If you read me regularly, you’ll know I’m a Secondlifer.  I’m happy being involved in the Metaverse, and I think it can make positive changes in the way we communicate and interact.

What interests me recently, is the amount of people who absolutely seperate “Second Life” (SL) from “Real Life” (RL).  In short, the total denial of the outside world.

I think that we can, due to this seperation, risk losing sight of our ethics in SL.  That’s a thought, does the Dharma go with us into the virtual?  In my mind the answer is a firm yes, as even though you have a virtual representation (an “Avatar”) it’s the same mind doing the piloting, you’re still you.  Regardless of whether behaviour is virtual or not, it can still be unskillful in the Buddhist sense.

SL is a very complex, flexible, powerful platform.  There’s a lot of potential for both good and bad in there.    It’s easy to get lost and to deny the outside world, but also to start neglecting our real needs and those of our nearest and dearest.  It’s also possible to hurt them very deeply, romantic affairs in SL do happen and there have been some that have hit the media when they ended in divorces.

I think that other worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) are like application software, but SL is like an operating system, you can build worlds and applications within it.  I’ve explored virtual landscapes and cities and seen entire imaginary worlds inside SL, I’ve attended meetings of more than one virtual Buddhist group.  I’ve also created things in there, I have an idea of what it could do and that’s far more than any mere game.

It’s very important that we approach this whole thing carefully, this virtual universe is not seperate, wishful thinking won’t change that and using it to “escape” our real world issues is very ill advised.  I know that SL can be used to raise awareness of world issues and I do believe that SL is at it’s best when used to enhance our Real World communication ability especially in Education.

But to simply use it as a fantasist escape and to try to enforce some sort of schizophrenic seperation from reality?  I think that misses out a huge amount of it’s potential and opens some very dangerous doors indeed.