My journey through the realm of Second Life served as a safe, albeit limited, outlet for the wanderlust that inspires me in reality. At the helm of my avatar, QuadraticKumquat, I found dreary worlds and exciting ports that were all available to our unlimited exploration via an empowering form of unrestricted flight.
My lone expedition culminated in my teleportation to a populated island world. Immediately, I found that my flight feature was disabled, implying that someone was trying to preserve “the metaphor.” Ignorant of the social norms of my environment, and for sure looking like a total noob in the default avatar character, I asked a passing by avatar where she was off to, and was met with a pleasant invitation to the local jazz club. Felicitie, as her username turned out to be, explained to me that I’d need a suit to be permitted on the dance floor, and was kind enough to explain how to acquire one. Afterwards, she accepted my invitation to dance, and so we virtually waltzed to the Adele’s Skyfall from James Bond, among other elegantly dressed metaverse-goers, before biding each other farewell and good luck in our adventures.
There was something unusually surreal about the interaction between the two of us. My contributions to the dialogue were a little too similar to what I might have actually said in a ballroom in reality. While we were swinging, I set the camera to a first person point of view mode and was met with an intimate face to face proximity. The jealous looks from the single guys lined against the wall, her careful pivots around my waist, the smell of her cheap perfume – it all made me forgot, at least momentarily, that the screen in front of me was in fact not a portal yielding a dance between two strangers, but rather a complex series of calculations rendering false images to two people who would ultimately never meet. Nevertheless I am more satisfied with how things went than I should be. If you’re out there Felicitie, I’ll always be grateful for your putting up with my two left feet! You can count on another dance should a future English assignment bring us back together in Second Life.
