These days I’m playing YoVille on Facebook, putting off a big work project, an agent’s biting at the hook of my book idea and asking for a five-page proposal, something to take seriously.
I know, I know. And I’m filled with shame about it, but how can you resist making your eyes and hair whatever color you want, your head big, eyes wide and body tiny, your apartment full of gothic or zen furniture? You can move quickly from the furniture store to your job at the widget factory, where you only have to check in briefly every six hours or so to get paid.
You can chat with people around the world, from the UK, Turkey, Mexico, France. You can move around the virtual village, meet cuties just like you and invite them over. Your apartment never gets dirty, and if you ever get in a bad situation you can just leave the room.
In YoVille I’m Luluette, with big brown eyes and short dark hair with a huge bow. I’m adorable all the time, whether I’m wearing my red evening dress and matching heels or my red tank, short black skirt and red flip-flops. I earn money for more clothes and furniture by playing games with my new friends, like tic tac toe or rock paper scissors. I can chat with them, jump in the air and put smileys over my head that express any emotion. I can get some quick energy at the coffee shop, snacks at the diner and weights at the gym supply store. What’s cute is that if I have a couple shots of tequila at the nightclub, things get blurry wherever I go.
What’s creepy is there is a sort of hangman’s noose in the middle of the virtual village and a spiral down to the underworld that’s labeled, like many other things, “Coming Soon.”
What’s cool, I guess, is that I see YoVille to the future as PacMan is to today’s advanced video games. The technology will improve and evolve soon into a more sophisticated pretend world where we’ll have relationships, sex even, by moving our perfectly coiffed, fit and dressed character across the screen to another character to say the 00’s version of whats a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Then we’ll go home to their perfectly designed apartment (already doable on YoVille with a little cash, payable by PayPal) and wrap our buff arms around them and whisper sweet nothings, all behind the safety and invulnerability of our computer. Will we miss what the senses give us? Will we choose a YoVille seitan burger over the taste of fresh grass-grown beef? Probably not any time soon. Will we have our virtual sex where we can’t smell our partner’s freshly showered skin or the misty sweat of their passion, see their irises get bigger when they look at us? Will we toss our senses aside in favor of making ourselves into a perfect video dream of what we want to be?
Already, in 2008, the phone calls, letters and visits of yesteryear have been replaced by e-mail. Soon to come may well be all human contact muted by the interface of the computer. How long will it be before all the nuances, the voices, the touches, of our relationships all pass through the computer screen? Do you think it will happen soon?
