Thursday, November 27, 2008

Virtual Insanity

Ah, online love. We've all heard the story. Man meets woman, man weds woman, man has cybersex with other woman on online game, woman divorces man. Er, riiiight...

Is there anything good about games like Second Life, where you can create a sexy, dashing avatar that looks nothing like your flabby Caucasian self, buy yourself a virtual dildo and let rip upon the world like the sexual conquistador you long to be? Or is it a well-meaning naive Social Networking site that simply got overrun by people who take the phrase "sex sells" too literally?

It's so easy to screw with people (pardon the pun) when they're not in your immediate vicinity. If you want to get rid of your girl- or boyfriend but don't want to hassle of - you know, actually seeing them, because that's so tiring - you can just erase them from FaceBook, break the news via your MSN display name or simply send a well-thought, articulate, personal text: "SRY UR DUMPD :("

Yes I know, sour grapes and all, but receiving a voicemail detailing all of your personality flaws and exactly why you're not perfect for the person you want to be with is not nice, whether you've just had your first date or you've been together for years. Even if your other half makes Attila the Hun look like Winnie the Pooh, don't they deserve to be told face-to-face that you don't want to be with them?

Personally I love the idea of Second Life, FaceBook and MSN. I've got friends who moved to Australia, I've got friends who moved to Coventry; and I can keep in touch with both of them on the same site through the same medium. I don't need to worry about them losing a letter in the post or not getting my phone message. But why, God, why would I want to watch my pixellated creation doing sexual position 67 with person X from location Y? Some say it's no different from a one-night stand. Er, of course. I'll save you the patronisation there.

What's the point? You want sex, get sex. There's porn out there, and I'm not going into the seperate argument about what is acceptable in the pornographic industry, but please leave the social networking sites as they are, and please have the common human decency to TALK to people.

Neety - "Is there an option to have a fat avatar??"

4 comments:

Sprog said...

Thats a jamiroquai song :P

Fox89 said...

Second Life has SOME good qualities!

My mate Nick made quite alot of money on it buying and investing in land. Seems weird, but the way I figure it, if you feel its a good idea to pay real money for a few megabytes of virtual land, you thoroughly deserve to be ripped off!

Neety said...

I admit it's not a bad game, but these things can get overrun by morons. Such as Materia Magica, where I used to go with 8s, then the other players realised I was a white English teenage girl.

@Sprog: Whatever happened to those guys? They were...well, not great, but vaguely acceptable...

Sprog said...

They're still around, the greatest hits came out last year, it's great (And they fucking RULE).

Anyway, my comment on your post thingy. To be honest, second life isn't a social networking site and should not be classed alongside Facebook or Myspace, which were built entirely for a network purpose. If you were to class it as a SN, you'd then have to also include WoW, RuneScape and all the other shitty MMORPGs. Which is ensentially what second life is, an almost Sims online. If people choose to have a relationship in it, they can. If they choose to have virtual sex in it, they can. Of course it's nothing like a real relationship, or having sex, but that's not what it's meant to be like. It's just a game, not a life (and maybe that's where the title misleads people), and thats why people would want their pixellated creation doing it, as it's all just part of the game. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have been programmed in. If people get off on it, then yes they're bloody weird, but there's not really anything particualy wrong with the in-game characters being programmed to do so, as the game is meant to be a reflection of (a bizarre, i'll give you that) life.
I doubt you could even class what the guy at the start of your post was doing as "cybersex".
*waffles on*