When we were kids my sister and I would visit our grandparents house, play all day, be ordered to clean up the mess and then go home. My grandfather would reorganize his desk, make sure his favorite pens were still there and head off to read the newspaper. My grandmother would do a quick turn around the house to make sure there were no little toys left out to step on. That was it. Simple. The biggest mess I could make was to scatter parts of a Marx castle play set all over and maybe forget to pick up a plastic knight that would eventually find its way into the vacuum cleaner. My sister might have spilled some flour from her Easy Bake oven but it was nothing serious. Neither grandparent had to reconfigure a computer, spend hours getting rid of virtual pets or clean the browser cache of tracking cookies from websites selling virtual merchandise.
My granddaughter is only seven but seems to have visited places (on my computer) that I could never even dream of. After her last visit I was greeted by a pixie-like animated figure on my screen that was clad only in a fig leaf. It taunted me to buy clothes for it, or him or her or whatever it was. I chased it around the screen with my mouse but every time the cursor came close it would disappear and show up on another part of the screen. It was, I came to find out later, an avatar. You’ve heard that word before from the movie called Avatar, a science fiction tale about, um, stuff. I still haven’t figured out the whole thing except that some soldier guy on an alien planet had sex with this blue creature babe thing and then the bad guy human soldiers attacked a big tree and the whole planet got really pissed off and made the wild animals chase the soldiers off. I guess that’s why they don’t let me do movie reviews.
The avatar that was popping around on my screen was called a Shwinky, from Shwinkyworld, a virtual land of apparently needy, hungry, thirsty and socially starved little cyber characters in desperate need of virtual money to buy virtual stuff. The one haunting me indicated I could get rid of him if I bought him some clothing. Embarrassed to have a nearly naked little cartoon character on my screen I coughed up some cyber bucks, created magically from my credit card, and the Shwinky avatar waved and went poof! Happy that I had discouraged the creature from bugging me I went back to scanning the news to see who was doing what to whom around the world. One of my great joys in life is reading the news just minutes after it happens. Unlike a newspaper where you have to wait 24 hours to read about a tragedy or disaster, now you can get updates in real time. It’s kind of like a soap opera on steroids and highly addictive.
A short time later, in the middle of tracking an angry hurricane headed for the Gulf of Mexico, the Shwinky character reappeared on my screen with a smaller version of himself he referred to as his brother. The original Shwinky was now clad in a nice outfit of shirt and slacks, but his brother was wearing the fig leaf now. They both had big droopy eyes and looked like paintings you would find displayed at a gas station along with velvet paintings of dogs playing poker. How can you not feel sorry for big droopy eyes? Out came the credit card again, little squeals of appreciation came from the characters and poof! off they went again. I left the computer for a while and went for lunch.
Just over an hour later I returned to my computer to find the screen filled with a dozen other little Shwinky’s running and playing and being generally obnoxious. The two brothers were there and introduced the rest as their cousins, and related a story about how they had all been put out of their homes in Shwinkyworld because their last human didn’t keep up to date on his credit card payments. Okay, hurricane story or not, I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I clicked on one of the characters and was apparently transported into Shwinkyworld, a digital land full of thousands of little avatars living in houses of various shapes and sizes, with shops, streets, little avatar cars and a lot more. Now being a baby boomer, I did grow up in the 60’s and 70’s and am used to seeing freaky things, but nothing I’d ever done or seen prepared me for this.
Several more clicks on the credit card button gave me cyber bucks and created a little avatar that was supposed to be me. I was invited to wander around, shop, have lunch and do whatever it is that Shwinky’s do. I tried it and my character ended up in a dead end alley where it was confronted by some tough looking Shwinky’s demanding money. I typed in “bugger off” and they beat up my character mercilessly and left it laying on the ground. A few minutes later some Shwinky paramedics arrived and offered to take “me” to the hospital for more cyber bucks. I responded with a sharp “no” and my character evaporated in a puff of smoke. The last thing I saw was a group of other Shwinky characters standing there staring out of the screen shaking their heads and whispering among themselves. It was unnerving and I switched off the computer.
For the next week, every time I turned on the computer I was greeted by a swarm of nearly naked Shwinky characters looking hungry and begging for cyber bucks for food. I had missed the hurricane story entirely and had to resort to an old-fashioned newspaper for my daily news fix. I received a credit card bill for $753.82, paid to Cyber Fun Megacorp located somewhere on an island in the South Pacific. I called several help numbers for the game company and was directed to various call centers where they spoke only enough English to ask for a credit card for phone support. It seemed hopeless.
The following weekend my granddaughter came to visit again and I found her glued to the computer once more, working on something that looked like a complicated calculus formula. I looked closer, and saw that she was working in on a spreadsheet. I asked her about the Shwinky’s and she laughed and told me I was funny. I noticed there wasn’t a Shwinky in sight on my screen so I asked her where they went. “Oh grandpa,” she said, “you just press control-alt-f10” and it turns them off when they start asking for money. You didn’t pay anything for them did you?” I blushed slightly, coughed into my hand and replied, “well no, of course not. I knew all that.” Satisfied she had a cool grandpa she returned to working on her math problem. I went to the other room and called the newspaper to renew my daily subscription.
(Note: Sales of virtual merchandise is an exploding market and generated over $1 billion in actual sales in the U.S. last year. That figure was even higher in Asia. Microsoft makes $625 million a year in game subscriptions for its X-box system, and an equal amount in sales of virtual goods. Apparently lots of people are willing to part with actual dollars to feed and clothe little computer animations and send e-cards and e-flowers to friends and relatives. This baby boomer is kind of glad retirement is just around the corner.)
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