Where do all the avatars go when they’re no longer are here?
I
know, I know! Into
the dead zone (cue
the dramatic music!)
Second
Life (SL)
is
littered with so many phantoms, or what I call fleeters,
those who were there once and now not but have left their ghost
in names, accounts and avatars which exist and don’t exist
at the same time in
a
limbo.
Once
upon a time they’d
run away to join the circus and then run away from that, the
circus being
SL, never to be seen again and
yet
their tantalising breadcrumbs are still to be found going
stale.
Second life is becoming a graveyard of empty lives, of echoes, traces, corpses pretty much, the dead existing in name and statistics only on friends lists, on prims, in profiles: are they undead, in a coma, in hibernation, abducted by aliens, avi-napped?!
Second life is becoming a graveyard of empty lives, of echoes, traces, corpses pretty much, the dead existing in name and statistics only on friends lists, on prims, in profiles: are they undead, in a coma, in hibernation, abducted by aliens, avi-napped?!
I
know, I know! They’ve
moved into Second
Unlife,
a holding pattern, a waiting room, stasis,
perhaps
an anteroom to a Second
AfterLife.
After
all, some of
them might
come
back one
day
though the
longer they dn’t the less likely they will,
while some
most definitely won’t
being that they shuffled their mortal coil in
the real world
leaving no clues
as to what should happen to their SL-self,
or
Slelf, should
they have
pre-deceased
their avatar. These
are the spookiest, you
know they’re gone and yet.
Perhaps this is just like real
death
in real life (RL)
where even though the person is gone they
are still here in their photos, their old possessions,
image, the
things
they’ve done, and
in the minds and hearts of those closest to them.
SL
is perhaps one of the largest graveyards in the virtual world, but
without any actual graves, just
a few with real names with most being merely facades,
macabre playgrounds, impressions.
Fleeters
are
the lost boys and girls inhabiting a dead
zone, a
land
of echoes, a
shadowland
consigned
to forever do so, suspended
on the cusp of a black hole not escaping and yet not vanishing
utterly inside to be crushed to nothing.
All
these names with no one to claim them, that’s
what I’d call an existential
crisis.
© 2019 Anan Eebus
