Which Character are You Today?

How many personalities do you have? Are you sure which one is the real you?
If you’re like a lot of people these days, you have a split personality. One personality is what could be called the “Real You”, the person who needs coffee to wake up every day, worries about how much weight you’ve gained, and has to do laundry on a regular basis. The other is the “Virtual You”, which is the personality or character you inhabit when you enter certain online environments.

Virtual worlds, in case you’re one of the few people who haven’t heard of them, are online environments where you create a character, or avatar, for yourself and interact with other people in the world. One very popular virtual world is Second Life. Another is World of Warcraft. Many thousands, even millions, of people log on to these worlds every day, from all over this planet. These environments are gorgeous 3-D worlds where you can do lots of things that you can’t do in the “real” world. In Second Life, which I’m most familiar with, you can build castles, set up stores where you sell products you’ve created yourself, change your gender, fly, teleport from one location to another, all with the click of your mouse.

Some people have the mistaken impression that these virtual worlds are only populated by teenagers. Wrong. There are senior citizens, and people of every age and background playing, and more are joining every day. Virtual worlds offer visual stimulation, social interaction, excitement, romance – a lot of the spice that’s lacking in the real world.

Futurists predict that as time goes on virtual worlds will become an ever more important part of our lives. Companies have set up stores in Second Life, for example, and you can purchase just about anything there that you could purchase in a mall in your hometown. Virtual worlds are being used by companies for training, teleconferencing, and more. Schools are offering online courses in the virtual world. Musicians have put on concerts there. Artists have staged art shows.

As time goes on it seems certain that people will spend more and more time interacting with others in virtual worlds, but what will this mean for human psychology? Already there have been cases where people have had problems distinguishing the real from the virtual world. There was a recent case of a woman whose boyfriend on Second Life broke up with her, and she tracked him down in real life and broke into his apartment. She was arrested before she could do any harm to him, but still it sent shock waves through the Second Life community. An advice column I saw recently had a letter from a husband who said his wife was spending so much time on World of Warcraft that she was neglecting him and their children, and she basically told him, “if you don’t like it, leave”. I have met people in Second Life who spend most of their time each day online, and they seem not to care about what’s going on in their offline life.

This is all uncharted territory. Never before have we as humans had the ability to leave our real world and venture into a virtual one that is so enchanting we sometimes don’t want to come back. Psychologists will need to study this phenomenon carefully and come up with guidelines for people as virtual worlds become increasingly a bigger part of our lives.