Second Glances with Arabella

No one tells you on the day you first come into this world how important that date will eventually become—assuming, of course, that you make it out of the orientation arena.

Those first few moments of life in the virtual world, as you quite literally try to find your feet, can be overwhelming, frustrating and even a bit frightening, depending upon when and where you happen to arrive as you venture into the great unknown. This is your actual Rez Day: the day you stepped out onto the vast plateau of Second Life as a clean slate, with an empty profile, zero groups and no identity whatsoever beyond the name you first chose to give yourself.

From out of the primordial pixels comes you, and suddenly you have your entire virtual life ahead of you.

From that first day, you begin learning the basics: how to walk, how to fly, how to communicate and how to get out of the rain—if you can actually find some. You join nearly every group thrown your way and begin working on your avatar, tentatively venturing into the bewildering realms of bodies, heads, skins and hair. Eventually, you graduate from the goodwill bin of freebies to the world of couture, selecting with ever-growing care the outfits that tell the world something about your taste, your style and your personality.

You also begin to find your people, hesitantly at first and then more boldly, becoming part of the wider Second Life community and everything that entails. Perhaps you settle down, put down roots and find a place that feels like home. Or perhaps you choose the life of a wanderer, jumping from one destination to the next as you explore in amazement all there is to see and experience in this magical world. You visit cities, castles, beaches, forests and places that could never exist outside the imaginations of those who built them. Somewhere along the way, without even noticing it, you stop being a newcomer and simply become part of the world.

Months go by and suddenly you discover—usually by accident—that, like King Charles III, you now have two birthdays: one in real life and another in Second Life. The revelation generally comes when someone enthusiastically wishes you a “Happy Rez Day,” and you realize, to your amazement, that you have reached your first full year in this strange new world.

This is your Rez Day, and while many are celebrated much like real-life birthdays, these are always something a little more. A Rez Day means you have accomplished something. You have mastered—or at least survived—a technical world in which things do not always make sense and where you can do things you could never do in real life, such as fall from the roof of a building without injury, walk around on the bottom of the ocean without air or accidentally wear an entire house on your head.

It is a badge of honor, there for everyone to see who reads your profile, because Second Life never allows us—or anyone else—to forget exactly how old we are.

Unlike most, though certainly not all, real-life cultures, advancing in age in Second Life is not something you lie about or even attempt to obfuscate. It is something you proudly embrace as an advancement, perhaps even an elevation. With it comes the expectation that, by virtue of your increasing age, you have developed and honed abilities commensurate with those years—even if you have never rezzed a prim, raised a mountain or sunk an entire region.

With great age comes great responsibility, and that includes certain rituals and traditions.

This occurred to me over the weekend as I attended a Rez Day celebration for a friend who had reached the exalted Second Life age of twenty and was marking the occasion in high style with friends and neighbors from around the Scottish Highlands of SL.

Let me say clearly that there are Rez Days, and then there are special Rez Days.

The major anniversaries—five, ten and fifteen—are important ones. They measure extended periods of an avatar’s life and speak of experience, knowledge and history. Twenty, however, is very special, and it is an achievement that truly deserves to be celebrated. If you have made it that long in Second Life, you have been there, done that and seen nearly everything. You have completed a score of years, and there is not much about the virtual world upon which you cannot speak with some degree of experience.

That is precisely what elder Rez Days tend to bring out.

By the time I arrived—fashionably late, as usual—the old photographs were already out, and still more were coming. There were photographs dating back to 2006, complete with all the bad hair, pasty skin and painted-on clothing that particular period of history implied. The images possessed the archaeological quality of relics from some vanished civilization, except that many of the people in them were standing nearby, looking considerably better and pretending not to recognize themselves.

Then the stories began.

They were stories of a different time and place in the history of Second Life: of people and regions long gone, of communities founded and lost, of friendships that endured and others that quietly faded into the mist of the grid. As the celebrated one began to reminisce, another elder friend, himself standing on the brink of nineteen years, offered an explanation to everyone else:

“Sorry, folks. This is what happens when old avatars get together.”

This is a phenomenon I have come to recognize as one of the universal truths of Second Life. Gather any group of old avatars together—at a Rez Day, a holiday celebration, a club, a performance or especially an occasion involving people who do not see one another very often—and the gathering will quickly become an expedition down Memory Lane and into the deepest recesses of ancient Second Life history and impossibly disorganized inventories.

Remember, one real-life year is roughly equivalent to six Second Life years in most people’s minds, so twenty years is a lot of history in the virtual realm. Whole communities have risen, flourished and disappeared in that time. Technology has transformed the way we look, move, build and communicate. Businesses once considered institutions have vanished, while others have somehow survived nearly everything the grid has thrown at them. Names that once appeared everywhere have gone silent, and empty spaces on the map have replaced places we once believed would always be there.

I will confess that I have gone down that rabbit hole a few times myself. Although my main account is only eight years old, my alter ego AKA as Original Arabella is now in her seventeenth year and can relate to many—though not all—of the stories told about the “good old days” of Second Life.

There were gridwide crashes of epic proportions. There were solemn warnings not to spend any Linden dollars until the financial system had been repaired. There was the dreaded condition known as “being Ruthed,” in which your avatar suddenly decided to collapse in upon itself, usually with results that were alarming to the victim and hilarious to everyone else. Logging in to discover your hair or a shoe protruding from your butt could be quite unsettling as well.

“Young avatars today do not know what lag is. We walked to school six miles every day in lag, uphill, both ways. We crashed entire sims just trying to dance. Don’t talk to me about lag young lady”.

The stories went on and on, including a few about things even I had never heard of. To a newer avatar wandering into the discussion, it probably did not sound as though they had been the good old days at all. In truth, many of them were not especially good while we were living through them. There was nothing charming about a region crashing at the worst possible moment, an inventory refusing to load or body parts emerging from places they were never intended to be.

But Rez Days have a way of softening the sharper edges of memory. They make us pause and remember the good times that occurred alongside all those mishaps. Nostalgia gradually overcomes the frustration we once felt, and the technical disasters become comedy, legend and part of the shared history that binds us together.

Perhaps that is why Rez Days matter so much.

They do not merely celebrate the date upon which an account was created. They commemorate the life that followed: the places we discovered, the things we created, the ridiculous mistakes we survived and, above all, the people we met along the way. An avatar may begin as little more than a name and a collection of pixels, but over time it gathers stories. It becomes attached to friendships, homes, communities and memories that are no less meaningful simply because they happened in a virtual world.

After twenty years, the old photographs are not merely amusing evidence of questionable hair and painted-on trousers. They are records of people we once were, standing beside people we were fortunate enough to know. Some remain with us. Others have moved on from Second Life, and some have left this world altogether. Yet for a few moments, when those photographs come out and the stories begin again, the old places reappear, familiar voices seem close at hand and vanished days become briefly present.

There is something beautiful in that.

Second Life is often described as a world where anything is possible, and much of its appeal rests upon that promise. We can fly, teleport, change our appearance and rebuild our surroundings whenever we wish. Yet beneath all that possibility lies something much more ordinary and far more precious: the passage of time. We arrive, we learn, we change, we make friends, and we accumulate memories. The world changes around us, but we carry pieces of its past forward.

So when an avatar reaches twenty, the celebration is about more than endurance. It is about continuity. It is about having witnessed a world grow and transform while remaining part of it. It is about being able to look around a crowded room and recognize not merely names above heads, but chapters in a story that has been unfolding for decades.

And yes, when old avatars get together, there will be photographs. There will be stories. There will be exaggerated tales about catastrophic lag, missing inventories and the horrors of being Ruthed. The younger residents may smile politely and wonder how any of us survived such primitive times.

Let them.

One day, if they are lucky, they will gather for someone’s twentieth Rez Day and tell their own stories about the baffling technology, fashions and customs of today. They will laugh at old photographs, remember places no longer on the map and try to explain to some bewildered newcomer what Second Life was like in 2026.

That is how a virtual world acquires a history—not through servers, software or archived release notes, but through the people who remember it.

And perhaps that is the greatest honor of an elder Rez Day: not simply that you have spent twenty years in Second Life, but that after all those years, there are still friends beside you who remember the journey—and who have come to celebrate that you are still here. Dance at your own party. You’ve earned it.

PS: And a very HAPPY 20th Rez Day to Magnus Brody and all his old friends who inspired this story! May you have many more!

~ Arabella

PSS: I was reminded that old avatars also LOVE gestures and frequently bring them out at parties.

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