Second Life,... Sophisticated, Glorified Chatroom, or Game?

A hole in the internet that you throw money into...

Dunno about the rest, but as a chatroom, its UI is pretty miserable.

It's a Drama Simulator...

GOLD!

Sorry, that's not true. =) Just checked some grammar and punctuation sites and it's acceptable to have a comma followed by an ellipsis.

But, irt, the OP, SL is in part certainly a chat room, a very immersive one.

The Game of Life; the Game of Second Life. It's all a game.

-i

Second Life is one part Performance Art, one part Kabuki, and one part World Wrestling Federation.

I unno, they said that about my first sailboat, but it tripled my return in 2 weeks.. then the next boat, which saved me thousands in rent (and dinners and drinks if you count how much easier it was to take them home on the 2nd date)..

so yeah.. lol.. pffft.. but yeah the abyss of SL can be deep.. today I got lost in Greenie's kitchen cabinets and had to call a taxi.

It is just high priced chat room that let's me create and learn things

Lol. I choose this one! =p I'm so *not* girly RL, but SL.. Gosh. I just can't resist those new bling heeled boots, and that flashy skirt. Don't wear it all much, but I sure love having them!

SL is.. A sweet place to make some new friends, learn how to build stuff and expand knowledge! .. And, needless to say, terrible for the pocketbook! (I have limited myself to $2.50 a month, though.. It's HARD.. Lol.)

It's a place where you can chat or be alone. Make money or spend it. View porn or extend your knowledge (and the two aren't mutually exclusive). Be yourself or someone else. Build, explore, or play games.

Like the internet, in 3D. But more likely to crash.


To descend to levels of pedantry even I rarely attempt, may I point out that an ellipsis isn't a part of grammar, but punctuation?

Quite right. It was a little late.

You can't win if you don't play.

QFT. I might have said "shadow puppetry" instead of Kabuki, but very apt.

And I suspect that the answer to the OP tells much less about SL than about the respondent. A kind of unintentional personality test. For someone like me, an off-the-chart introvert according to Myers-Briggs, it takes an effort of will to acknowledge that "chat room" is even meaningful here. But of course it is, for many.

As I have said before, Second life is neither a game nor a chatroom. It is a place, like San Francisco or Paris. It just happens to be a place that we access via the Internet and software applications, instead of via an airplane, bus or train.

If you think of SL as a place, a lot of the typical "what do I do?" questions answer themselves. "How do I play a visit to Paris?" is a silly question, but "What do I do when I visit Paris?" opens up countless options.

How do I make money? Same way as in RL - make a product people may want, advertise, make it available, and sell it.

What do I do? What would you do when visiting a foreign country? Go sightseeing, meet new people, experience things you can't do at home...

For me, SL is a place where I can meet with people from all over the world, without the expense, risks and difficulties of international travel. It's a place where what I can be and what I can do is not limited by most real-world constraints. If I want to be a dragon, I can be one. All I have to do is buy or make a Dragon avatar, and wear it. If I want to build a Cathedral, all I have to do is learn how. The materials cost me nothing, and the work can be completed in days or weeks instead of a lifetime of effort. If I want to be an adventure heroine, with guns blazing and amazing martial arts moves, there's ways to do that, with no risk to my real body. If I want to experience being male, I can do it without a sex change operation. It's only a few mouse clicks away, with the purchase of the right 'accessories', and just as believable an outward appearance as anyone else.

I think this is actually a big difference between different people's perceptions of Second Life - the idea that you can "experience things you can't at home".

For some people they genuinely feel that they can experience things in SL they can't in the real world. For others, however, they feel that all they ever experience in SL is some graphics on a computer screen, so that the only thing that separates SL as an experience from any other experience that is just graphics on a screen (such as watching TV) is the ability to interact with other people in the proces.

Do you feel you can build a cathedral? Maybe you can, but to some people it's just a picture of one. Can you be a dragon? To some people, you can only look like one - you couldn't actually "be" a dragon unless you could feel the fire in your belly and your tail swinging behind you.

So answering the question "what is Second Life" is tricky, because arguably all of those things (eg, feeling that you actually are a dragon or actually did build a cathedral) are added by you - all the software does is to draw pixels on the screen. The argument then goes that you could add those things to ANYTHING, so you could feel you'd built a cathedral on a text-only game if you wanted, because all the feelings are coming from you. On the other hand there is probably some subset of people who could feel that way given graphics but can't feel that way given text and those are largely the people SL is aimed at, I think.

Real Life,... Sophisticated, Glorified Chatroom, or Game?

i just love 'either/ors', so western political...

'either your with us or against us!!' - beauty and the beast (the disney version)

I see it as a platform. Just like our 2D internet that we choose to do business on then play some games pr use our chat tools. SL is a blank book (see sandbox) and we add the pages.

Well, you build stuff in a SIMCITY game kinda way. So thats gamey. And you will find real games here and about. There are some catch the fish games. There are tringo type games. There are role playing games. There are some 'you think Im a guy but Im really a chick and you dont know it yet, but wait till you find out at the worst possible time, I know you think you love me, but boy are you gonna freak out', head type games. So though you will find games enclosed, its more of a glorified chat room, social venue than a game. Sophisticated? Thats friggin debatable.

For keeps.

SL is just an excuse to talk on the forums.

second life is the matrix

LMAO!!! So very true. . .
It is what it is and that is what you make of it!

...you pretty much described how I use SL too. I've been exploring MMOs (not many MMORPGs though) for about 12 years, even ...Adobe Atmosphere (YECH), and this one "takes the cake".

...for all it's faults, SL is a LOT more advanced than attempts at similar platforms, made by other companies at the same time. In it's field, SL is still ahead.

It's a platform, that's for sure, but we're so used to SPECIALIZED platforms, that it's hard to just accept SL for what it is.

With Quicktime music and video, a web browser, "3D websites" integrating chat, Voice, 3D Avatars, a (somewhat) user-friendly collection of building/modding tools, and other integrated "toys", SL is a big glob of past attempts at "Virtual Worlds" and next-gen communication balled into one. I don't think there's one name for projects of this type yet.

Life, the Universe and Everything .. in two dimensions .. pretending to be three.

This is debatable.