Output details

Wildlife

Based on Stretch’s research into Second Life and World of Warcraft, Wildfire follows the experiences of a group of characters as they engage with a new and ground-breaking virtual world, called The Wild World. Stretch spent four months in Second Life and a month in World of Warcraft researching the novel. The politics of avatar-design is examined in the novel–particularly with regards to sexuality and body-dysmorphia. The performance of sexuality in virtual worlds is also explored, with a focus on the impact that free, easy-access hardcore pornography has on this “performance”, and also the extent to which sexual violence is somehow permitted or condoned. The novel seeks to examine the interplay between ‘the virtual life’, ‘the mediated life’ and ‘the real life’ in the identity projects of young people in 2007–the year that Facebook and Twitter impact significantly on life in the UK. The anomic features of social networking are explored–the angst induced by frequent acts of self-disclosure, the potential of communication to induce loneliness, and the way in which celebrity culture’s emphasis on “access”/”tell all”/”confession” functions pedagogically, providing an ideology or modus operandi for social networking and the notions of individuality that underpin it. Aesthetically, the novel is an exercise in distaste. It seeks to mirror a vulgarity, an ease-with-obscenity, that characterises areas of the Internet–specifically US pornography, targeted-advertising, “hook-up” sites, unselfconscious self-disclosure and savage trolling.

Ultimately, Wildlife is concerned with how people come together - socially, politically and sexually, when their identity is, to some extent at least, fragmented by deep and frequent engagement with virtual worlds. Does such immersion in “the virtual” lower the political, social and existential stakes of “the actual”, or provide new forms of democratic behaviour, a more “horizontal” power structure, and even productive, playful new ways of “performing” oneself?