Pi-Consulting

The internet, among the many dubious benefits it has bestowed on Mankind, has enabled us all to lead double lives. No, we’re not talking, for once, about sneaking peeks at porn, but about virtual reality sites.

If you want to know more about the real world, take a closer look at virtual worlds, and the way people inhabit them. Join an online game world like Second Life, for instance, and you’ll see what Pi means. Second Life is a 3-D world jointly created by thousands of internet users over time. Once you’re there, you can re-imagine yourself as taller, better-looking and considerably more dashing than the prosaic reality you see every morning in the mirror. Re-cast as your cyber-double or virtual avatar, you can even sprout digital wings and fly, if you’ve a mind.

All of which would suggest that players who inhabit such virtual worlds might choose to leave behind the boring everyday business of working, shopping and hanging around in bars and restaurants. How wrong that supposition would be, however!

In Second Life, for instance, as reported in a recent New York Times guided tour, you can get a virtual job if you want to, and earn virtual money, even exchanging it for the real thing. Many do decide to “cyber-work”, and derive keen enjoyment from spending their hard-earned imaginary dollars on virtual goods and services, such as flashy outfits, glitzy hair-dos and makeovers, or furnishings for their cyber-home. Says the Times, “They don’t need to have drinks in their hands when they visit a virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right and feel comfortable”. Shopping is a major collective obsession. Some users buy so much stuff in cyberspace that they have to dedicate time to turning out their virtual cupboards. One or two have even held virtual garage sales.

Even when our imaginations fly beyond the real world, it seems, they drag along behind them our earth-bound preoccupations with wealth, ownership and acquisition. We are left with the question pointedly asked by Nick Yee, a Stanford professor who has studied virtual worlds and their inhabitants: “What does it say about us, that we trade our consumerist-oriented culture for one that’s even worse? Why can’t we break away from …an appearance-oriented culture?”.

Attitudes are hard to shake. The NYT report concludes, that “As a petri dish for examining what makes us tick, Second Life reveals just how deep-seated the drive is to fit in, look good and get ahead in a material world”.

Even when that world is immaterial.