Your Cheatin’ Heart

I love Hank Williams.  He’s one of these people who displayed such a prolific genius so young, you can’t help but wonder if he somehow knew that he had a limited time and was rushing to create while he could.  I’m not normally what you would describe as a huge country music fan, but his songs have a stark passion and emotion that is so hard to resist.  Recently, a few things in SL have reminded me of one of my all time favorite Hank Williams songs – Your Cheatin’ Heart.  The biggest one of these is a recent conversation with my friend ChatBrat Pippita, in which we talked about how many people cheat on their SL partners.

This post isn’t about the question of virtual relationships and first life infidelity, but instead about infidelity within virtual relationships themselves.  (First, a very important caveat: This post is not about you or your partner.  I know there is a tendency among people to read into blog posts that intimate the personal and let me say for the record, this post is not about any specific person, it is simply my musing on something that I’ve seen. )  One of the things I love about Second Life is that relationships take all sorts of forms.  Monogamous, polyamorous, open, partnered, you name it and SL has it.  Of course, the most important part to all of this is how the two people in the relationship have defined it for themselves; if it is an open relationship, it is hard pressed to define it as cheating.  All that said, among the monogamous relationships in SL – partnered or unpartnered – it appears to be relatively common for things to go sour because one avatar has been unfaithful to the other.

I’ll be the first to admit that my evidence for saying virtual infidelity is “relatively common” is purely anecdotal.  But between stories from friends, observing some relationships break-up, and my own being hit on by avatars admitting to be cheating (either as an alt or more blatantly), I feel pretty safe to say that it does happens with some frequency.    It happens in all sorts of ways, of course, but the most common appears to be through alting.

My big question is why does this seem to be so prevalent in Second Life?  In a world where trust is the most important currency of all, why is it common for people to try to circumvent that trust?  I have some partial answers; I think one is that I believe people do it because they think they can get away with it.  Another is a belief that a little dalliance isn’t so bad, they still love their partner and this is better than breaking up.  Finally, I think that it also has to do with why people seek other relationships in any world; they’re trying to address some unmet need.  But as I mull over it, none of these seem to fully answer all the whys.

So I put it to you, dear reader, do you believe cheating on virtual partners is a common occurrence in Second Life?  And if you do, just *why* do you think this is?

The Avatars of Capistrano

Not terribly long ago, I had a minor disagreement with one of my friends in Second Life.  What was the disagreement about?   He claimed, “No one ever really leaves Second Life, they just close one account and come back as an alt.”   I, on the other hand, agreed that does happen but believe that there are also people who actually leave, never to return in any form.   To be clear here, we were talking about people about people who fit in the category of regular Residents, people for whom SL became a conscious choice for a period of time.  Now, I’ll admit that may be a bit of a Pollyanna at times, but I’m not that naive; I know people hide and start new accounts all the time.  Yet I argued that people do leave, that they might feel burnt out on SL or maybe their first life circumstances change or possibly a whole host of other reasons, but that they log out with the intention never to return.   He contended that this happens less than you would think.  We never really resolved it, but simply moved on to another topic, silently agreeing to disagree.

Flash forward a couple of weeks and an interesting thing happened, in the space of less than of a week, I had conversations with four different friends who had all but disappeared from Second Life and had decided to peek in to see what was going on.  Four!    One had been gone sixteen months, another a year, another seven months and the last for just three.  And while looking through my old groups to decide if there were any I should cull, I saw that another old and dear friend who had been away since August 2008 silently logged in just a few weeks prior.  With the third person peeking back, I found myself thinking, “hmm, this is odd.”  When I chatted with the fourth and fifth instance of seeing that someone else had popped in, I thought it was downright surprising.

It has been wonderful to reconnect with the four that I caught up with (and I’m peeved that I didn’t at least get an IM from the one who peeked in, but I understand and that’s another story altogether); I had been close with all in one way or another and it felt like old home week.  Some have decided that they want to come back to SL regularly, while others were just interested in peeking in and going away again.  Now, I don’t think any of these people have been alting, but they were all interested to see what was going on in SL these days.

This has gotten my brain working, of course.  Why would people who decided to leave SL peek back in?   While these were just random occurrences that all seemed to happen in short order, it does make me wonder what is going on.  I don’t believe it signals anything significant about Second Life or my Friends List.  They had some different reasons for peeking back, but mostly it was about curiosity.  What it got me thinking about, however, is the human need to return.  Second Life may be virtual, but it has a feeling of place and a collection of people with whom we connect.  So, much like our need to visit former workplaces or old homes or class reunions, it makes sense to me that people might get curious and want to see what has happened in their absence.  Or perhaps they felt some other need that drew them to SL in the first place, as if they somehow felt a pull to travel back to the same place.  So let’s hear it dear reader, alts notwithstanding, do you think people ever truly leave SL?  Or that SL ever truly leaves them?

Me, My Alts, And I! (Or: Why I Alt)

Lanna and some of her alts

Last week on Plurk, Daila Holder posted “Blog Post Topics I’d Like to Read.”   Some of them were really pretty funny, Confessions of a Male Fashion Blogger’s Girlfriend and I Saw You Naked and Now I Only Want to IM.  On the whole, it seemed that the list would make for very interesting blog posts (I’d post a link to the plurk, but her timeline is set to private.)  But there was one that got me thinking, Why I Alt.   So I thought, it is an interesting topic, why not give it a go?

Alting is one of those interesting Second Life anomalies; most people do it, but few admit to it.  If I had to guess, I would say that easily 85% of regular SL users that have been in-world for more than six months have at least one alt.   Maybe people don’t talk about it because Linden Lab wants you to pay for additional avatars.  Maybe they are quiet about it because people often use alts to do things they wouldn’t want to admit to publicly.  Or maybe people don’t talk about it because they use it as a clean slate.  Whatever the reason, people seldom discuss their alts.

But what about you, Lanna?  Are you going to talk about why you alt?  Yes!  And if you’re that curious about it, look after the jump to find out!