Tech Central: How do avatars have sex?

I know it’s easy to make jokes about people who live out their fantasies online via geeky computer games that function as alternative worlds. David Pollard and Amy Taylor are, or rather were, one such couple. They are getting divorced because Taylor, 28, caught Pollard, 40, having an online “relationship” with a cartoon person, or avatar, and found the pain of cyber-infidelity too hard to bear. “It was the ultimate betrayal,” she said last week.

Easy to poke fun at, but irresistible – especially in a week that, in my case, has been spent carefully avoiding newspapers and television news. I remember crying in the office loos when the Jamie Bulger story was playing itself out; but if such horrors can be measured, last week was worse. We could all do with cheering up. Pollard and Taylor might do the trick.

In real life they live in Cornwall, weigh 45 stone between them and are on benefits. In Second Life, the hugely successful virtual reality game that has about 15m signed-up users worldwide, they are Dave Barmy and Laura Skye – a cool-looking, lissom, villa-owning pair of hotties, whose Second Life marriage featured passionate embraces on enormous marble terraces, debutante-style full-length white gloves and yards of strapless taffeta (her) and an immaculate tuxedo, accessorised with killer cheekbones (him). It was perhaps a rather more elaborate affair than the real-life register office version. None of which is, in itself, without poignancy.

The problem is that Second Life is peopled by self-created, idealised, animated humanoid versions of the real people behind them. Needless to say, the people who wander around the game looking like goddesses do not necessarily bear any relation to reality. In this virtual world Taylor is a bodacious black-haired vixen, all giant eyes and pouty lips; in real life she has thin ginger hair and is morbidly obese. Pollard, who sports rock-star hair and a tall slim body online, is in reality as bald as an egg and weighs 25 stone.

Anyway: Taylor, who had met Pollard online in the first place, became suspicious about his movements on Second Life. One day she found him at the computer watching his avatar, Dave Barmy, having sex with a Second Life prostitute. “I went mad,” she said last week. “I was so hurt. I just couldn’t believe what he’d done.”

Now, I don’t know – I may be terribly old-fashioned. But if I caught a husband having virtual sex with a cartoon, I might suggest we turn off the computer for a bit and maybe waddle off to the pub for a bit of human interaction. This is not an option that struck Taylor. Instead, she used Second Life to hire a virtual private detective, whom she paid in Linden dollars, the game’s currency (obtained by paying real money), to investigate Pollard’s “adultery”.

This is the point at which compassion, or perhaps amused pity, leaves me and I just start snorting with laughter. Taylor, on the other hand, was wounded to her very core by this pixellated infidelity. The couple patched things up but soon – whaddya know? – Dave Barmy was at it again. Taylor caught cyber-Dave having sex with another player, one Modesty McDonnell based in America. When I say “having sex”, I don’t mean as in the coming together of human loins. I mean the cartoon Dave Barmy was getting it on with the cartoon Modesty. “I caught [the pretend] him [pretend] cuddling a [pretend] woman on a [pretend] sofa in the game [about pretending],” Taylor said. “It looked really affectionate. I ended up in floods of tears.” She filed for (real) divorce the next day on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour.

Still, the story has a happy ending. Taylor also loves World of Warcraft – another role-playing, alternative universe game, except that in this one everyone gets to look like a goth troll or dwarf and, wahey, there are demons. Happily, she has found a new mate online through WoW and is now living with him. Pollard, meanwhile, considers himself well shot of his former wife. “Amy would never do anything around the house,” he said. “She just played World of Warcraft all the time.” When I say “he said”, I really mean “he typed”: Pollard would speak to the media only through his online avatar, Dave.

I don’t subscribe to the view that alternative reality games are automatically ludicrous; and I am fully aware of how addictive online gaming can be. Aside from anything else, Second Life is a fascinating social experiment – let people be anyone they want to be and do anything they want to do and see what happens. The game is also used as a platform by institutions such as (real) universities, the British Council, the Goethe Institute and various embassies. Even IslamOnline has purchased SL “land” to allow Muslims to perform cyber-Hajj, the idea being that they gain experience of what the pilgrimage might be like before doing it for real.

Predictably, however, what people mostly want to do is not have chats about Faust or investigate some improving course. They want to have pretend sex with pretend people. What, may I ask, is the point? As the Pollard-Taylor story demonstrates, even sex with cartoons is not victimless: it causes human pain. Also, it is sex with cartoons. What’s wrong with porn? (Quite a lot, as it happens, but in this context – for the terminally frustrated, who are so terminally lazy that they can’t go and find a human to have sex with – it is surely an obvious option). What is so pitiful about sex on Second Life is the pretence of intimacy, the idea that one might really “know” Dave Barmy and get one’s kit off for him.

I said I’d try to be cheering, but the loneliness and isolation implicit in all this are almost tear-jerking, especially coupled with the pathos of hoping to form real-life relationships by wandering around a computer game wearing purple hair and a pair of 34DDs. It would be tragic if it weren’t so funny – except that, demonstrably, 15m people don’t find it funny at all. A character on Gary, Unmarried, a new sitcom on CBS, the American TV channel, observes his son playing Second Life and says: “We didn’t have this when I was young. We had . . . outside.” Well, quite. Outside may not always be a bed of roses, but at least it doesn’t turn you into a mad person.

+ In Guildford, Surrey, roadside snack vans will be forced to close unless they offer healthy alternatives to their usual fare of burgers, hot dogs and bacon butties.

Environmental health officers have been instructed to check menus as well as hygiene standards during their visits, and anyone who is found not to meet the new standards will have their licence turned down the next time it comes up for renewal.

“The aim is to give consumers a wider choice and to move away from the sole provision of high-calorie high-fat fast foods,” said the head of environmental health.

How ridiculous. As the owner of Skip’s Catering Van, which sits on a lay-by on the A281, said last week, “Our customers are mainly scaffolders, builders and lorry drivers. They are not going to want this new food.”

Choice works both ways: if some knackered long-distance lorry driver stops off to buy something to eat, who’s to say that he can’t have a burger and chips and must feast on low-fat yoghurt and salad instead? And what does Guildford think will happen to said yoghurts, salads and jacket potatoes? They’ll go in the bin and Skip and his ilk, who have forked out for them, will go out of business.

I know Surrey is a salubrious place, but does its environmental health department really have nothing more pressing with which to concern itself?

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