On meeting people in SL, or "The Backpacker Syndrome"
posted by Zoot Voom on Haman 93 weeks, 6 days, 3 hours, 32 minutes, 14 seconds ago [442 views]
On meeting people in SL, or "The Backpacker Syndrome".
One of the things I remember reading about SL before being born was how the threshold for stopping to speak with a stranger is lower in SL than in RL. And from my experience these first days I agree, this is clearly the case: In my first couple of hours I had spoken to and been spoken to by several people, and even had a real conversation and gotten an entry in my Friends list.
Now what does this mean? And also, how does this really feel? It certainly felt good those first sessions. But lately I've noticed that I pick up conversations more seldom. Certain casual comments and observations are only fun in small doses, and too frequent encounters with strangers about nothing in particular tends to make me slightly numb.
In some respects this reminds me about a week I spent in RL Cape Town as a backpacker some years ago. The setting is quite similar: As a backpacker you stay in backpacker hostels, spend time with other backpackers on the beach, in common rooms and bars, exchange bits of information about a place nobody knows much about, all the time knowing that after a couple of heady days it will all be over and you will most likely never meet again.
One difference immediately comes to my mind though: In SL it may be more likely that you will meet some of your backpacker buddies again: After all you don't have to fork out for plane tickets to Cape Town; an IM and a quick teleport does the job. But is this necessarily a good thing? Sometimes such out of the ordinary encounters are best kept as a fond memory. at: Haman (140, 87, 44)
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