Any other free on line games like SL?

Like Eve Online?

I've never tried EVE but I do like reading about it. Does it sound similar? The kind of shooting I mean is you are standing there minding your own business and someone shoots you - not for a gameplay reason, more like for griefing.

Hey! I read that one! (I think I may still have the book on my shelf...)

As far as I can tell from what I've read, griefing is part of the gameplay in Eve.

I'm quite intrigued by the text only worlds. Are there any that don't revolve around dragons, wizards, elves, monsters and stuff?

The one I mentioned, Cantr, is a world simulator. It's based around commerce, I guess you could say. There are some things you can't do without supplies from other cities, and some places where you can't survive without food from outside, which involves travel.

And there is a very rigid rule about your various accounts not helping each other.

At one time I found a place where there was only wheat and coal, so there was no way to eat. To make bread in that place, you'd have to build a mill and then an oven, and you could only build a coal oven indoors (for some reason) so you'd have to build a building first.

Oh, and if you want to lock a building, you need iron to make the lock...

so it's complicated. But I got a two accounts (each with about six characters) and moved them all to this out of the way place. Some would travel and bring food (so we didn't die) and stone (for the buildings, etc. and gradually built up a little city where other people came to live.

It was tricky because I had to be sure that I didn't pick up what one of my alts set down. I had to pass things to a character from my other account -- and that was how I got kicked out of the game, I messed up once.

The only problem with it is that it's slow. If can take literal (real life) days for you to walk from one town to the next, and if you don't have enough food, you could die. And if you have to do a task, like build a building, that takes days too.

AND if you want to have a conversation with someone , THAT can take days too, because you're on and they aren't, so you ask them a question and come back hours later to see what they said.

All that said, it was a lot of fun and I played a long time.

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Puzzlebox was (possibly still is) based around an artificial construct larger than the solar system with *apparent* non-Euclidean geometry and a variety of species. The main plot when I was active in Puzzlebox involved what seems to be a nanotech infestation from a collective hegemonizing culture.

Edit: I probably shouldn't provide a link until I know whether it's currently active or not.

...Farm Town. That's the game a friend of mine and his wife have gotten hooked on. It is played via Facebook (which I don't quite get) and when I Googled Farm Town I got a ton of hits but this one seemed the most informative that I've seen thus far:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4919178_play-facebook-farm-town.html

I may have to give it a whirl for the heck of it, even though I have a black thumb and I'm a little like the Eva Gabor character in "Green Acres" where the great outdoors is concerned.