“There is no there there,” the writer Gertrude Stein famously observed in her autobiography, which is curiously titled “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937). She was talking about Oakland, Calif., where she’d gone looking for her childhood home. She couldn’t find it. I don’t understand why this quote is so well known, possibly because I haven’t read the book.
At the risk of stealing from the dead, let me state that there is no there here, either, and I don’t mean Ms. Stein’s ancestral bungalow. I mean There, capital T, the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s no longer here, on my hard drive, because I uninstalled it.
If you have been keeping up with your reading assignments, dear classmates (Hint: Don’t look for them under “assignments” on the wiki) you know that There is “a world of unending leisure and pleasure” with a “melon and aqua color palette” and “cheerful, perky font.” Or so gushes Betsy Basket, who, my guess, is not a person at all but an avatar who skips around gum-drop land in blue-checked gingham.
“There” wouldn’t let me into its utopia of sensibly priced brocade dune buggies. First it didn’t like my browser. Then, after unpacking approximately 80 billion files onto my hard drive, it wouldn’t let me past the log-in page. No, it recognized my user name and password as valid, it just wouldn’t load.
A message suggested I check to see if the domain itself was down – as if anything so cheerful and perky could ever be down. (It wasn’t.) The next suggestion was to go to the help page. This turned out to be a list of queries from other hapless souls whose symptoms didn’t match mine. The registration confirmation email had included a link to a “Live Help,” page, so I clicked on that. It loaded a page divided into two categories: Abuse Issues and Billing Issues. Billing? Nobody said anything about paying.
I mention this frustrating episode because this is not an isolated incident. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence now indicates that I am not welcome in virtual reality. Who is? Substantial experience in computer gaming seems to be one prerequisite along with a computer no more than a year old.
The first unwelcome mat I encountered was at Second Life, which I downloaded some weeks ago. This reportedly fantastic – dare I say remarkablized – virtual world displays on my computer as a muddle of gloomy silhouettes, like some dreadful intermediate phase between Picasso’s blue period and cubism. Our esteemed instructor and Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka diagnosed the problem as an outdated driver for my graphics card, but a search online uncovered no available updates. So I may never get to tie up at Radio Shack Island or experience other destinations I hear tell are neat-o.
The explorer moves on.
World of Warcraft warned that it would take 38 hours to download its 16 gigs onto my hard drive. But an hour after starting this process, I had barely received 3 megs. A message said I apparently had a firewall in the way. I was ushered to a page that, worryingly, promised instructions on how to disable my defenses. None of the virus protection software listed , however, matched what I had (newly) installed on my machine. Goodbye. I was only going to advocate for truth and reconciliation anyway.
VMTV actually downloaded and opened on my laptop. I entered and patiently listened as Zach and Jen (I’m making up their names) explained how to walk and talk and teleport and shop. For the next hour or so I roamed VMTV looking for someone to talk with or something to do. I saw only two avatars. The first was a comely blonde in a white bikini. She stood behind a lectern looking as confused as I was. And by “I” I mean my blond male avatar in a red hoodie. I typed “Hi.” She ignored me.
About an hour later I found myself repeatedly walking into the closed door of a shop on a deserted city street. Someone typed into my conversation rectangle, “You can’t go in there.”
I typed back meekly that I was new in these parts and wondering where everybody was.
“Do you have a car?” the mystery typist asked. I typed no.
“Do you have any money?” I located a button in the lower right corner of the screen that informed me I had 1,000 of something. I disclosed this information.
Just then I got the idea to turn Red Hoodie around and see if someone was there. I was startled to find that there was, a guy wearing some kind of creepy cat mask. He didn’t type anything more. He just stood there staring at me. I started to wonder why he had asked about my car and money.
More staring.
I suddenly and irrationally had this sense of impending … I don’t know … homosexuality. I hurriedly found the exit arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen. A second later I was back on the familiar green rolling hills of my Windows XP default desktop.
I’m probably going to have nightmares about Creepy Catman tonight. Best that I uninstall his world too.
3 comments:
I had many (other?) issues on my computer, too, Ed and only made it onto Second Life. MTV land sounded surreal! Glad you didn't get mugged there.
I'm sorry to hear you had so much trouble getting on to these virtual worlds Ed. What kind of video card do you have on your laptop? You can check by pressing the Start button. Go to the category Run. In the box that comes up, type in dxdiag . (All one word). Click on the Display Tab. There you will find all your video card stats.
Let me know and we can see if it meets the minimum requirements for Second Life: http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php
Chris,
It's a Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP by ATI. I looked it up in the Windows device manager before going looking for an updated driver. The laptop manufacturer, Toshiba, didn't have anything. Neither did the card manufacturer. I looked around at some other driver sites and found one that matched the card, but when I downloaded it it said it wasn't compatible with my computer. My laptop, by the way, is only about two years old.
Don't fret about my not being able to view Second Life. If everything worked like it should I'd have nothing to write about! There really is a consistent theme here, I think. Consciously or not, these sites are set up to discourage people who haven't grown up gaming. Probably it is intentional. They know that their core audience doesn't want a bunch of clueless technophobes clogging up their world. In this respect the VR sites are very different from the e-commerce sites, where every step is taken to be easy and inclusive. They don't want a single customer to bail because it's too complicated or there might be a software compatibility issue.
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