I learned young both the wild potential and inequalities of the virtual world. For about three years in the mid-to-late 2000’s, my interest was absolutely consumed with Disney’s VMK, or Virtual Magic Kingdom.
VMK was a MMOG, or a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, a style of game that allows users to create virtual versions of themselves (or not) called avatars, and play and interact with other people from around the globe in a virtual world.
In VMK, I could escape my social self into an idealized version of me, one that would be called by my username, and not look like anything that would inspire people to call me my actual nickname at the time: “afro” (derogatory). Despite this, however, there were always characters that seemed better than me, that had cooler rooms, more money, more exclusive items, more everything. As a nine year old, I was jealous of the kids whose moms bought them the cereals with boxes that had codes to get special prizes printed on them.
After VMK shut down in 2008, I went out chasing the dragon, looking for another MMOG to offer me the sort of sovereign embodiment I craved. I stumbled upon Second Life.
Second Life seems to have been the greatest life simulation MMOG in internet history, but I can only hope that in a few years, this style of game will cycle back into fashion like tacky wide belts have. In fact, given all of the isolation that Covid has brought around (or should be bringing around), I was somewhat disappointed that a new, great MMOG hasn't popped up into popularity, or that Second Life’s brief resurgence in 2020 didn’t translate into what felt like a more connected gaming experience.
Second Life has a self evident title. With an expansive virtual world, Second Life allows players to literally live and build another existence, just online. Create your own avatar, look how you want, live where you want, do what/who you want. Near anything feels/felt possible in Second Life.
People find an escape, a way to live a life freer from the confines of reality, but not necessarily all too far. Trans people could live in euphoric bodies. Disabled people could experience life and move about in a world where they do not have to consider the pains or limitations of embodiment or mental illness in the same ways as the non-virtual world, the isolated and alone can find community. The inaccessible felt closer in reach, desires could be enacted and achieved. During the pandemic, I watched concerts held over Second Life, and one lady even became a millionaire in non-virtual money through the game, albeit as a landlord...
Now, however, in the semi-not-so-distant future, Second Life feels a lot like a very, very horny ghost town, where the main desires people act out are carnal or based on the pursuit of generic markers of wealth and luxury fed to us by the materialistic hands of capitalism. After a decade of wondering what it was like, I logged in for the first time a couple years ago, thinking of an old Monster Factory video, and the schoolboy fun the McElroy brothers had playing in more recent years.
Within five minutes of entering the game, not even having finished the tutorial, I was harassed by a man who already felt entitled to my time. Having to take a moment to pee, I left my avatar next to the (barely clothed, angelic looking female) Non-Playable Character I had to talk with. Coming back two minutes later, some dude had sent me the following messages:
“Hey”
“...”
“Oh so you can talk to her but not me? Bitch.”
It was all about as expected.
Unlike VMK, where budding pre-sexuality was barely toyed with, Second Life is pure horniness. I don’t know if capitalism can really breed innovation, but horniness absolutely does. People were truly out there learning how to 3D model and write script in game-specific language just to make characters get down and dirty. While Second Life was definitely an incredible and life-like virtual world during its hey-day, it feels like little more than an immensely, potentially excessively, lustful sex club.
Much of the map’s properties are locked from access, and few, if any, live players can be seen. If you come across any open lot, it is likely only inhabited by gamers playing with only one hand. Despite low expectations, the game still felt like a letdown. There was only one true point of grace for me as I waded through what felt like a galactic ghost town… the Virtual Black History Museum. It was like an oasis in a wasteland.
For a place that feels like nothing but sex clubs, the fact that a space still exists in Second Life that takes time and care towards black life is wonderful. I cannot recall how I originally stumbled across it, but there was a small sense of awe as my avatar stepped into the building, stately, tall ceilings, boxes of black texts containing information on the walls. Arriving back there today, I happily note that it seems still active, under a 2021 revision, and wonder how much it has changed since my first arrival. Modem World describes the Virtual Black History Museum as tracing “the often uncomfortable history of African Americans from the days of slavery through to modern times, as well as offering featured exhibitions on African American history and the civil rights movement”.
In a nearly twilit atrium with a fountain, a framed poster of Angela Davis greets me to my left, while Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech adorn the plain walls to the right. I wonder how I am going to navigate this museum when I can barely figure out how to control my camera, or make my avatar any more androgynous. One room has a large black wall decal briefly detailing the history of interracial marriages in the United States, and a large infographic on fascist crimes committed against the Black Panther Party. Upstairs, another black decal asking “Did You Know?” tells me about a slave, Onesimus, who helped introduce inoculation to America from his traditional African knowledge.
I learn about a couple details of the Quaker protests against slavery that I did not know before, while my avatar stood there, hands on their hips, an enormous and bouncy afro certainly covering their line of vision. I still don't know how to control my camera, and wonder if I am properly experiencing the place. I can’t seem to tell if the rooms are curated, or if it is just a mix of facts and images, or if the timeline I’m starting to guess at is accurate. I don’t really care either way. I’m happy I am here, even with the distinct feeling that this is a very different museum than the first one I entered a couple years ago. Memory is feeble, diluted by trauma and time and disease, but perhaps this site is more engaging. I miss the guestbook, but also remember the original place I went to having mostly text, and few images.
I note with happiness a poster about the Stonewall Riots. As a 2SLGBTQ+ person, and someone who is sadly well aware of the homophobia in Black communities, this affirmation of not just my existence as a Black identifying person, but a queer Black identifying person felt important.
Created in 2017 by Sara Skinner, who I will be referring to from here on out by her Second Life name, Abrianna Oceanside, the Virtual Black History Museum was her passion project. Having been playing Second Life for multiple years by 2016, and having experienced her own share of racism and rejection both in real life and Second Life for being a mixed-Black woman, the death of Philando Castille, Oceanside decided she wanted to do something concrete to contribute to a more culturally aware virtual world, and began her work on the Virtual Black History Museum.
From such a surprisingly innocent and well meaning online interaction, came a reaction that only my naive and hopeful side can see as surprising. As if almost satirically parodying the police forces in the United States, a player known for roleplaying a cop decided to erect a wall blocking the entrance to the budding museum. By late 2017, Oceanside moved her operation to a different area, and began rebuilding with much more success and support. Just like before/during/after Covid, and the various Black Lives Matter iterations that have been happening since even before 2020 (I am still beyond shocked that so many people forget that this stuff and BLM has been going on since like 2013), the Virtual Black History Museum has hosted events and openings remarkably similar to real life Black owned markets and events, with musicians, vendors, and exclusive items. At one point, they had an exhibition dedicated to the unsung female figures in Black history.
Despite the continent not necessarily being light, the place delights me anyways, and speaks to the cross-platform persistence I’ve seen of Black female custom content creators that greatly enrich the gaming experience.
So what does it mean exactly, to have a Black History Museum in a virtual world like Second Life, a space of Black remembrance, education, care, and excellence? That is something I am still dwelling on, and while I think writing doesn’t always need to be about providing concrete answers, or knowing everything, and I never claim to do so, I don’t want to just leave a reader hanging. Even after ruminating on the topic for a couple days, I can feel the fully fleshed out thoughts sliding around in my brain just outside of my grasp.
The part of me interested in curation wonders how having a single person –and not one with specific academic training –in a museological role impacts the museum. Would a male creator dedicate the time to focus on lesser known female figures of importance? Would a white creator even have bothered to make the museum at all?
Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, said in an interview with The Atlantic that he wanted his grandchildren to see the “real world” as a sort of “museum or theatre.” and that he thinks “we will see the entire physical world as being kind of left behind.”
Second Life may be this idealistic platform, without a history of displacement, slavery, and genocide, yet it still has a history of racism. In the same article, a Black user named Bel Muse mentions her success in Second Life as building team manager. However, this is not done under the guise of a Black woman, but a white blonde. As the article’s author, Leslie Jamison, notes, “this anecdote—the fact that Bel Muse found respect more readily when she passed as white—confirms the persistence of racism more than it offers any proof of liberation from it.”
I’ve been reading Katherine McKittrick’s book, Dear Science, for the past two weeks now. A key question she asks over the course of the book is how our discussions of Black history can avoid being something that “affirms rather than undoes racial violence”(107). As McKittrick notes, one method to “honor black ways of knowing [is] by observing and critiquing the injustices of racism without revering and repeating and describing racial violence (description is not liberation)” (128).
One of the ways the Virtual Black History Museum seems successful in that aim is what I view as them not singularly dwelling on Black suffering or tragedy, but also looking towards Black power and innovation. Built in response to both real life and virtual racism, Oceanside’s museum is both an example of Black persistence and KcKittrick’s propositions applied. While mentioning racial injustices encountered through North American history, I found that much of the museum contained what I would consider pro-Black works. From Black liberation posters from the civil rights era, to the tale of Esther Jones (the real Betty Boop!), or the aforementioned Onesimus and temporary exhibition of women Black heroes, it feels like there is more on Black triumph in the VBHM than lynchings.
McKittrick begs us to “not ask how we describe and get over the awfulness and brutality but, rather, how we live in our world, differently, right now and engender new critical interventions” (139). Not only did this project enable Oceanside to find confidence and a voice in herself as a member of the Black community that had been complicated towards her as a mixed-race person, but it was made with her express intent to raise awareness and pay tribute to Black Americans. In her Abrianna Oceanside’s own words:
“I paid respect to the history in a timeline format in hopes of getting people to understand how we are NOT disconnected from the history that enabled these current-day issues without being blatantly told how to feel. I kept it objective and bite-sized so each person can experience it in their own way. And, because there is SO MUCH that can be discussed, I decided on a format that would have an ever-changing special exhibit and a constant attention on current events and enabling in-world discussions on certain topics. I wanted a place where people can safely learn and discuss their individual views. If I had a positive impact on just one person, that could create a ripple effect that would impact so many more.”
Is this what it means/could mean to have Black curators?
Oceanside works with the intention to change the discourse surrounding Blackness, especially in America, in a positive way. Despite her keeping things objective, it is still celebratory. Her consideration of the audience and location in her formatting, while perhaps not as textually in-depth as non-virtual museums, less encumbered by the need to learn coding and operate as a single person, is still a far more accessible museological approach than many larger institutions. Oceanside works to try and avoid what McKittrick critiques, by not presenting knowledge in a way that “[posits] blackness and a black sense of place as dead and dying” (149). Rather, the Virtual Black History Museum presents Blackness as something very much alive, and more importantly, firmly asserts the aliveness, place, and importance of Black users in the Second Life community. As McKittrick may put it, the Virtual Black History Museum is a site of rebellion, resistance, and encounter (150).
Even though Second Life is ostensibly a world of potential and possibility, racism was sadly made a place where Black players were still treated as lesser than, affected by the same politics of real life.The affirmation of Black Life, as McKittrick argues, “reinvents black selfhood-community anew” (158). Even if only within the macrocosm of Second Life, the Virtual Black History Museum does this by creating a space exalting Blackness in the face of dehumanizing (deavatarizing?) behavior, and seeming to help to foster a sense of Black community within the game.
As mentioned earlier, Black gamers have long been important content creators, filling in the shameful gaps left by developers. Some random self-taught person at home really be making better curly hair or dark skin tones than a team of developers? I’m looking at you, EA, but that's another piece of writing for another day. By maintaining the Virtual Black History Museum and continuing to host events, such as the Juneteenth Art Contest in 2018, or the same year’s Black History Month event that included live performances and the ability to purchase content from Black creators, Oceanside helps to encourage, enrich and stimulate a simulated, but very real Black community.
If Black empowerment is such an important cause in real life, is it not also important in virtual ones?