Second Life « Disenchanted Youth

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Second Life

April 27, 2008 by disenchanted

So, a colleague of mine was going on and on about Second Life tonight. Question: Do any of you do the Second Life thing? And is it worth playing with?

Posted in pop culture | Tagged Second Life | 7 Comments

7 Responses

on April 27, 2008 at 11:44 pm | Reply Tateru Nino

Yes and no. It depends a great deal on what you really want to and expect to get out of it.
on April 28, 2008 at 1:24 am | Reply tqe / Adam

I suspect it’s a huge time suck.
on April 28, 2008 at 3:09 am | Reply Tateru Nino

Depends on if you’re doing time-consuming things. If you’re just popping in for meetings, lectures, talks or classes then it doesn’t have to be.

Think of it like Paris (without the travel times). You could spend most of your time there, getting to know people, shopping, creating, selling – or you could pop in for an hour for some specific thing and then depart, without getting distracted. Your usage is more about the choices you make.
on April 28, 2008 at 8:10 am | Reply Cynical Queer

I make it a point not to play in Second Life because I get addicted to things like SimCity. I’ve heard it is a lot like that, and frankly, there’s a huge real world out there.
on April 28, 2008 at 10:17 am | Reply Linda Latte

Monday, April 28 2008, @ 8:14 AM (-0800 GMT)

SL, i.e., “Second Life” is NOT a game. There are no space aliens or police to kill or main, no points to gather, and no one to defeat. It is an extension of RL, “Real Life,” but created, on-screen, in 3D virtual format. you can EARN REAL $$ there too, not toy money, but $US. You can also make many friends. A nice thing aboul SL also is that, unlike in RL, you can FLY and TELEPORT like in “Beam me up Scotty.”
on April 28, 2008 at 3:13 pm | Reply Cynical Queer

I prefer the great outdoors and REAL life, not the synthesized cyberlife people think is real, thank you very much.

It’s comments like the previous commenter that make me fear the future. Does it mean Second Life is one step away from mandatory chip implants in the brain, or something else equally as nefarious?
on April 29, 2008 at 10:21 am | Reply Tateru Nino

Good lord, no. SL is a communications medium and content publishing platform. Like IRC, IMs or the Web – only with a strong sense of presence (nothing at all like SimCity, by the way).

It connects real people to real people with an immediacy and presence that you don’t get over the phone or by email or in IMs or on the Web. That’s the strength of it.

It extends your real life communications options, just as all those other mediums do.

Odds are, 99% of what you know about SL is wrong, because 99% of what is written about it is wrong (Just like all the same guff was written about the Web 12 years ago).

In all this, I’m not saying that it’s right for you (or for any other individual) any more than I’d say that everyone absolutely has to have a mobile phone.