fourworlds

I didn’t go into Second Life looking for the virtual girl of my dreams. But that’s what I found. And this is our story.

In the fall of 2007 one of our company’s clients expressed an interest in establishing a presence in Second Life. I volunteered to revive my seldom-used account and become our resident expert. As luck (or fate) would have it, my wife and kids took a trip that weekend and I spent almost every waking hour in the virtual world. Somewhere along the way I crossed the psychological border between observation and immersion. One moment I was was staring at a screen looking into a virtual world. The next, I had the visceral experience of being an embodied avatar inside a virtual world. I was hooked.

As a newly-converted virtual world evangelist, I soon encouraged my spouse to give it a try and we started spending time together in avatar form. It wasn’t too long before I got the idea of registering an alt account, slapping together a slave girl avatar and springing a little surprise. I realized this wasn’t the most original idea in the world so I registered the name “Botgirl” for a little twist. Little did I know that this whimsical decision would lead to a pseudonymous identity that would take over my creative life.

I didn’t have a particular set of attributes in mind when I started shopping for the shape, skin, hair and clothes that would transform Botgirl into the hot little number I intended.  Hours flew by like minutes as I teleported from store to store and drifted into what I now suspect was a semi-hypnotic state. When I “woke up”, I realized that a dreamlike story had been unfolding beneath my conscious awareness: Botgirl as an Artificial Intelligence waking up as an avatar with no memory of a prior existence. I promptly cast aside my original lame plan for Botgirl and stepped off into the unknown.

I’m not sure where I got the odd notion of method-acting my way into developing Botgirl as a character for a comic or graphic novel. But that’s what I started doing. I began exploring Second Life as a newly-hatched Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a mind-blowing experience. From the start, being Botgirl felt like channeling a cross between Susie Bright and the Dalai Lama. It felt like Botgirl was speaking through me. I was often more surprised by the words coming out of her mouth than were those I chatted with.

I soon realized that Botgirl’s emerging personality would not be fully realized through random chats in Second Life. So I launched a blog to develop her unique take on both physical and virtual life. Although I was still very interested in creating a work based on her fictional story, Botgirl as an existential phenomenon was much more intriguing. The journey became the destination.

After blogging almost every day for five weeks her audience had grown to only five or six viewers a day. That was fine with me. Despite grander long-range plans, I was quite content to keep things on the down-low for the foreseeable future. So it was a huge surprise when I took a cursory glance at the bog’s traffic numbers on the afternoon of April 9 and saw the visitor count for the day climbing towards fifty. WTF?

Surprise escalated to shock as I followed the referring links and read an article headlined “Who Is Botgirl?” in New World Notes, a tremendously popular blog reporting on virtual worlds. Shock transitioned into high-anxiety as I watched the numbers climb towards 200 as the day progressed. I wasn’t ready for that kind of scrutiny. My knee-jerk fear was the crazy notion that “Who Is Botgirl” was a clarion call for the masses of NWN readers to work on cracking my human identity. I got over it.

Since then, Botgirl has been my muse, model, collaborator and creative slave-driver. We’ve produced a large body of work, including a series of web comics, videos and over 1000 images on Flickr. “Botgirl’s Second Life Diary” was listed recently among the top 50 Second Life blogs. Botgirl presented at the first Second Life Comic-Con and created a large-scale solo art exhibition, “Botgirl’s Identity Circus.” Botgirl has active accounts on Twitter and Facebook. As a matter of fact she has more friends and followers than me.

LIke most avatars I know, the identity of Botgirl’s “typist” has been a closely held secret. Although my immediate family, close friends and even some business associates know the connection, as far as I know, there are only a couple of people in the Second Life community who know the score. Since part of the magic of pseudonymous characters is that they are independent of preconceptions attached to human existence,  disclosing “real life” identity is akin to Minnie Mouse taking off her head at Disneyland. So why am I doing it now, given there’s a fairly significant amount of risk that disclosure will kill suspension of disbelief for at least some segment of Botgirl’s current friends and readers?

The short answer is that the pseudonymity that initially facilitated free expression is now a box that constrains creative growth and the development of more fully realized personal relationships. For the first year or so, social interactions were strictly from Botgirl’s perspective and consciousness. She adamantly refused to admit to having any human aspect. But over time, as a number of acquaintances moved towards friendships, it began to feel like withholding all reference to my human identity was inauthentic. So I started to intentionally inject more of my human self into the conversations. No identifying information, but personal anecdotes that were relevant to a conversation.  The problem this created was that although both Botgirl and I feel “real” as unique individuals, we are pretty much a sham as a morph.

After trying a few less onerous strategies over the course of this year, I finally decided that the best way to restore Botgirl’s singular persona and reestablish a sense of integrity would be for me to step out from behind the curtain. She can go on as a work of living fiction and I can finally begin to tell the story of the human side of virtual life. This is our first step in that new direction. Stay tuned.

(Some of this content originated in posts in Botgirl’s Second Life Diary)

BOTGIRL ON THE NET
Botgirl’s Second Life Diary
Botgirl on YouTube
Botgirl on Issuu (comics)
Botgirl on Flickr
Botgirl on Twitter
Botgirl on Facebook