In Tom Boellstorff’s “Coming of Age in Second Life”, he focuses on the daunting task of studying the history of virtual worlds. Boellstorff provides many different histories of virtuality, rather than one chronological linear history. Virtuality has been present in humans since the beginning of time. According to historian Hillel Schwartz, “Virtual reality is older than sin. It is the hallucination of heaven, the peyote vision, the dionysiac stupor. It is the play, the novel, the opera, any system devised for losing ourselves in another world” (Schwartz 1996:362). Even primal capabilities like dreaming, performing rituals, speaking language, and creating pneumonic devices in our minds are considered some of the first virtual realities (Boellstorff 2008:33). Boellstorff highlights a scene in the seventh book of Plato’s “Republic” that depicts one of the oldest notions of a virtual world in Western history. In this scene, humans are imprisoned underground and use the faint light of a fire to communicate through the medium of shadow puppets. The physical world is seen as virtual.

In modern times, we have a tendency to view the physical world as more authentic and real than the virtual (Boellstorff 2008:34). I found it very interesting that the definition of virtual has shifted drastically over time. British anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern, wrote that, “in this tradition, ‘virtual’ referred to ‘the physical qualities (or virtues) that things have, and to the effects of these qualities, like the virtual heat of wine or of sunshine. It then came to describe the state of being effective or potent. Not until the seventeenth century was the term first used for the essence or effect of qualities by themselves’” (Strathern 2002:305). It is so strange to think that “virtual” at one point referred to physical qualities. In modern times, we view the virtual as an alternate reality. Specifically in the past century, there has been a large influence of fantasy and scientific fiction literature and film on the general public, which has depicted the make-believe world as a possibility. This influence of nineteenth century electronic mass media has led to a desire to create our own “secondary worlds”. Even more recently, the popularity of video games and “cyberpunk” literature and film encourage individuals to experience these virtual worlds in groups, forming what Benedict Anderson would consider “imagined communities”.

In Boellstorff’s world of Second Life, he gives examples of pauses in the virtual world created by a gamer’s inactivity.  This aspect of cyber-sociality is called afk (away-from-keyboard): when gamers leave their virtual avatars and reenter the time of the physical world, even though their avatars are still present in the virtual sociality.  An afk “revealed the complexities of presence, but multiple redeployments of the virtual/actual binarism occurring, not the erasure or transcendence of that binarism” (Boellstorff 2008: 108).  In Second Life, there is one instance where Trishie, a child resident of Second Life, notices plates and sandwiches and exclaims, “Mommie left us lunch” (Boellstorff 2008:109).  Trishie then proceeds to say she has to go afk and check on her meatloaf in the physical world because she is preparing dinner for her two children.  This real life mother inverts her real life role and becomes a child avatar in Second Life.  In this case, the social roles of the virtual world challenge the social roles of the real world. 

*Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the     Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.