In a nutshell - What is this about?

I created this blog for those who are interested on Internet Addiction and my request to Linden Lab to display a cautionary note mentioning Internet Addiction to the people signing in.

After all this time, this has become just a way to place this on the conversation. This is in a nutshell all I strive for.


Your liberty to read or leave its not denied on this space.


Virtual communities have enormous potential and will be part of many people's life's and work. So we need to take a thoughtful approach towards this. SL has an extraordinary pull and this phenomenon can result in dramatic damage to people who develop an addictive attachment to them.

  1. People joins in with no knowledge of this phenomenon
  2. Awareness of a danger helps reduce its potential harm
  3. Any tool to display this reality, might prevent those who read it

All ideas an opinions are welcome, posts with foul or offensive language might be deleted. Some information and videos might be disturbing for some people please be advised.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Stage 3. Full Immersion

I have posponed this one for months, in part I have been away from SL a little more and in part I did not want to talk much about this stage. Perhaps I can write since in some ways I must be doing much better than the sorry-lame person I used to be. Letting my life slip into this "game" so much.

However as its names implies, this stage its when the full deep addiction is taking over a player; in my case I gave way to some of the temptations available in SL, specially those with a deep soul searching attachement to another human being. Yes I had a special one in SL one of my best friends we got too close and ...one thing leads to another... but this is terrible because I have pledged not to do anything like that with my time in the game, that way I failed to one of the many rules my family and I had established for me here.

You see, after we -my family and me- saw how much time this was consuming and affecting me, we set some ground rules for me to play SL, I was totally ok with, one of them being "no affairs".

I used to use my time day dreaming about SL, and then come running to it to try the stuff I had envisioned. Few things were more important than friends, projects and games we were playing inside this virtual land.


Full immersion for me meant, letting the horse run free, living the SL with no
remorse, caution or control. I was a complete freak, lying to my family, an fantasy running free.
Now I enjoy calling SL a "game" and playing it like that, now many months after this happened I can see how much I had fallen for the fantasy of it. I tought stuff was so real, a total self-induced fantasy.

I hope this words that I write do not hurt the feelings of my virtual friends when they read it, new and old. I understand they looove their SL and my words might feel negative, a friend once told me, "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", but this addiction thing has no sweet side.

I whish I had the time back I wasted in SL. This keeps me writing this now and then and reminding me of that time when I was fully immersen in that place.