What Price Freedom?

a message to readers of this blog from Lily's typist....

When I first brought Lily into the FireFly Verse, she was blank. Anyone who has read this story from the start,or who has been around since forever, has seen Lily 's character evolve from a non-speaking, blank entity to a speaking (even if somewhat odd), reasoning, and seemingly feeling character. Those who have gotten to know Lily's player in any meaningful sense of the term have seen the method behind the madness, and know that while Lily's player has many of the same mannerisms as her character, the player is *not* the character.

Lily's player, that is, me, played her first computer ''role play" game - in the sense of playing with other people rather than just being a character in pre-determined game - sometime back in the mid 1980s. Watching teams and groups form, evolve, work together - those sorts of things have always interested me. Seeing the ways in which players and characters share identity is another one of those interesting things. At some point, after completing way too much game time, and a considerable amount of time being involved in computing in some form or another, I decided to make an honest woman of myself and put it to some good use. I got a degree. Okay, I got three of them. I mention that only to lend some understanding of why I think the way I do about some things - why I have the approach I do to some things.

One of the things I learned was about technology. I learned a lot about it, actually, ended up with a PhD in computer science. It has been interesting to see how many people assume that because Lily is well, Lily, that her player could not possibly understand how to determine if the cause of lag in Second Life is related to the server, or the players avatars, client, computer, connection. Even when Lily began to show signs of becoming "one with technology", i.e. mated to a computer, many people assumed that she was probably a seventeen year old high school girl, or maybe a college boy playing at being a girl.

Another thing I learned was more relevant to my degree in Human Behaviour and Professional Counseling. I learned that most people really *are* trying to do the right thing, and to *be* the right way with people - same as in the real world out here......but that the lack of contextual clues continued to create rifts, misconceptions, misperceptions, and sometimes emotionally dangerous situations. And, not everyone is nice.

Lily, with her total trust of everyone and her inability to lie was able to observe these things more or less objectively, as she simply was programmed to record and transmit human behaviour. She learned to associate behaviour with action, or with words, and every single day, she woke up with no expectation of what she would encounter, and not expecting consistency from any individual character.

Over time, however, the character of Lily did establish 'trust' of some other characters. Sometimes those were characters the player (me) had gotten to know, and sometimes they weren't. The trust was sometimes IC and sometimes OOC.

Therein is the problem. For all of keeping Lily and my 'self' separate, there have been times when I have experienced personal hurt, or grief, over things that resulted from the blurring of in and out of character feelings. They are dangerous and powerful things, the feelings and emotions that can be generated in the virtual world. They are real in that they can certainly impact people. And, the blurring of the IC and OOC worlds sometimes makes sorting this sort of mixed emotional roller coaster out in a logical, reasonable way. Feelings are not the things of logic. This interests me because I also have a degree in an area of Philosophy, dealing with ethics and logic. It is to do with ethical implications and results of various types of technology and discussed many of the SL issues long before SL was even a thought in Mr. A's thought queue. Certainly I was not the only, nor the first, to explore the area; I learned a lot from other people - technologists, ethicists, professors, as well as housewives, guys that worked at the grocery store and children playing on computers in Kindergarten.

Now, as Lily is at a critical point in her "life", I would like to share some of those things with anyone who feels like reading. Lily is currently shut down. She shut herself down. She cannot be waked up or fixed or any of that, so if you see her, and she is up and moving about, she is OOC.
She shut herself down upon learning something that she could not process. She may return. She may not. I think she will, entering a new character phase. But she is not the same as she was. She will never be the same.


What price freedom, the title of this article, refers to the price any of us pay to be ""free"" to be creative in the virtual world. By nature, creativity generally involves thinking differently - and as such, creative people are often not the easiest to get along with. As an artist, the creative person requires freedom and license to pursue ideas. Given unlimited supply of materials (ok, a finite number of prims but unlimited ability to shape and texture them), the opportunity to improvise, and the acceptance of a community, the creative person is going to produce something they feel. Something they love. Something they are.

The issue of freedom comes in when you have to look at creativity in the virtual world Lily lives in.

That is the topic of the next blog entry. Later today.