'm good in real life and just bad here.' Cuz it is you here, too.

JF: Someone who lies here is being true to themselves as a liar, I think. If that makes any sense.

US: It’s odd, thinking that you can say anything you want because communication is mediated.

[Jinny makes the point that there are relatively few griefers in Second Life]

US: There is a reason that it is free of griefers. A bunch of griefers [from another online world] came here and basically stopped being griefers. This place gave them a creative outlet that they didn't have before. I think that was key. Griefing was a way of being creative in [the first online world.]