Putting you firmly in your online place

By SHELLEY HOWELLS

I should have known I was in the wrong place when I asked Dave, the Dirty Duck Pub's barman, for a beer.

"You wouldn't Adam and Eve it," he said with a Casting Central touch of Cockney slang, "but we're a dry bar."

A pub with no beer. Everyone else was ordering Cokes and milkshakes. The penny was teetering, but hadn't dropped.

The Dirty Duck is a virtual bar, one of the online Habbo Hotel's habbo many facilities, which include restaurants, bars, pools and games rooms.

Members create a persona (an avatar, or "Habbo" on this site) by choosing from a selection of hairdos, face shapes and skin shades, clothes and shoes, then wander around the hotel, Sims-style, chatting to other netizens cunningly disguised as cartoon characters.

I'm not that good at such goings-on because, tragically, I drag real-life hangups and petty anxieties wherever I roam - online or off.

When choosing my Habbo I realised, after 10 minutes of indecision, that I was actually fretting over what I should wear.

This in an environment that offers blue hair and gravity-defying bosoms for the taking.

Surely the whole idea is to shake off your landlocked self and lighten up in virtual land?

Specialists on the psychology of the internet - or cyberpsychology - will tell you that the appeal of online chat, especially avatar chat like Habbo Hotel, is way more complex than that.

John Suler, from the Department of Psychology at Rider University, has written a vast, fascinating online hypertext book on the topic psycyber.

In his opinion, I went there partly because I enjoy the anonymity that online chat delivers.

The twist of walking around in a cartoon "costume", he writes, "also symbolically highlights aspects of who you are. It amplifies one of your interests, some facet of your personality or lifestyle, or something you wish for."

Which makes what happened next all the more alarming.

A few minutes after I ordered that beer, the guy on the next barstool tried to pick me up.

This was amusing so I chatted a while. A short while. Right until we got to his age: 14.

The penny finally fell. I was surrounded by children. I was WAY out of my demographic and this room was no longer amplifying any interest, facet of my lifestyle or anything on my wish-list!

Horrified. Mortified. I hit "quit" and was out of there before you could type "pervert".

Habbo is designed for 14-to-20-year-olds.

Which puts my mental age at - what?

Ten, according to the first online test musicreview

The second yourmentes was more generous, I escaped with a mental age of 20.

This was grim.

Time to get serious. Time to check out Real Age, the site that takes your chronological age and background, asks a lot of medical and lifestyle questions and comes up with your "real age".

They put me at 42.

Even lying a bit, the best I could do was 39.9.

This on my 39th birthday.

It had been a disheartening couple of days online, so I decided to seek solace in the real world.

In a real pub, with real friends.

Old friends.

"Old" as in we've known each other a long time and "old" as in two of us are looking 40 in the eye, the other two are staring down 50.

But, dammit, we knocked back glasses of Guiness and pints of Chardonnay (what is your wine personality quiz) with youthful zeal.

Then one of the party mentioned that, in order to drink without peril, she'd delayed starting a course of antibiotics until the following day.

How we laughed. Until another admitted that he had done the same.

It turned out that three of the four had put off taking "no alcohol or heavy machinery allowed" medication so we could drink that night.

The fourth, though drug-free, was a good three or four drinks behind the others because she can't cope with hangovers any more.

What next? Zimmer frames? Support hose? There's no escape from the indignities of middle age.

Online or off, the world has a way of putting you in your chronological place.

Email Shelley Howells