So I heard that Second Life was great, and I created a character there. I tweaked the appearance, and then set out to explore. There’s lots of stuff to read. I can get all kinds of different clothing and body images. However, even as a little girl, I didn’t really enjoy dressing up my dolls…I used them more as action figures than mannequins.
But seriously, is this site just for chatting and dressing up? Maybe cybering? Because that’s the impression I get. I don’t just chat much any more (though when I was new to online services, I loved chat), and while I enjoy the occasional cyber, it gets old. Would I be better off just playing WoW, where (as I understand it) I can dress up my character, chat, cyber, AND GET TO KILL THINGS TOO? Because, you know, I like to kill fictional things.
Second life is just a souped up chatroom. There’s nothing there that you couldn’t do with IRC technology 20 years ago. It just has avatars.
It was supposed to be the Next Big Thing in education. It let you have online classes – something there are multiple other platforms for. You could have someone lecture the class from a distance – something that teleconferencing does and even lets you actually see the person talking. You can have your students create things in Second Life – a skill that easily transfers nowhere.
Even now, I see seminars talking about using it as a tool, despite the fact that few students have any interest in it.
I hear Second Life has some potential for businesses as a cyber meeting-ground. That, and it also interests online vendors, and online architects/designers. Apparently the building engine is pretty advanced? Also, there are some areas where users enable custom scripts that can be fun, from what I hear. I haven’t played it in years.
I think it is an acquired taste. A branch of the company I am involved in is doing Second Life, and apparently it is now use for more training and enterprise stuff, like what **Autolycus[/b have said]. It’s almost the same as IMVU Chat, where you can play “dress me up” with the chatting (plus emoting, which I guess you know what else it can lead to).
Second Life has a rather comprehensive scripting support and with imagination you create any environment you like. I saw a re-creation of Innsmouth (of HP Lovecraft fame), and it was quite evocative. Heard from my boss that people gather there to talk about HP Lovecraft’s works and etc. There are some MMO-like game islands on SL, from what I gather. Plus you can use Linden dollars to buy items, decorate your room, dress up your avatar and etc.
It is also great for doing walk-through, though graphical quality is a problem. I am not too much into it, so this is all I know.
I tried SL a few years ago. The avatar-creation and customization is nice; I was actually able to get someone who looked reasonably like an approximation of me. But then I just couldn’t find anything to do, and I didn’t want to start spending real money for Linden dollars just to buy things in a virtual world. I got bored pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, I ended up going to WoW, which offers much less in terms of character design and customization but at least you get to kill things, equip your character, dress up, role play (if you want to), solve puzzles, etc.
Second life is a media darling, its the game that gets brought up every single time the news media wants to do a story about online gaming. The thing they fail to mention is that its HORRIBLE in every way and never was very popular to begin with. I’m not sure where you heard Second Life was great, are you sure you didn’t just read lots of stories about it and just assumed it was great because it gets talked about so much?
If you figure out how, let me know and maybe we can tag team.
I’ve seen videos of trolls fucking up servers by putting in code that creates endless copies of flying dildos or whatever- if you figured out how to do that I would happily be the Robin to your Batman.
I’m not sure where I heard that Second Life was so great, either. However, you and the others have reassured me that the problem is with SL and its users, and not really with me. As I said in my OP, I don’t really have much interest in online chatting, so SL is not really for me. I MIGHT enjoy it if I had to do a lot of teleconferencing, as I could chat in my Underoos without anyone being the wiser, but as things stand, I’ll probably just let my account sit idle, and never sign in again.
Well, that may have been true two or three years ago. These days, it doesn’t get nearly the press it did in 2007 or 2008. IME, the go-to game the media uses now is WoW.
Yes. I’ve never messed with it myself, but if you know what you’re doing you can really, really piss people off. Some examples I’ve seen are endless flying dildos that will constantly swarm around a person (as AClockworkMelon mentioned), a giant Stay Puffed Marshmellow man peering through windows of various people trying to cyber, invisible objects that you can hide in a zone that behave like an Annoy-a-Tron, and a zone invasion by flying pirates that look like Mayor McCheese, the Hamburglar, and assorted other McDonald’s characters.
Almost all of these things are from the SA forums. They have a guild on there that, as far as I can tell, exists just for this sort of thing.
I usually dislike griefing but if there was ever a game that deserved it, it’s Second Life.
Dwight: “Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn’t have points, or scores, it doesn’t have winners or losers.”
Jim: “Oh it has losers.”
Yeah, I think that was right after Linden Labs’ latest round of “We have millions of users!” bragging. Someone ran the numbers and figured out that only a few thousand people had logged into their accounts within the last six months and of those, many were just alts of the same 1,000 people or so.