Asa mo yoru mo koikogarete,
Hoshi ni naru yo, kimi mamoru, tatakai wa yukue shirazu!
Ashita to kinou no kousaten de
Majiwaranai, kimi to boku,
Ima iku yo, boku wa nagareboshi!

My doubts are gone. I am Maia. Even if I sort of consciously wished her into being, it’s the strongest personal identity I ever had. The old me has been slowly dying ever since the awakening, and even before that, never felt so real to begin with. Whether female or genderless mind-wise, one thing I’m utterly convinced in is that I’m not male, and the very thought of identifying as male disgusts me.

That being said, it’s somewhat uncanny how often it happens that people cast off their cheery facades and open up to me in PM, sharing their insecurities. I wonder how often winterwyn and other de facto “unpaid therapists” go through this. I try to comfort them and inspire hope, and it’s important for me that I say what I really think. Honesty all the way. I’ve seen enough depression around that seeing people depressed makes me depressed by proxy, and I try to stop the mind poison that is self-loathing, assuming they listen.

In her conversation with me, in-between describing her depression, Hazuki raised some rather interesting points, especially about transition. There are people in the world so uncomfortable with their physical sex, feeling so outright wrong that they’d do anything to change it, even knowing that they would probably die earlier, go through utter hell, and be treated like trash. Do I really want a female body so badly? No. It’s more a case of, “I’d nearly die of happiness, but I can live without it.” It’s not a definite no, it just means that other things take priority. I’ll only be ready for transition if it doesn’t ruin my life. Most of my contacts I only know online anyway—my body doesn’t matter to them. I hope.

Hazuki and I were also amused at the uncanny mental “resonance” between us, and the many ways in which we think alike and even have similar life stories. As she noted, we are similar in so many aspects, and different in just a few key ones.

Finally, in preparation for meeting Hazuki’s avatar in Second Trainwreck (it looks positively creepy), I tried to replicate the pervasive female mental self-image. This was the farthest I could go with freebies, but I’d really like a T-shirt like my “circle/gender” one.

My biggest problem with Second Life isn’t even its craptastic graphics, its spectacular pointlessness, its user-unfriendliness (just who was that monstrosity of an UI designed for? Even Microsoft should be crying), the completely LSD-induced environment, or the fact that the IQ of most users doesn’t even seem to approach double digits.

No, not even the spectacular dissonance between the hype, the serious business facade, and what actually is going on there. That’s tolerable. After all, players on Argent Dawn somehow put up with all the night elf lesbians in Goldshire, not to mention all the angsty, vengeful refugees from Lordaeron whose biographies look like carbon copies of each other with just a few names changed.

Not even the utter lack of Genuine People Personalities™. The angsty refugees and witty draenei prostitutes whose behavior goes “against everything the naaru stand for, and for everything a human might lie down for” may not be the best this version of Azeroth has to offer (in fact, there are some pretty mature and interesting roleplayers out there), but it’s better than nothing—as long as there is a clear degree of in-character/out-of-character separation. “Avatar rights are not human rights”, indeed!

No, my biggest complaint can be summed up by one quote from H. G. Wells: If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.

Linden’s motives were apparently benign, although they did and still do mostly support SL for the purpose of making money out of it. The problem is that the not-players took the “anything is possible” idea too far. Since this not-game essentially has its own toolset built in into the main UI and worldbuilding options are displayed everywhere by default, people started adding all kind of crazy stuff into it. TV Tropes said it best about the trope that describes the setting:

…Basically, every concept or creature that has ever touched upon on popular culture is not only real, but has a vested interest in the main characters. It is, perhaps, a Fanfic Chop Suey about all of popular culture. However, despite the rampant weirdness, everything superficially appears to be identical to the present day.

Except for the “main characters” part, the “Planet Eris” trope describes the world of Second Life to a T. Utterly random, without any internal logic whatsoever—and since it’s possible to make just about anything there, it crosses the line and everything becomes pointless. It deprives you of your in-universe hard work in making something possible and just presents it ready-made. Of course, “virtual words are supposed to be fun, not hard work”. But there needs to be some motivation, a sense of excitement, and most importantly, the process of acquiring virtual assets should be fun too.

WoW managed this—and that despite never being marketed as anything other than a game. Leveling is fun, mostly. Acquiring in-game money is fun, and Blizzard tries to make sure it remains so (although I admit, extorting real money out of users for the permission to improve the world is an ingenious move on Linden’s part—not so fun for the average not-player). Maybe too much, hence all the complaints from hardcore gamers about “dumbing the game down” in expansions and patches—it never occurred to them that the parts that are unrewardingly hard were not supposed to be hard in the first place, but were a result of sloppy game design back then, and Blizzard got better.

The “gamist” aspect of WoW works organically with the “virtual world” aspect. There are perhaps even better solutions, but they’re yet to come. For now, Blizzard’s game has sprung opportunities for social interaction that Linden’s monstrosity can only dream of. Even it is too fringe, perhaps. The majority of the player base are not hardcore raiders who take down Illidan in highly-coordinated attack patterns, but people who see it purely as entertainment, who log in for an hour or two a day just to vent off stress, or who play it at weekends. Blizzard is heading there. The UI is minimalistic yet clear and efficient, and offers opportunities even the developers didn’t foresee. (Using the raid interface for organized roleplaying events, anyone?) In fact, the holidays, “useless” but pretty-looking items and new emotes can be an indirect acknowledgement of the game’s unusually successful social side.

Sure, it’s restrictive. Sometimes too much, the environment is too static. But it’s quite close to the balance between reasonable restrictions that constrain players to the laws of the world and technical restrictions caused by imperfect software. Second Life is pure, unrestricted, open-ended randomness as far as the eye can follow.

In the end, the target audience of virtual worlds are the same as for today’s social networks: ordinary, unsophisticated people, Uncle Joe and Aunt Jane. They just want to enter the world and explore it, and they want everything to Just Work. They don’t want to spend hours just studying the user interface, or wondering why half the other people are naked or transformed into weird animals, why the camera is laggy, and why objects just appear out of the blue. They may not be interested in killing monsters and selling their stuff, or putting up with 15-year-olds with the IQ of plankton not knowing how to spell, and that’s what puts them off the alternative. Still… Blizzard got dangerously close without trying, and Linden tried hard and failed.

Apparently, my fear that Second Life would cause me nightmares because of its sheer graphic uncanny-valleyness has become a self-fulfilling prediction. I had a nightmare that very night (although not about SL), so intense that I woke up in mid-sleep shuddering. I won’t elaborate on what it was about. More on that game… ahem, sorry, virtual environment later. Long story short, the world may get its “second life”, but not from Linden. Blizzard, on the other hand? Quite possibly.

After I fell asleep again, I had another dream. In it, I was looking at China on the world map and wondered why all the cities were in its eastern part, and then I noted that Tibet consisted of barely-hospitable mountains. So, when I moved my eyes to the west, I saw Tibet (unrealistically) depicted as flat land surrounded by an almost perfectly circular ring of mountains, similar to Un’Goro Crater in WoW, and hypothesized that it could be a crater itself. From there, I moved to looking at South America, and then the entire thing soon devolved into a Transformers episode—a weird mix of G1 characterization and Animated art style.