From every quarter of the media these days comes a barrage of stories and statistics about identity theft. How strange, then, that, at the same time, millions of us are inventing new selves. The incredible popularity of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) — Second Life, Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft — reflects a world in which identity is never stable. Unlike older-generation computer games, in which players would identify with a fixed figure such as Lara Croft or Luke Skywalker, the virtual worlds of the MMORPGs allow them to invent their identity, their activities, even their environment. They don’t just step into a world; they create one.
The widely publicised new game Spore, due for launch next year, takes the idea to its (bio)logical extreme. The player starts as a single cell, evolving, if successful, into a species that can then go on to dominate other planets. Nobody can predict in advance what will happen as the player moves from the cellular to the galactic. Is it an accident that at the very moment environmental scientists and economists warn us of the impending collapse of our planet, these virtual worlds are multiplying? While films such as An Inconvenient Truth sound the alarm at the unchecked expansion of our civilisation, new cities are being created every day in virtual space.
It’s tempting to see the proliferation of virtual worlds as a consequence of the impasse our real one has reached. What, after all, do people in virtual worlds do? As well as date and make friends, they buy property, land and rooms; furnish, build and decorate. In fact, exactly the activities that are becoming increasingly impossible for the average urbanite.
Reinvention is the stuff of our culture now, anyway. We are continually encouraged to break with the past. TV shows turn frogs into princes and allow lives to be swapped with a freedom that knows no bounds. Jobs, wives, even skills such as ballroom dancing can be traded, exchanged or speed-learnt. The moral of these staged adventures is that we can create who we are. And now we don’t need to do it through a TV show: we can activate a new self in virtual space. We can choose what colour hair we have and how thick our calves are; we design our own tattoos. A separate economy has sprung up to service our virtual needs — there are now companies that sell accessories and designs for our alter egos, offering clothing, haircuts and beauty treatments. Where once we could look after virtual animals such as the Tamagotchi toys, today we can become them.
The consequences of change are rarely discussed, and the virtues of self-invention are taken for granted. It was no surprise that the winner of the last Celebrity Big Brother was a fake celebrity — Chantelle — someone whose identity had been invented by the programme-makers themselves.
The process of change doesn’t end there, either. Having created identities and made ourselves known in some virtual universe, we can then sell our selves, literally — if the identity, or avatar, we have created is deemed desirable, it can be sold to other players. The self becomes a commodity. And that is bound to have psychological effects. When our self-image is lost or questioned in real life, the result is often depression.
Selling and even creating a virtual identity can change our mood, our actions, our behaviour.
Reinventing yourself is often put forward as being liberating. Gone are the constraints of money, class and background. You don’t even have to go on Big Brother; all you need is a computer. Our role models and idols once inhabited a separate space: stage, screen, sports field. We could aspire to be like them, but could never quite get there. But today TV series not only document the creation of celebrities from scratch (such as Chantelle) but also reveal how their daily lives are the same as ours. We see them shopping where we shop, eating what we eat, sweating as we sweat. And now we can even “meet” them. Bands such as U2 and McFly can check into the Habbo Hotel and rub shoulders with fans.
This shift in how we relate to our idols is exactly the difference between two big comic hits of the 1970s and the 2000s. In the 1972 film Play It Again, Sam, Woody Allen continually appealed to the fantasy image of Humphrey Bogart for advice and help. Thirty years later, people could pay to become the star in Being John Malkovich. Rather than ask him for advice, they could literally inhabit his head.
These changes are fascinating, but when we start to explore the world of avatars, we find less new freedom than old constraint. Creating new identities often goes with social isolation and exclusion. Joining a virtual community can be engaging and addictive, but at another, deeper level, it just gives us another way of putting barriers between ourselves and others. In particular, a barrier to the opposite sex, as we see in the popularity of these virtual spaces with teenagers. It’s a kind of modern version of courtly love, where we create buffers to put our object of desire at a distance. Reading about a couple who live far apart yet share a house in virtual space through their avatars, we can only wonder what would happen if they actually came to cohabit.
Humans aren’t really that keen on proximity. TV adverts endlessly depict domestic scenes where neighbours or friends drop in, and the host or hostess desperately offers them coffee, chocolate or scented air, as if to defend against being alone with them. Sad though it is, we tend to be distance-creating creatures, and that distance, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out, is one of the characteristics of the virtual world. When virtual relations become real, the result is often, though not always, deeply unsatisfying, even traumatic. When we finally meet the person behind the second self, we often find something unsettling and unwelcome: the alien beneath the avatar. The miracle of finding the nice single bloke turns sour when you discover he’s married. And that is surely the reason there are more mobile phones in the UK than people. Second Lifers or not, we’ve all got double lives.
Virtual worlds underscore the basic problem of double lives. At first glance, it might seem as if one’s virtual self is the mask and one’s real self the truth. But it’s not so simple. Take the example of the quiet male art historian who creates a virtual identity as a scantily clad Lolita. Should we say that the truth behind the mask is the inhibited academic? Or, on the contrary, that the truth behind the shy scholar is the provocative, exhibitionistic Lolita? Aren’t our fantasy personas, in fact, sometimes more real than we are? They evoke parts of ourselves that we block out in everyday life. Our real selves are just false masks, empty husks we inhabit lifelessly. This is the paradox of double lives and second selves: the virtual world shows us that our real lives are profoundly artificial, and that perhaps they need to be for human society to function.
It’s a paradox investigated in the film The Truman Show. The hero finds out that the world he inhabits is an immense television stage-set. Everything from the rising sun in the morning to the starry sky at night is illusion. Everyone around him, including his girlfriend, is an actor, and the cameras are filming 24/7. As he discovers the truth, we can ask what the real horror is: to be lied to or to be told the truth. Although we might be devastated to find out that everything around us was an illusion, don’t we still desperately require a screen to separate us from what’s real? Isn’t that why, in America, for example, almost 70% of heads of household play computer games daily? What better way to keep the reality of their families at arm’s length? Finding out that we live on a vast set or in virtual world might be troubling, but how much worse to find out nothing is staged, nobody is tracking us, no eyes are watching over us and everything is real. That is the world we really dread, and it’s why our taste for the artificial will never dry up.
