Layers: a meditation
by SealWyf, HSM editor
I’m dancing in the Hub, wearing my Echochrome suit, surrounded by other Homelings.
Since this is a Home-centric publication, you’ll know exactly what that means. If I were writing this for a general interest magazine, I would have to explain it — Hub, Homelings Echochrome, and Home itself. If I were writing fiction, I’d drop it in and let you figure it out for yourself from the context. Context is everything in writing, as is the intended audience.
But, being Home users yourselves, you’ll know exactly what Homelings dancing in the Hub look like. Perhaps you’ve seen me there yourself. I’m the bald one in the white suit. Since this is a Home-centric publication, you’ll understand that this is a joke.
So perhaps it’s not fair to point out that I lied just then — I’m not really in the Hub, dancing and wearing Echochrome. I’m sitting on my living room couch wearing a bathrobe, curled up in a blanket facing a large and moderately expensive flat-screen TV, which is attached to a gaming console, which is in turn attached to the Internet. And you are doing much the same thing, though the details will vary. We are here in our living rooms, but we are also in Home. You understand this without being told — these layers of reality are part of the virtual experience.
But wait — I lied about the living room just now. I’m actually sitting on a bus, the Metro 5A express, somewhere between Dulles Airport and Rosslyn Station. It’s my evening commute, a 45-minute chunk of time into which I can fit a fair amount of writing. I write on the morning commute as well, another 45 minutes total. I’m typing this on an Asus Eee PC netbook computer, from which I’ll email it to my primary laptop. And, thanks to the miracle of WordPress publication, you are now reading these words on some other network-attached device, at some unspecified later date, on the HSM website.
When I get home, I may curl up on the couch with a controller and log into Home. And then I, or the avatar that bears my name, may dance in the Hub wearing Echochrome, in the company of other Homelings.
Or maybe not. I haven’t decided yet. I may just log into HSM for a spate of copy-editing, and go to bed. Lately I’ve been very tired.
It’s all very confusing, this disjunct modern life, split between the levels of reality. Sometimes I feel like Digory and Polly in the Narnia novels, wandering through the Wood Between the Worlds — a place that is nowhere in particular, but lets you go anywhere, if you just find the proper portal. We didn’t have all this a few years ago. I wonder how it feels to people who grew up with it — who have always been able to live in three layers at once without confusion, like Alice’s Red Queen, who could believe three impossible things before breakfast. These days, we all live in Wonderland.
The hardest question, when I try to explain all this to my real-world colleagues, is why I do it. I know some of them think it’s moderately creepy, especially when they see General SealWyf in her jet-black armor and glowing eyes. “This is me,” I say. And they edge away, making non-committal remarks, and change the subject.
The other question I’m asked a lot is how much I get paid for working at HSM. (For those of you who were wondering the same thing, the answer is “nothing.”) But “nothing” is not the real answer either, because I wouldn’t work this hard without rewards. It’s just that the rewards, like my Home-based life, are intangible. Or virtual, or imaginary — take your pick of adjectives. But not unreal. It’s just that reality has multiple dimensions these days.
There’s another layer to it, the person who answers to “me”. She’s someone I’m not going to describe, although she provides the resonance for my writing, as the physical body of the violin gives resonance to the music.
And she, in turn, was shaped by history and environment, race and socio-economy, a particular set of parents and friends and places. There’s the pile of psychic pebbles left behind by a lifetime of reading — scraps of poetry and metaphor, tools and models and amusements. And there’s the inescapable chiaroscuro of memento mori, the knowledge that I am six decades into a life that may last seven or eight, or even nine if I’m statistically lucky, but is in any case on the downward swing to darkness.
All that is personal, and really nobody’s business. But I will tell you one thing about myself: I sincerely believe that the important, vital, profound parts of life are revealed in the trivial. I have to — otherwise I would not be trying to do serious writing about a virtual-world chatroom, this massively multiplayer online social experience that is PlayStation Home. I believe that what we feel and do here, in a very real way, affects who we are as human beings, and how we choose to live our lives — the lives on the outer side of the screen, which we assume are more real than the life of the mind.
General SealWyf is as real as that other person, the one who spends her weekdays designing museum database applications, and taps out tales of Home on her evening commute. And you, the other avatars of Home — you’re real too. I know a few of you well enough to guess at your separate real-life journeys. We never would have met without this peculiar microcosm, this window into the collective imagination.
As microcosms go, Home is a pretty good one — somewhere between Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “heaven in a wild flower.” It’s a virtual world inhabited by real people, who have managed to turn it into something more than a mere set of rules and rankings — more, in other words, than a game.
Though one can argue that most of our life on this side of the screen is a game as well, a spider-castle of culture and conventions we have built to fill the hours we are not performing basic animal functions. Art is a game, fashion is a game, business is a game, and so are politics and science. They all have rules and ranks and status. They all have intense, serious competition. I suspect if we could come up with the proper trophy system we could do away with money altogether. My own experience hints that we work harder for ranks, status and ideals than we do for a paycheck.
This is why Home works for us. It feels familiar. Home is a game, and if we have spent any time in the real world, we already know how to play it. And so I suspect that the people who don’t “get” Home and find it boring tend to be younger, while the ones who move in and set up housekeeping have some serious life experience. That’s just my guess, of course. But my own observations bear it out.
We’re used to living in layers, because the real world comes in layers. We are used to dealing with abstractions, the intricate spider-castle of human civilization. We are used to projecting ourselves into other people’s expectations, and creating an appropriate avatar — even if, in the real world, an “avatar” takes the form of a set of clothes and conversational topics and manners, one for each world we inhabit. Family or classroom, playing field or office, nightclub or church — we know how to adapt. Only when we are role-playing are we fully human.
The bus on which I’m writing slides along the highway, changing lanes, jostling among cars. Gliding through the river of humanity, the countless commuters headed home after another hard day of gaming for paychecks.
I check the word-count, and decide that I have said enough. It is time to put my writer-layer away, and let myself be just another commuter at the end of the work-week. Planning the small maintenances of the weekend, looking forward to sleep. And dreaming of PlayStation Home.
May 27th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 11 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
Share
| Tweet |
One of the best HSM articles ever written.
Simple as that.
Excellent work! You have wandered into the land that I love and made me smile and made me think. Thank you!
Thank you, Norse and deuce. This was actually Seal’s taken on the “write a thousand words on something or other” challenge. It was one of those brain-dead evenings on the bus, and I just started tapping away, with no plan as to where it might come out. I’m glad it seems to have worked.
Amazing article Seal. What you said is so true about life and Home. My life changed a great deal the day I stepped into Home, it became a much richer experience because of all the friends I have here. Home gave me the strength I needed to move out of a rut I was in in real life and stretches me as a writer through this magazine. Best thing you have ever written Seal, very few people think of things this way, you have given me much to ponder.
Thank you, Burbie. I am amazed and gratified that my “brain-dead random musings on Home” seem to have touched a kindred nerve in others. I still don’t think Sony quite realizes what they have created here. Or, perhaps they do, but they are still desperately trying to figure out how to monetize it. Either way, I hope it stays around for people like us to explore and colonize.
I dream of a never ending, ever growing PsHome.
Nothing else to add. Awsome article.
mmmmmm. Yes quite simply the best article ever written! As to life well, some of us still search out, How it actually unfolds.
Time isn’t quite a full factor. Ideals would be why I do what I do here.
“The game”, as it were, is separate from what it means to live. It has no bearing on how we actually live. Though we do try to express something we may feel in this place. Sometimes I wonder if that has any good point.
*picks lint from Echochrome suit*
Grand article. Thank you
And now it is time for the pilot of the Nosdrugis avatar to get back to work.
*bows*
Love it! Absolutely brilliant!
This was such a wonderful article Seal. I thought of Stephen King’s concept in the Dark Tower that an entire other reality exists within a rose going in a abandoned lot in New York City. Layers within layers! Brilliant!