Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Second Life

I have recently downloaded Second Life. It's not a game - you can play games in it - but there isn't any real challenge or objective. So what's the point? Well, I suppose if someone is unhappy with their own life, they could very well lead a virtual second life in this game. Sure there are some little obligatory things that are different: You can fly in Second Life. You don't have to eat or defecate. You can stay under water for great lengths of time. And after falling from great hights and tumbling into a pit of fire, I've discovered you probably can't die.
Unlike your real life, you can choose your name. You can also craft your own appearance. No ugly sticks in the world of Second Life unless willingly applied. In effect, the majority of people end up looking roughly the same - tall, muscular, bronzed, big breasted, etc... Though there are many detractors who opt for the goth or furry animal look.
Yet after all of this, the developers carried over one of the most undesireable things about real life into this dream world: money. You can't die, but there's still money. You use your real money to buy virtual Linden dollars which allow you to purchase virtual things in your second life like land, clothes, transportation, furniture, or genatalia (since you aren't given any at the start of the game.) After leaving the bright and sunny tutorial world, you're dropped into the real virtual world of Second Life. Once this happens, it becomes pretty clear what Second Life is all about.
I was dropped into a parcel of land that was labeled mature. It was a party island of some sort where a bunch of virtual people were danicing, sunbathing, chatting and shopping for kinky items that were scattered around a pool. I decided to teleport to a different area of the world and ended up landing in a casino where you can virtually gamble your money away. After some more exploration of the map, I found that much of the world in Second Life that I saw was dedicated to showcasing sexual content. The rest of the world is and endless maze of residential or commercial spaces that is less populated by users. It's evident that there's little community planning that keeps things organized. Thus, it is not easy to locate things. A solution to this could be having street names, cities and maybe even states and nations.

I think the main problem with Second Life is that you are introduced to this world completely alone. You don't have a family and the traditional institutions that are set up to make friends are non existant. I think the game would be amazing if you were born into a family. I think if you started with that and combined the open source environment of Second Life with the inginuity of games like The Sims, Sim City and Vice City you would end up with something that would really suck away someone's first life.

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