I suspect that a lot of people have alts--that is, additional Second Life accounts: third and fourth and fifth lives! Of my closest friends, though, I only know of one or two who do, and I speculate (because of course, that's what I do!) that maybe some of the ones whom I don't know to have alts actually do have alts, because I've heard people talk about creating alts they can use when they want to log on quietly, without getting in touch with everyone they know, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of my friends sometimes need a little peace and quiet. :) Or, of course, they might be having wildly interesting paint-the-town-red alts, in which case I'm jealous that I don't get to hear! But then, some of my friends don't need alts for that!



Frankly, this probably would have been a good idea for me, but it's only now that I'm creating an alt, and I'm afraid it's not a secret-love-affair alt, or an I-don't-want-my-friends-to-see-me-as-a-schoolgirl-furry alt, or even a sometimes-I-just-want-to-go-around-incognito alt, but rather a much less interesting Kate-has-work-to-do-and-is-easily-distracted-by-her-fascinating-friends alt.

Even more boringly, my alt looks just like the regular me, just with less good stuff! I even was going to call my alt-self Kate again, just with a different last name, but when I tried signing up like that, Kate was taken. Not just for my first pick last name, but for all last names. (And kudos to Linden Labs for writing code to let me know about that instead of letting me bumble around for half an hour discovering it for myself!) I hardly ever meet Kates in Second Life. Where are we all? Everyone I meet is named Euphenia or RocketGirl or Transylvanio or Barbie or something. Kates, Susans, and Louises are few and far between!

Maybe people who sign up with usual First Life names are people who tend to think Firstlifily and don't find Second Life to their taste?

So not being able to be Kate, I thought about some variants of that (although I'm only tolerant of "Katherine" and am never, never to be called "Kathy!") and of my middle name (which I decided it would be silly to reveal in Second Life, considering I try to keep my First Life comfortably private), and was finally rewarded to find an Irish version: Kaethe. I think the correct pronunciation of this is as crazy as all Irish (Gaelic) pronunciation, something like "Kay-heh," but I'm just pronouncing it "Kayth," which I liked until I realized how much it looks like a typo for "Kathy." Oh well!

Anyway, now I have a worker alt to do building and scripting and things with, and I really *hope* that will help keep me from first, being rude to my friends, and second, spending all my Second Life time playing. I know, Second Life is mainly about playing, but these days I have work to do, and I plan to do that instead of frolicking as much as possible. Boring again, I know. :) It would be more interesting to hear about the times I give in to the temptation of playing around. :)

Well, and of course I had a wonderful excuse to play around a little as soon as my new self arrived: I had hardly any clothes or beauty accessories! Even if I'm a worker alt, I don't want to look like a slob. When I'm staying at home to do housework or bills or something in First Life, I still try to look presentable, although it might just be with old jeans and a t-shirt and my hair pulled back into a ponytail. It's that much more important in Second Life, when I'm made to stare at myself every time I move!



At least, that's how I justified making my first action with my worker alt being to jet off to pick up some choice freebies. Actually, I was shocked and delighted at the wonderful new default avatars they have! I settled on one whose them appeared to be "girl next door," which is a little embarrassingly revealing, since that's kind of how I like people to think of me (when I'm not singing or running some kind of business activity, anyway). I like people to like me. I want people to say "Oh, here comes good ol' Kate! What a cheerful person she is! And man, does she have beautiful wings!"

Anyway, "girl next door" was not only immediately presentable, but had a hairstyle I really *liked*. I suspect I'll wear it a lot! I'll say more about that avi and the new orientation experience in a separate post, but in any case, I looked presentable from the beginning except for my creepy gray-and-white eyes. I don't think that texture loaded properly.

But even so, I jetted off to some favorite stores (more on this too, in another post) to pick up New Resident freebies and Just Plain freebies, and then I exited and logged back in as regular me, Kate Amdahl, to give myself some hand-me-downs: the eyes that are a little too intense, the wings that I decided point out too far to the side, and those kinds of things. I also had a business suit I rarely wear and a gray overall set, and I thought those would be good work clothes, and I gave myself those as well. Oh, and I copied my shape (which I had made by hand) over to the new me, too. And voila! Another me.



Being another me felt a little strange, frankly, even though I look a lot more like myself as my alt than I do as my black self or my Japanese self or my faerie self! I guess I've gotten used to changing my race, just not my identity!

And now I've set the challenge for myself: when I log in as Kaethe, will I use my unusually quiet surroundings to get work done? Or will I look at my inventory (so easy to organize! So few things to trouble with!), despair, and spend hours shopping? (God help me if I decide I want to use that alt to model things for my store!) Or will I contact my friends even though they're not on my friends list and send Kaethe-me off dancing and flirting and conversing all the livelong night? Well, we'll see, dear reader. Let's hope I have another boring answer for you when I report back. :)

^^^\ Kate /^^^

This post explains what an "SL resident name" is.

My friend Kit Meredith brought up a problem in a recent blog entry: since many people blog, correspond, comment, and otherwise have public lives using the versions of us that exist in Second Life (which if you haven't heard of it is a virtual environment in which people build, socialize, exchange information, play, and spend leisure time), we often will sign messages with the names we use in Second Life. Those names correspond to a virtual version of ourselves, one that may or may not match our physical appearance, gender, age, species (!), or even personality. Many of us keep our legal identities private and don't publicly associate them with our Second Life identities.

I call the name my virtual self uses a "Second Life resident name," or "SL resident name," because individuals in Second Life are called "residents." Some people might use the term "avatar name," but since a single avatar can change its build, height, skin color, hair, clothing, or gender within a few seconds, this can be confusing: the word "avatar" can mean either a resident's virtual self in any form or a particular version of that virtual self. For instance, in Second Life I am sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes Asian, and so on, and sometimes someone would call each of those an avatar, and sometimes they'd call all of them my avatar, singular. So the term "SL resident name" might be less confusing than "avatar name."

What Kit pointed out is that there may be confusion about the names we Second Life residents sometimes use in correspondence to people who are using their legal names. For instance, I might be interested in quoting someone on my blog and e-mail them to ask about it, signing the e-mail "Kate Amdahl." But since "Kate Amdahl" is my SL resident name and not my legal name, I might worry that the person reading the message would be misled into thinking that was my legal name. So in future, I'm going to have the following line after my signature in some kinds of messages, linking it to this entry:

Kate Amdahl is my Second Life resident name.

If you'd like to do the same thing, you could link to an explanation of your own, or you'd be welcome to link to this post, which as you can see, I've tried to set up to explain things to someone who doesn't know about Second Life.

And if you're a person who has questions about Second Life residents or identity, you're welcome to post them in the comments to this message, which will make their way to my e-mail account and usually be answered promptly.

Of course this post is continuing my vampiric little habit of turning my blog into an extended comments section for Kit's Blog, but Kit's posting regularly and I'm posting at whim, and further, I'm not doing any grand social experiments in Second Life at the moment (whereas I usually have been, in the past!), so it seems only appropriate that I should be stirred to thought by Kit's posts and surf, as it were, in her wake. :)

^^^\ Kate /^^^

So I've been interested in what it's like to be on Second Life as a different race from the almost uninterrupted sea of white people. Thanks to the knowledgeable people on the LiveJournal second_lifers community (including our friend Soph, whom I guess I should have just asked in the first place!), I finally was able to find the skin I needed to put together a Japanese version of myself (Keiti?). Eris came along with me to Tete a Pied, where we tinkered with new shapes while we waited for skins to rez. (Almost everywhere we went last night was laggy, laggy, laggy until we came back to the Diversionarium.)

After getting new skin, hair, and eyes and changing our shapes, we went through our respective wardrobes, which were more than up to the challenge, and dressed the part. Eris came up with a lovely version of her avi that, to our eyes, looks distinctly Vietnamese. I think my results were less strikingly on-target, but I did come out looking (it seemed to me) passably Japanese.



Now, my question from here is, will people treat us any differently, or will we experience Second Life differently, in these avatars? Our only experience of strangeness so far was when our friend nox came by and said "I feel like a giant!", because our new avis are both to normal human scale and smaller than the average Caucasian woman even on that scale. She did look like a giant to us, or we looked like pygmies next to her. Later when I changed back into gaijin Kate, she seemed a perfectly normal size.

And down the road, I'll try further race bending experiments. While it's not like being a minority race in First Life, it should still be enlightening.

^^^\ Kate /^^^

A lot of Second Life avatars are different from their Real Life counterparts. A lot. Males have female avatars, females (less often) have male avatars, married people represent themselves as single and available, and almost everyone is svelte and trim, with large breasts for the women and bulky muscles for the men.

There are people who fight against this trend, some staunchly, others of us less emphatically. In my case, I've tried to at least keep my breasts to a realistic size. I'd love to compare them to my real life breasts to find out whether I'm in the ballpark, but there's no easy way to do that unless someone out there has a scripted prim measuring tape they can loan me!

For this entry, I've gotten kind permission to post Second Life and Real Life pictures of seven residents side-by-side. Here's Aur.

Anyway, it's all up for grabs: age, weight, race, marital status, sexual preference, personality ... you name it, someone in Second Life is appearing differently in that way than in Real Life. Let's call this kind of thing "identity bending."

And there are all kinds of schools of thoughts on what "should" and "should not" be the rule of thumb for different kinds of identity bending. This gets tricky, because there are all kinds of issues that come up. Some people are freaked out by or condemning of gender bending in any form; many people aren't interested in getting involved with someone who's married in Real Life; and even well-intentioned people might be a little disturbed to find out their petite, girlish lover is a 350-pound 55-year-old in Real Life.

Casidy Craig in Second Life and Real Life. In Real Life, Casidy is transgendered, female to male.

So some people hide their Real Life identities, and other people lie about their Real Life identities. I'm one of the hiders: my Real Life and my Second Life aren't allowed to mix, because in my Real Life I'm not interested in having to defend my habit of blogging about sex and all the other fun things I get to do as Second Life me. I'd do it if I had to, but in the end it would be more trouble than it's worth.

It might be useful before we plunge much deeper into this to reflect that there are really two different types of reasons someone might not want to mix Second Life and Real Life. One reason is because the person doesn't want their Second Life to affect their Real Life, as with me. The other is because the person doesn't want their Real Life to affect their Second Life, which usually means that they differ in some substantial way from their avatar, for instance in gender or marital status.

Fenix Harbinger, matching closely in both lives

There's no question that some people would be very disturbed to find out that a friend-or especially a lover-is the opposite gender of their avatar, but it's hard to make an ethical case for objecting to this if the gender bending person doesn't claim their Real Life self is the same as their avatar. It comes down to asserting that people who bend gender should always reveal that in their profile because people who associate with them in Second Life may feel bad otherwise-but it's just as defensible to say that people who aren't comfortable with gender bending friends should stick to friends who have declared their Real Life gender already. In either case there's that bad old pitfall "should." Regardless of what you believe is morally best for people to do, a lot of people (in this case) are going to do the exact opposite. Many people will have avatars of a different gender than their real life selves without making that public knowledge, and many people will assume that avatar gender is the same as Real Life gender even though that's a lousy bet in Second Life. Ultimately we can't expect each other to conform to our personal codes of conduct. All I can suggest is that being as honest as we reasonably can and as open-minded as we reasonably can is likely to be a big help.

Keiko Takamura

The gender issue especially is more complicated than it might seem at first. First, there's the whole prejudice issue. If a person's profile is one gender and their "1st Life" tab says another gender, they are likely to be opening themselves up for abuse from random passersby which you could argue isn't really deserved. Second, there's the experiment part. If a man is trying to find out what it's like to be treated like a woman, or a woman is trying to find out what it's like to be treated as a man, the results aren't likely to be very accurate if everyone knows that the person's Real Life gender is different from the avatar's gender.

And being able to be different and to experiment are some important advantages of Second Life. Yet for all of that, some people always will be disturbed if they discover a friend is bending gender, and there's probably no way around that short of complete cultural transformation.

Lisse Livingston

Another thing that might be helpful to think about is this: sometimes people aren't given the option of keeping quiet; they must either lie or be silent and revealed. If someone asks a male avatar "Are you a guy in Real Life?" and the person is female in Real Life (or more confusingly still, transgendered!), then just refusing to answer the question or saying "I prefer to keep my RL private" is usually going to be taken as an alternate version of "no, I'm not." That cuts the options down to revelaing or lying, with no privacy in the middle. So if you feel people deserve privacy on these things, don't ask those questions!

Marianne McCann. This is an old picture of her, of course. As you can see, Marianne's avi is a child, too.

(I tried hopping into a male avatar for about an hour once. I stayed only with friends while doing it, and everyone knew who was really behind the wheel. I actually didn't find it appealing *at all*, but I understand there may be a greater appeal for men trying on female avatars. After all, we are prettier than they are! With the exception of the occasional Orlando Bloom, of course.)

I've sometimes seen people confuse "honesty" with "disclosure," and this is a mistake. For someone to decline to reveal something about themselves is not a lie; it's privacy. So a 50-year-old Asian male who goes around in a 20-year-old Caucasian female avi is not lying by doing that. That's bending genders and ages, not bending truth! Of course he *could* lie about it too, and that's a different matter.

Maus Ennui. Like Fenix, a close match in both lives.

Marital status is a more serious issue in some ways because many people (raises hand) don't want to have any part in someone else's marital infidelity. If you have an open marriage or are legally separated or what have you, that's fine by me (though not by everybody!). But otherwise it's a problem because people can get enticed into an immoral act without knowing it's immoral. (That is, if the sex itself isn't immoral by their standard, but cheating is.)

As to appearance and age, Second Life avatars are clearly designed with the assumption that they'll be relatively young and relatively svelte. I would be happy for my avatar to look my actual age (mid-thirties) instead of the default 25-or-so we all seem to look, but I don't know any way to age myself attractively in Second Life. And it's even harder, presumably, when everyone else has physically idealized, young avatars. Well, almost everyone! I've seen older and heavier avatars very occasionally, but I'm not sure in those cases that they represented a closer match to their Real Life counterparts; they may just have been experimenting.

In the end, it's probably helpful to think of Second Life as a place where it's fun and interesting to experiment with identity. If instead we get in the habit of assuming that everyone is showing their Real Life self, I think we invite trouble, because that's definitely not the case! At the same time, it's hard to go wrong with honesty when you can get away with it.

^^^\ Kate /^^^