Virtual communities, or on-line suburbia?

Blogging, it seems to me, is a community activity. There’s the imagined community of blogger and readership, often made relatively responsive through the medium of comments. (Indeed, comments sections often take on a life of their own, fostering discussions only tangentially related to the post.) Further to that, there is the cross-pollination of bloggers linking to or commenting on other bloggers’ sites - as well as the phenomenon of the blogger meet-up (where geographically coterminous blog authors can perform the anachronistically embodied act of gathering together as flesh-and-blood avatars of online personas in a physically co-located “offline” space.

Usually to drink beer.)

In fact, I started blogging mere days before going to my first blog meet-up (under the kindly wing of blogger-of-standing Beth) - so I’ve always been able to put faces to certain blogs.

Anyway, if blogging has the capacity to invoke “communities” that may transcend boundaries (is there a time-zone where there’s not someone reading minderella?), what about creating your own virtual suburb?

That’s exactly what the on-line version of "The Sims" is apparently doing (as written up in last week’s "The Weekend Australian" magazine – no online text available). For a wallet-lashing US$50 for the initial game and a US$10 monthly subscription you can join a huge cyber-suburban landscape, your own bourgeois simulacrum. You design your “Sims” inventing personas, or modelling them on people you know, and unleash them into a cyber-social world where they will chose a house and furniture, make friends, go to work, go on dates and have to remember to relieve full bladders, get the kids on the school bus and set out the garbage.

The are, apparently, a gazillion shareware sites with extra clothes, physical appearances, tattoos, lamp-shades and gee-gaws you can select for your little creations. There are no rules and no objectives, unless you want to make the 100 Most Liked characters list. People apparently even set up on-line share houses to act out their little soap-operas and sit coms (DIY “Friends” episodes).

I have to say I find the idea eerily compelling. And am only restrained from hurtling headlong into this experience by (a) expense; (b) the lack of a computer of altogether my very own; and (c) the pressing need to reduce, not expand, the number of distractions in my life.

Perhaps the politics of it should worry me, the rampant consumerism of it, the emphasis on “popularity” and the risk of it becoming a substitute for “real” interaction with people. But frankly, none of it does.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Sim games - going back to the early, primitive black-and-white Mac edition of Sim City which I would play endless hours of, often at Jason’s house, as we’d advise each other on the finer aspects of urban planning, or mopping up after a nuclear power station meltdown.

Sometimes we’d leave a game running over dinner and return to find half the town razed by an earthquake and the ensuing unattended fires.

Ooops.

I can recall playing so long, I could fall asleep visualising the chunkily-animated B&W visuals behind my eyelids.

I have no idea if they occur, but I also find the idea of “Sim meetups” really funny. I can easily imagine people who have shared a Sim dwelling with a player from another country eventually winding flatmates.

“Damn, why can’t we just download some better wallpaper?”

The real risk, however, seems that a large number of players are just … well, kinda dull. From the Weekend Australian article and the little I’ve seen on-line, there’s lots of bikini babes and bench-press perfect animated guys churning out dialogue that would scarcely pass in a bad 80s teen movie. Like everything in our great trans-national electronic state-of-nature, it’d be a question of sifting through the (what is for you) dross to find (what you consider) a community worth participating in.

Still, it’s one more step towards the world where we truly telecommute to the office, even social occasions, by donning our VR helmet and goggles and entering a dedicated virtual space. I think office jobs would be much easier if it could all be done in one’s PJs sitting up in bed. The Sims may have to relieve full bladders, but I doubt they have to iron shirts.

PS

On the theme of trans-national communities, a cheery “Hello!” to whoever is reading at Berkeley and McGill universities. I have no idea who you are, but I’m sure you’re cool.