The whole point of gaming, it can be said, is escapism. To escape from this world, to be so immersed in an experience that you forget everything else about you, even if for a short while. When you're playing a game, you're not you anymore. You are a witness to an epic adventure when you play an RPG, a powerful electronic athlete when you play a MOBA, or a romantic hero when you play a dating sim. But there is a game that takes this notion and runs with it entirely, turning it into its Modus Operandi. That game is Second Life.
Second Life is a free to play three dimensional game. Some may claim it is not a game, as there are no goals or anything of the sort, but I disagree. However, I am not here to debate whether Second Life is a game or not. I am here to speak about how Second Life brings escapism to a whole new level.
The very name in itself gives away the purpose of the game. Second Life: a second life for you, the player. Here is a game world unlike any other. Here is a world for you to create, to be free. To buy what you like, to be who you want to be. You are limited only by your imagination.
And yet, therein lays a question. Is this right? Is it right to escape from your real life to pretend to be someone you are not?
In Second Life it is easy to be someone you're not. No, let me rephrase that. It is easy to pretend to be someone you're not. In Second Life, you can start your own business. You can dress your avatar down in the latest Gucci suit, give him sunglasses, a chauffer, the works. You can rent out a house made to look like a mansion, in a sim that closely resembles West Hollywood. You can have an office, you can sit your avatar down in meetings. You can be this huge success, and honestly? That does not sound so bad. But, when you turn off that computer, where will you be? Back in real life. Hopefully with a family that loves you, working a job that pays the bills, on a nice enough house that may not be a mansion, but it provides what you need. I wish to God this was how it always is. And for most people, it is. But not everyone is like this.
Too many people take the game more seriously than they should. Single people go on here looking to start relationships. Sometimes they find it, and their avatars enter a pretend relationship, where they go on pretend dates to places that are simply not real. I have seen avatars go to sims made to look like amusement parks. It may be fun to pretend you are on a date, but you're not. You're not in a real amusement park, you're at home, on a computer, watching two avatars go up and down a fake roller coaster. Too many people forget this.
Far too many avatars are done up to look like glamour models. I understand that, sometimes, we are unsatisfied with how we look. We often wish to ourselves "if only I were skinnier", "if only I were more tanned", "if only I were white, blonde, blue eyed, slim and petite." Second Life does not give you the chance to live that life, no matter how much we wish to pretend we were. Second Life only allows you to make an avatar that looks like what you wish you it to look like. By itself, that's not bad, but some people take it too far. I once had the misfortune of knowing someone who ditched a friend, just so she could date someone who's avatar looked like her favorite rock star. The guy behind the avatar was married in real life, but the two began an online relationship anyway.
That's another issue. People catfishing, pretending to be someone online when in real life they are someone else, beginning online relationships on false pretenses. I have seen this happen far too many times. I once met two people on Second Life. A boy and a girl. They were in a relationship. They were in love. Thing is, the guy was really a girl in real life, and the girl was perfectly straight. The 'guy' eventually confessed, and they broke up afterwards. No harm was meant, but the 'relationship' was simply false to begin with.
That's why I don't believe in relationships that start on Second Life, or anything from Second Life at all. There is always a falseness to it, to everything. What you are seeing may look like something, but it is not. It is simply a bunch of 1's and 0's, gathered together to create data to look like an object from real life. It is not real.
It is not real. That tiny phrase, to me at least, became almost like a mantra that I repeated to myself every time I logged in to Second Life. It is not real. It is not real. It is not real. So why treat it like it is? Why treat something fake like it's real?
Sometimes, real life becomes too much to bear.We often fail, we often grow tired. We often just feel like retreating, to get away from the hustle and bustle. Video games offer us a retreat from this. In a video game, we can rescue the princess, we can develop a farm, we can save the world from the Magic Emperor, we can date a high school girl. But this retreat is not meant to replace your real life. After you're done, you're supposed to be re energized, so you can take on the world. But when you start neglecting your real life, for a game? That's when you have a problem.
Escapism is not the answer to anything. Running away from your problems does not solve them. It is OK to take a rest. It is not OK to abandon yourself in a game. You don't need a Second Life, if your First Life is not what you wanted it to be. You just need to get out there and make it happen.
