Second Life Success Story

When we started our class discussions about Second Life a couple of weeks ago, I thought the whole thing was bizarre. A weird addiction, one in which people create alternate identities and seemingly spend as much time working on their new identities as they do on their real life persona. After our first discussion on Second Life, I had to fly home to be with my family, where I quickly saw the positive uses of these virtual worlds.

While sitting in my Aunts house, I was hanging out with my 37-year-old cousin who is severely mentally challenged. As much as I hate to call him a burden, this is essentially what he has become to my Aunt and Uncle who are both in their Mid-Sixties. He essentially has the mental capacity of an 11-year-old who has a hard time counting the change in his pocket. For the last thirty seven years, my Aunt and Uncle have had to bring him everywhere, their life has been entirely centered around him. He has no friends, no life outside of their small Trenton suburb home. One of his only interactions with the outside world is when he and my Grandfather go to the Yankees minor league games, the Trenton Thunder. That was until I helped him open up a Second Life account.

I called him yesterday to see if I could ask him a couple of questions about how Second Life has changed his life. Luckily he agreed, but I promised him that I wouldn't give out the name of his Second Life avatar because he doesn't want people in his new community to know that he is, in real life, mentally challenged, a request that I am going to honor. Although he has only been in this virtual world for a short time, I have heard from many relatives that he has never been happier and has given my Aunt and Uncle a freedom they haven't experienced in a long, long time. This is what my cousin Chris has to say about his new life in his new world. Mind you, I had to change a lot of his wording so it made more sense, so none of these are direct quotes.

He was nervous, scared that the people in this new virtual world would discriminate against him like people have done his whole life. He was very hesitant to talk to women, or anybody for that matter. He spent the first couple of days just exploring, trying to get the hang of how to control his new world. Luckily for him, my younger cousin lives down the street from him and was very familiar with technology and the Second Life community, so he helped Chris out a lot. Finally, he started talking with people, started making friends with all sorts of people. He started telling me about this bunny that he became friends with (we know them as furries). He was telling me about the friends he met that would talk baseball with him and how much easier it was to communicate online then it was if he was face-to-face with them. Then, whispering into the phone as if he didn't want my Aunt to hear, he started telling me about how he saw people having sex and how he finally gained the confidence to talk to women. Now, all he does is go around talking to females, something that he has never had the confidence to do in the real world. He spends a fair amount of time on Second Life, because as he says, "they like me, they treat me normal there." Real world or not, everyone deserves to be treated normally and I am really proud of my cousin that he has finally found a community that he feels a part of.