Second Life Adventures Number Whatever: Pretend Houses and the Performance of Class

[snarp]

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

I’ve talked about nice things enough! This time, I’m going to make fun of somebody’s house.

Click the picture to zoom in and read the text. It is hilarious.

* It is a “Luxury Lodge,” with ad copy visually calculated to make one think of a ski lodge - the little bare-wood structure at the top of a sharp slope that the signs are in, the snowy picture (there’s no snow in the actual sim). And it has “privacy windows,” and you can also get a “vacation lodge” version of the house. So far we are doing a pretty good job here of invoking the Western stock symbols of wealth and privilege, but can we take it further?

* We can! We can call something “exclusive.” “Owners Group: An Exclusive Group for Arc Owners.” This group is only for people with big ridiculous houses.

* It’s called “The Arc.” This is my new favorite marketing thing ever. It conveys moral superiority, legitimacy conferred by authority, escape or sanctuary from a teeming rabble and/or hostile world, a sense of vast size and weight, and wood. It’s so perfect.

I’m not an expert in architecture, but, you know. Even I can see that this is not all that great of a building. The top’s very high and light, but the bottom’s way too heavy to be part of the same house - there’s that big dark gap between the first and second floors where nothing’s really happening visually, and those stone columns that look like they were intended for a different structure entirely.

Though maybe this is the intention. Maybe it’s ultra-ironic, sort of a Murakami Takashi-type thing, and the bottom-heavy pretend internet house is intended to imply the luxury home’s status as an image rather than a dwelling. The physical house becomes overloaded by its own symbolic weight and sinks into itself, becoming something too dense with meaning to be comfortably lived in.

(I don’t think this is the intention.)

And the sides and the back just have nothing going on - the house is intended to be seen from the front. Or, preferably, the inside. The copy did mention “privacy windows,” and the designer obviously knows her market.

A separately-purchasable bedroom set. Every SL merchant selling furniture intended to make you feel upper-class has a flat-screen TV or two, and they never do anything. They’re just pictures of flat-screen TVs. The pricier ones are pictures someone made from scratch in Photoshop, and the cheap ones are pictures someone took off Circuit City’s website.

The second floor, which privacy-minded people probably won’t be spending much time in. You can usually set “privacy windows” so that you can see out from inside but not in from outside. But when you can see the other guy, it’s hard to convince your brain that he can’t see you.

The first floor has some optional furniture sets, but the second doesn’t, though there is a fireplace that is obviously too small to heat the huge skylight-covered room. The second floor also has some things resembling overhead lights, which the first floor does not.

Despite the house’s size, the inside of the first floor manages to feel claustrophobic. The Second Life client obviously illuminates everything whether there’s an actual area-light nearby or not, but the dark texturing, filtered windows, and lack of anything looking like a strong light on this floor the house make it feel dark. This is intentional, as the candles and dark red-and-yellow lampshades attest.

The aimed-for mood is presumably coziness and security. Most Second Life architecture and furniture sellers have at least a few items going for this sort of ambiguously-domestic privacy aesthetic. When people leave their SL houses open to the public, they tend to fill them with the sorts of things they feel convey their ownership - big pillows and soft lights and wooden tables and seashells and stuffed animals, so crowded together and texture-heavy your avatar can’t move and your computer grinds to a halt.

My instinctive feeling is that the desire for these sorts of things comes from the same place as the desire to bling out one’s blog/social networking profile/message board sig/whatever to within an inch of its life, until even the owner can barely read it. The simultaneously personal and public nature of these methods of communication instills a psychological need to stake off a “safe” territory for oneself. So, one needs kitchens and sofas and paintings and things, because their presence is how you tell yourself a place is yours.

And if one’s things are really expensive-feeling - like a “vacation lodge” (left) - obviously they offer even greater psychological security.

Here is a sign found outside the designer’s main shop, an ad for this person’s clothing store. It says “Please Join the Tableau Society for Well Being to receive Notifications of ever increasing necessities for well being in modern life.” It pleases me.

Comments

Let Them

[(Anonymous)]

There, feel better now that you've had a good 15-minute hate session on people with "mass taste" that you view as your social inferiors?

If people want to have prefab houses in a virtual world, that cost anywhere from $0 to $100 US dollars, let them? I mean, it's a free country. People don't wait around for you to give them permission to express themselves and socialize the way they want to? You can laugh and point and ridicule, as you may do about MySpacers, but, hey, this prefab owner is probably laughing all the way to the bank, because she charges real money for this house, essentially, since Linden dollars can be cashed out to real dollars. The prefab economy is booming in SL with the land glut and lots of new owners. Do you think YOU could build a better house and sell it?

I agree that this house is clunky, heavy, not the best. But there are gadzillion others. And privacy is something people do ask for -- and again,t hey, they don't wait for your permission and your Puritanical clearance on their online lives.

You don't get it about the TVs apparently. They can stream anything on Quicktime. They all have devices to move URLs into the parcel to stream media. They aren't just props or screenshots.

Prokofy Neva

Re: Let Them

[snarp]

Mr. Neva,

Thanks for pointing that out about the TVs. I leave streaming video turned off by default because my computer can't handle it, so I assumed they were just for decoration.

This blog is mostly about comic books intended for twelve-year-olds. It is presently decorated with pictures of my favorite character from "Battle Angel Alita." As awesome as this makes me (and it makes me totally awesome), I try my best not to think of myself as "socially superior." It seems risky.

I spend a fair amount of money on Second Life clothes and stuff myself (as I think is pretty clear in my other SL posts - my wardrobe is fabulous), so obviously I'm not criticizing people who buy and sell SL content. I also don't have anything bad to say about privacy settings. You'll notice that this is a LiveJournal. People generally use LiveJournal, rather than otherwise more flexible sites like Blogger or WordPress, because they like the privacy settings.

What I was making fun of here was a single individual's design and marketing strategy, and how it ties in with other aspects of SL culture and economics. You seem to be reading it as a personal attack on the Second Life user base at large, and by extension, yourself. I am part of the SL user base, and I do not know who you are. You do not need to defend yourself to me.