I was thinking SL is for extraverts, with its 3D chatroom aspects, virtual clubbing, and other, well, social activities. Because what else is there to do in there, except fly around and look at stuff? The repetitive visual fatigue of the new gets old pretty quickly. Of course you can build, which treats SL as another media to work with, like paint or textiles. But for the regular user, SL means socializing, chatting, connecting. If you're an extravert, that's meat and potatoes - the more new people, the more energy! But if you're an introvert, it's exhausting and annoying, worse even than a cocktail party where you know no one. So you log out.
But then I had to take my other avatar, the one that is not "me," clubbing, to get some relevant photos for her Facebook page. She's the Cautionary Tale, albeit a fairly mild one. So she had to get dressed in her digital Burning Man finest and troll for events, live music and DJs. I bought her a series of dance animations, one of which, disconcertingly enough, looked pretty much like how I dance in RL. At first we went to live folk and country streams, in digital cafes and beaches, until she got pretty frustrated with it. Steve Forbert covers, but they couldn't remember all the verses! A song with a chorus, "she thinks my tractor is sexy" (which I do not think was in iambic pentameter). And Sea chanteys. Twice! Of course I love this stuff. But she didn't.
So then we had to go to actual clubs, with LED floors and stripper poles and particle effects. 80s night, samba, classic rock, Goa trance. And lots of other avatars.
So I set her to dancing and let the audio stream, and I realized - SL is perfect for introverts. Dangerously so.
I was caught up in the dancing, not noticing the time going by, listening to the music and watching the particles and other avatars, and dancing around my living room, just a little, and I realized that SL just contributes more material to the already probably over-rich imaginal landscape where introverts live and thrive - in their own heads. I was having a relatively fun evening, when what I was actually doing was sitting on a folding chair at the computer in an empty apartment that would look exactly like the office if it had any furniture in it at all. I was also drinking absinthe, which helped. But "the green" is about sharing, and I was by myself. I wasn't even having the avatar talk to people digitally, just dancing weird by herself, like I always do.
I am resident in the castle of Beauty's "Beast," imprisoned there no less than he by an absent fairy who tells tales more compelling than reality. The more fantastical and elaborate the elements of the dreamscape, the more enticing and imprisoning it all is. The only way out is true connection, true love, just like in the fairy tale, tales which entwine hard truths in their storytelling webs. But truth has to break in, or out. Breaking hurts, even if it's to reset something correctly. I'm not making (nor looking to make) any true connections in SL, nor is any other introvert. I'm just putting angels in the architecture. And they didn't fall down to Earth for that.