Tuesday, April 22, 2008

second life diary

Overall I didn’t have much of a problem with the tutorial or how to manipulate and control the character. However I feel like I am missing some key skills in terms of manipulating the objects and places around my avatar.

When I logged into second life to explore the worlds I started world hopping in order to get a feel of the different environments in order to choose where I wanted to spend my time. Initially I went to a place called Mobility Island or something of that nature. It was actually a well designed and nice looking island environment with futuristic buildings and different sections which sold different means of mobility in second life whether it is luxury cars, normal cars, wheelchairs, etc. I had a good time enjoying the view until I got bored because there was nobody there. So instead of going to a place of interest I started searching for people to interact with.

The first places I went were a couple of malls or shops. After the amount of loading time these locations require I was ready to explore the shops. Now as I do not intend to actually buy stuff it was pretty difficult to find the free stuff among the items that cost virtual money. After I picked up some free items such as a hand gun, some goggles, and a large amount of free t-shirts. I got pretty bored again. I figured it was time to start harassing people and see if anyone even reacted. Initially I just started sending random messages to people or saying awkward statements to these people most of which just ignored me. However I managed to evoke the attention of a group of shoppers who kept talking amongst themselves about whether or not they actually wanted to buy what they were looking at. Nothing really came of it except them telling me to go away and my avatar doing as many rude gestures/emotes as it was possible for me to find. This brings up the idea of griefing as mentioned in some of the other posts. I didn’t really see any point to this world except to get reactions out of the people in it. Does it matter that I was “griefing” them? Well either way nothing I did in second life had any effect on anything except maybe wasting of someone’s time on the other side of their screen.

In addition to these places I mentioned I went to casinos, strip clubs, beaches, and it was all pretty much the same boring experience as before.

My experience so far with second life has been interesting at times but ultimately pretty boring. In my experience so far the people behind the avatars don’t seem to care too much unless there are other avatars with them. This program is so open ended that there ultimately is no objective. It’s a mixture of a game with no point and social spot with no limitations except the physical kind.

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