Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Retro 50s Diner

The hours I’ve spent, exploring educational sites that I hoped students might visit! These locales offer real “content” in the form of experiments with virtual reality, art installations, exhibits of illuminated texts and banned books. 

I really wanted to see a maze in one of the “Sims” (SL’s term for a region of player-made content).  I never found the maze, but I did find a classic diner, replete with tail-fin Caddies and some lost souls: Edward Hopper must have been watching, somewhere.

On the diner’s dance floor I tried some pre-programmed dances available at the click of a mouse.  A newbie-looking female avatar, watching me, asked “do u know a place to be paid to dance?“  I told her about the Starlight, one of many “all ages” clubs that pay avatars just to sit around and make the place look busy. . .then we waltzed around together.

“So can I get paid to dance?“

“I don’t have a cent,“ I typed. I got the sad little reply, “oh.“

Goodness, gracious. I’m only pixels and I’d met the digital equivalent of that 1940s, “ten cents a dance,“ sad-sack in a rumpled dress and down-at-the-heels shoes.

Should I give her a free house? A motorcycle?  This avatar seemed so pitiful. . .

“I want to see the Starlight.  It’s not an adult spot,“ I added hastily. “Want to go?“

“Sure.“

More on that adventure, soon.  We met an empire-builder.

Location: UR Island

I went to the virtual island that the university has purchased for faculty and students to do experiments with virtual reality.  It’s a safe location for students, because only those approved and on a list may be on the island: no weirdos except Ignatius present.

While that protection, perhaps coddling, itself deserves an entry, I want to discuss how I took off my face.

“In a Strange Land” has led me to interview other SL residents for a series of upcoming profiles, and I was talking to Beeble Baxter, the avatar (in the form of a cartoon animal) of a UR colleague. We sat there on the island and Beeble asked me about how easy it is to change not just one’s clothing, but one’s entire appearance.  He’s not had as much practice as I’ve had. . .so. . . I made my face vanish. 

In the snapshots the result is as dramatic as it is comic.

Using the option to “change appearance,“ I made my head into a blank white nothingness.

Avatars’ faces consist of a series of flexible graphics files that form a mask on a template. Remove that mask, and you have only the putty-like manikin head as a persona.

I put on my sunglasses. I planned to stay this way for a while

The interview continued.  More anon.

Location: 86th Floor, Empire State Building.  11pm

In the fabled location of Doc Savage’s suite of offices, I photographed Times Square glowing in the near distance.  I actually looked for the 1930s Superhero’s name, Clark Savage, Junior, on the building directory. He was unlike other superheroes in that he lacked superpowers: he trained himself, reinvented who he was, to be extraordinary.  What would Doc think of Second Life?

Manhattan has meant more than the best pizza I have tasted. It also jarred me because this place is so much like SL.

First is the erasure of topography and nature, except in Olmstead’s (magnificent) Central Park.  Next, the wild fashions of Greenwich Village near NYU or the Theater District show more modesty than in SL, but these gaudily plumed or subway-Goth natives could be avatars.  Finally, the tourists gawking at the neon canyon of Times Square are avatars, doing a scarecrow’s walk as awkward as any SL newbie’s. 

I don’t think that seeing the surrealist masterpieces at MoMA forced these connections.

A crazy man passed me singing, in a surprisingly clear and melodious voice, about why he hates Chinese people.  Later on, two lovers had a loud verbal tiff in public, right in the middle of the sidewalk.

Doc Savage’s New York was a place of great financial visions and futuristic dreams. If the dreams are parodies today—Trump’s hubris, Paris Hilton’s debauchery—we might excuse them. They hold up a mirror to the unreal worlds we are coding, one avatar at a time, online.