New age zombies

Zombies- the living dead.

In the world of all things cute, "Facebook" there is an option for members to play a game called "yoville". Yoville is a cartoon world where you creat a little avatar -you choose all the features, eyes, nose, ears, eyebrows, eye and hair color. You choose a little outfit for your avatar to wear. You are birthed into yoville owning your own cartoon apartment.

You animate your avatar, and are given points for dancing, fighting, kissing and interacting with other avatars. Interactions are rewarded. Options for more personal interactions are playing "tic tac toe" and "rock paper scissors". (genius)!

You can work in the little widget factory for cartoon money, you can gain "energy points" by spending cartoon money at the coffee shop or diner and eating cartoon pizza and/or drinking cappucinos. If you never got enough of playing with Barbies as a kid, this is the game for you.

Seems innocent and simple enough. I went to visit my husband's avatar in his cartoon apartment. There was another girl avatar in his bedroom. It startled me. Was my husband seeing other avatars behind my two dimensional back? Was he tic tac toeing around on me?

Caught up in my animated emotions, I quickly left and did what any disgruntled cartoon girl does. I changed my hair do in two right clicks of a mouse. Then I visited yoville's nightclub. I discovered you can type your chat in speech balloons. There was alot of graphic hanky panky going on in that nightclub. People asking for more than a game of tic tac toe. Avatars exchanging real life information, for offscreen rendezvous. I found you could click on an avatar and it would lead straight to the member's facebook profile. It was interesting to see whether the real person lived up to their cartoon represented self. In some cases the avatar was far more attractive than the real live person! (nice avatar shame about the face!)

I visited the yoville gym, bank, shopping mall and other fictional places that offered pretend goods for real money. (People spend REAL money on this!)

Then I got adventurous as I examined other options offered: the yoville "adult nightclub"!
That's where the real action is. There were avatars getting down! Speech balloons read like captions from a 1970's porn mag.

The comic side of me got the better of me. I typed in "Jesus loves you" and other such religious epitaphs, and got thrown out! Lol. I was bounced by cartoons for not being rude enough!

I went back to my husband's avatar's apartment. Ahh, good he was alone at last. I threw a snowball at him. He threw a snowball back. I danced with him, he danced too. The weird part is that my real life husband was not online. His avatar was interacting without his knowledge or control. Which begs the question, what do our avatars get up to when we are not online?

In the adult nightclub, there were many non online interactive avatars. If you sat and watched the screen for long enough you could see a "speech loop". Non peopled avatars advertising triple x sites. Cute invites to "cum see me play" were issued, followed by ritualised responses. The "real peopled" avatars continued chatting in amongst the avatar issued spambots. After about five minutes, back to the "cum see me play" routine.

This is our culture's new version of a zombie. We are the creators of our own living dead.

I am waiting for the day that someone brings the yoville chat transcripts to a courtroom to sue a partner for having inappropriate relations with a cartoon. Or for the day when someone sues yoville home depot for non refund for cartoon apartment furnishings.

The truth is, we think we are in control. But are we?

The zombies are taking over.
Be afraid, cute, but very afraid.