Why did you start Second Life?

At Seattle's annual arts festival I saw some images exhibited from second life and someone on a panel said she knew a woman who made money making clothes. I really liked the images and I thought, maybe I could make and sell clothes. That was 8 months ago and I am doing exactly that. I came to second life with the dream that many artists have: making an income doing something creative and fun.

I had no interest in cybersex and my real life boyfriend is not a computer person. I did end up having a couple of SL romances and I was suprised how much I enjoy cybersex, but for me SL is about making art.

I used to play Counter Strike: Source all the time..... joined SL because with CS I was fed up with it crashing all the time, the lag, problems with video drivers, constant updates and the voice chat bugged me....

Thank God I have now put all that behind me!

The other reason was to investigate using SL for higher education... but got so carried away with the other stuff that I haven't progressed as far as I wanted to on that front yet!

I came to promote my RL band, my RL musician friends and create a club/venue for inde music. witch I have done and still do.

I have been here a year... and have amassed many *adult* items
but did not come here for cyber or pixle sex...didn't even know it exsisted for the first week or so. But wanted nips on my AV so discoverd that there is more than you can imagine!

I'm one of the people who DID come in because of the sex stuff. Somehow, Second Life had flown under my radar until I read a story on Wired News in October 2005, about how there was this virtual world with all this naughty sex things going on. I was curious enough to go have a look and explore the world. I saw a lot of fascinating places, met some friends, and started to learn how to create things. Within a week, I knew I was hooked; I upgraded to a premium membership, and bought First Land a couple of days after that.

Oddly enough, it was a couple of weeks before I actually DID any of the naughty things; that's right, it didn't even happen until after I owned land. And it was (and is) only a minor part of what I do in Second Life.

I came on due to a desire to create game assets being a veteran of CAD, 3d and 2d graphics packages.. tried over the years with a few online groups to do artwork and models for games, most all of them fizzled.. the only real game I have artwork in is Lincity NG. Got tired of the runaround, found SL. Knew nothing of the sex when I registered, didn't really care when I found out and still don't. There is so much more than that here. Content creation is where it's at for me, I'm here to build. I can have sex with my husband in RL.

I found Second Life because I was actually looking for something like Second Life. I had recently got done playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and like alot of other players would have loved to see an on-line version of the game. Except my reasons were most likely different. GTAA has alot of what I'll call "side challanges" and make-up-your-own challanges. An example of a side challenge is you can go to a pool hall play someone a game of pool for money. An example of a make-up-your-own challange would be to get the parachute and jump off of different kinds of objects (challange being getting to the top of the object and then surviving the jump). I wasn't looking for yet another on-line first person shooter. I wanted to log into a world and do other fun stuff. Second Life generally fits the bill.

All of this reminds of Club Caribe (http://www.dsgames.net/qlink/caribe/pictures1.htm) although I was never able to join. Club Caribe is the successor to Habitat which may have been the first on-line graphical world. On-line virtual worlds are nothing new.

I had heard about SL from a slashdot article years ago, but didn't bother trying it. Earlier this year I was bored with the computer games I had and decided to see what was out there... especially for my Linux computer... found SL again. Installed, played and got hooked. I just love the fact that you can build/script what you like here. There's sex here?

Whenever a woman asks a man for sex and he is going to refuse, he must find a way to say no gently and leave her feeling at least semi-good about herself - or he's no gentleman!

In SL, who the person is behind the avatar is VERY problematic, but the same rule applies, because she MIGHT be a woman and you MIGHT be a man. Something like, say, your avatar is gorgeous but my wife has a thing against me fooling around on line. Or, You almost make me sorry I don't do cybersex (have used that one myself). Guaranteed you won't get a "You're no gentleman" from something like that.

Shame on you, Wilhelm. Emily Post would have a fit.

[Goes back to reading thread]

SecondLife was my first online "game" experience. I didn't like the idea of a monthly charge for playing online games, so up to my born date, I had only played console or PC games.

I learned about SecondLife from my RL brother, who had started SecondLife a several months before. At the time, he was paying monthly tier for virtual land. I had the "you've got to be kidding me" kind of outlook, lol. He kept egging me on to join up, and I finally did. I even eventually went premium, but still have just the 512m plot.

I came to SecondLife, primarily to script and build.

I had a friend on another game that recommended it because he knew I loved tinkering with building things. This was well over a couple of years ago, but I kept putting it off because it seemed a bit odd to me. Finally, I got the courage up and climbed on board to build, texture and explore.

I actually do think that for the vast majority of residents who joined in the last six months (not counting alts), the sexuality is the major draw.

I came from Everquest and WoW. I was bored of killing things, and I liked the amazing customization of avatars here. I was enjoying erotic roleplay in those other places and I came here because the props for such story-telling here are impressive.

But I'll go back to WoW now.

hehe i told her i didnt play SL for those purposes and they kinda uh "dropped in" unnannounced at my place and i was in the middle of building if i remember rightly. either way it did give me a little giggle on this end of the computer.

My standard response is usually "sorry I'm just a geek i like to build and script and didnt join SL for that scene". I still got told i'm not a "gentleman" /shrug (happened 3 times this last chrismas)

I first found out about Second Life scowering PC Gamer for anything I could find on Hellgate: London, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, or Guild Wars 2. Needless to say I baught the edition of PC Gamer with an article on SL just because the CD had a trailor for HG:L. I Saw the article, skimmed it, tossed it asside at first when I saw mention of WoW. Later I was getting bored of the games I had, went back to the article, read a paragraph or two and decided to give it a whirl, though for a while I lost interest because I could not get through Orientation Island without it crashing so I cancelled that account. Later a player of SL joined my Guild Wars roleplaying guild, she gave me tips on how to get it running smoothly when I told her I had not had any luck running it, made a new account and now here I am.

Honestly I did not come hear for anything related to sex. To me it is what it is, an open ended world that is created by its members. I even ran into a fellow bushballer and have made note to ask if he has his own marker and if so what he has, just for the conversation. Yes I am here to interact and converse with people, not to cyber.

I read about Sl for the first time in Wired magazine last fall and thought, Can this really live up to the hype? And does this thing really have the potential to change the world it looks like it might have? So I logged on in December, didn't really do much until after the holidays, then took a closer look.

Well, it outdoes the hype, by a lot. And yes, it will change the world.

So, I poke around, experiment with different aspects of it (except scripting; it makes my head hurt), and do what I can to help it along (I hope). Right now, I'm sucked into the forums, because of the fundamental matters that are in doubt and being argued in them as we speak. (If you don't already know, there are also lively forum threads on SLExchange, sometimes quite significant ones.) Whether SL becomes the new metaverse, or it ultimately fails and something else does, I think what happens here in SL is going to have a profound effect on the development of VR and the metaverse. And therefore the world.

So I'm in for the long haul.

Strange as it may seem this thread has induced me to post for the very first time.
I have been a long time lurker here (as I do in most forums and blogs) and do not generally post in online forums.

However would like to share my experience.

I came across SL in Feb '06 after searching for a virtual world in which to play.
I have long been a fan of virtual world based fiction such as The Silicon Man and felt that technology should be at the level when these worlds should be starting to appear.

SL seemed to be the most promising and complete virtual world that did not require money to try and even offered a free basic account for *Life* and so I signed up on the spot. Then I found that the Linux client had not been created yet and as I don't use Windows (and have not since '04) could not access SL at all.
So I kept my account details and hoped that someday the Linux client would appear but not really expecting that it would.
Then one day after about six months I was cleaning up my bookmarks in my web browser and came across secondlife.com again. I decided to go back and have a look and to my surprise the linux client was now in alpha.

In a flush of excitement that finally I would be able to enter the Metaverse I downloaded the viewer and logged in.
As the grey gave way to colour, buildings and people formed before my eyes I was amazed. Not unlike my first impressions of the Wizard of Oz where everything started in black and white until Dorothy travels to Oz and then the colour is so bright that it startles you at first.

However here before me was a whole world with many people doing anything they desired and not having to stick to any devised plot or story.
I very quickly became captivated and immersed to a level I have never felt with any game before or since. The possibilities seemed endless.

My experience was probably different from most due to first stepping into the SL world with an avatar that was already 6 months old. This had both its advantages and disadvantages.

One of the things I remember most is straying in to a vampire sim and being called a noob by a flying white tiger only for one of its companion blood-drinkers to burst out laughing saying I was the "Oldest God-damn Noob" he had ever seen!

These feelings of wonderment are still with me today even though I average about 21-40 hours a week in SL and have surely spent hundreds of USD in here.
Sure I have come to dislike some of the technical problems and policies that have been introduced. However I have a feeling that the outcomes of all of these things will tell us more about ourselves and the way we live our RL than we could ever imagine. Maybe we will learn a few things in the process.

Thank you for reading.
Nathan Childs

I read an article about an SL businesswoman making money in a virtual world.

Didn't want to make money per se, but had always dreamed of exploring a virtual world for it's social aspect.

The first week was not much fun, I found the chat at the WA to be just like some of the old AOL chat rooms - kinda infantile.

Then I started flying around, exploring and talking to other residents outside of WA, and SL set it's hooks into me hard !!!

For me, SL is all about my friends..........

Because TSO sucked the big wazoo and all my friends in There were abandoning it for Second Life. I was getting bored and lonely, which is never a good thing in my book.

Kam

A long time ago, while reading the TSO forums, I found a thread where someone was complaining about how TSO had become stagnant. At the time I was heavily into TSO (yay Blazing Falls!), but that didn't stop me from following a link to a Slate article about SL. I had low expectations, and planned to just have a look at it before I uninstalled it.

I downloaded the client (all 10mb of it) and started it up. Suddenly, I was in true, non-isometric 3D! I spent the first night all by myself on "Prelude", which is what they called the Orientation Islands back then. I worked on my av, forgot to save it, and had to do it all over. On the second night, I found my way off the island, and had to search for signs of life.

Four years later, I haven't got around to deleting this av. I still have my TSO account, and I look in at times. When I'm there, I'm easily the oldest one in TSO. I think that Slate article may have caused the first mass exodus from TSO.

Id been in Sims-online for a few years. Going through the mundane tasks required to live day to day in there, mostly just hanging out with friends. A few friends in there discovered SL and told me I really should check it out. The last thing I wanted to do was blow more cash every month for another diversion. So I held out for awhile. Then one night I was sitting in a skilling business in TSO, watching my avie sitting there reading a fake book for skill points. So out of sheer boredom I booted up SL. One of my friends was online, and she TP's me out of newbie island and into a jazz club. Flashing disco lighting, a foggy haze crawling across a dancefloor full of dancing fools dressed in all manner of garb. She strolls over looking blonde and beautiful, and hands me a NEO style MATRIX COAT! I was impressed. Id been hoping for a coat like that for a long time in TSO, and here it was. Logged in the next night and spent a few hours figuring out the controls. Didnt take me long to grasp the concept. Did some quick research and found a place where I could buy some cash. Believe it was called the G.O.M, a stock market of sorts. Armed with a fistful of dollars I hit the search engine, tracking down a skin, some tattoos, and a decent pair of boots. At this point in time I thought this place had some potential, but I was still a TSO junkie. But the third night changed it. Being a night-owl I tend to log in late, so on day three I log in around 2:30am. It also happened to be nighttime inside the game as well. Things were rather deserted, so I just flew around the countryside checking things out. I was flying over this big open grassy area, and parked in the middle I see this dinky gazebo. Kinda like a neighborhood park. And I sat there in this gazebo in the dark with the moonlight coming down. Another TSO friend logs in, she IMs me and I tell her what Im doing, and she says she'll be right there. A few seconds later she comes gliding out of the nightsky like some slow motion angel and sits down beside me. We sat there for a few hours shooting the breeze watching the sun come up. The whole vibe of the thing was kinda magical. Sometimes the simplest of things make a huge impression. I was hooked on SL before I clicked on that first sexball. The more things I discover are just frosting on this already intriguing cake.

Found it looking for VR stuff on the web, and the scripting and building looked better and easier than There (which was my current hangout at the time). So I tried it... and the rest, as they say, is history

I still maintain a TSO account as well. Some of those folks are amazed at us geezers who still log in once in awhile. I like to hit the money houses, pay everybody a thousand bucks, and tell em to GET THE HELL OUT AND HAVE SOME FUN!

I was reading the Sunday paper, and in my favorite writers column was an article about how she had started her secondlife, so i thought i would check it out as it sounded very much like the sims, but without having the worry of having to feed them and give them toilet breaks all the time.

I had heard nothing of the sexual aspects of SL, and i must admit when i first saw them, i was a little taken aback.. i suppose i wasn't expecting it, but if i sit down to think about it, that stuff goes on in RL so why not in SL too, and now its just something I have come to accept with SL

but yeah, point being i certainly didn't come here for the sex...

I first arrived in SL in November of 2006 after chatting on msn with a long time internet friend. He mentioned this game, and I figured "why not?" and downloaded it right then and there. I had been playing a game called Lineage 2 (something like WoW) for a couple of years, but my clan was slowing dissolving as they moved on to try other rpgs. They tried to get me to play WoW, but I had started SL by then and I just wasn't feeling the draw. I quit it after a week.

But back to Second Life... my first night, since I had a "guide", I skipped all the orientation areas and he just started showing me a few areas. I still had no idea how elaborate and detailed that some areas could be or the life that could be lived here. I remember freaking out that first night because "somehow" I removed some of my clothing and couldn't figure out how to get it back on. Then my friend had to leave.

Well not being a quitter before I can figure something out, I messed around until I got my clothes back on and somehow found my way to a Welcome Area. I sat around for a while observing the other players. After a while, a guy who definitely wasn't a newb, came over and started chatting. After he deemed me "cool enough", he invited me back to his place to meet his "wife". They gave me a new skin, hair, eyes, a couple of outfits and explained a few things about how to navigate and edit my av. Well, thats all I needed to catch my interest.

After that first night, I found a lm that someone passed me at some point, where there was countless freebie boxes for newbs. I was on my way to a new wardrobe. I really liked the fact that I wasn't limited in what I could wear by my class or level as in the rpgs.

I found a place called Cyberpunk City in Popular Places and went to check it out. Loved the music, though I'm not much of a roleplayer. So I made that my temporary home... hiding out in secluded areas down below where I didn't have to interact, to change clothes and practice my dances.

Then I found a couple of clubs where I liked the music and started going there nightly. After about two weeks in SL, I made my first linden dollars purchase. I'm still not a premium member, but I do my share to contribute to commerce here. My two biggest hobbies were dancing and shopping. I never even knew of the sexual side of SL until I started browsing the classifieds. Eventually, I came to realize that no matter what you're into, you can find it here if you search long enough.

After a couple of weeks I met a guy, got to be friends (non-sexual) and we ended up sharing rent on some land and got a house... later, we upgraded to a larger lot and a castle. By January, he stopped playing and I was on my own.

I really had no intention of having a romantic relationship here, after a bad experience in my former game, but lo and behold, in Febuary, I met my soulmate at BareRose. Now we share two beautiful homes and have a great life together here. I don't foresee myself leaving any time soon.

I'd been a regular on the irc #bdsm channel on EfNet, and got this message in 2003 or 2004 from one of the channel admins that he'd become involved with this thing called "Second Life". It was just starting up, and he was offering everyone on the channel a free membership.

Like an idiot, I ignored it for two years, but it'd always been in the back of my mind. I almost signed up - twice - but wasn't too keen about the registration process and giving money up front for something I might only spend an hour or two in before blowing off.

When they finally opened it up for free subscriptions, I went in and checked it out. I'd been playing EQ 2 and WOW with some close friends but royally getting bored with the whole process of levelling and grinding experience. One look at the totally open society, build tools, and scripting language, and I knew immediately there was serious magic here (I had long complained to my friends in WOW and EQ2 how tired I was with scripted adventures and that a real game would rely upon live content developers). I also knew this was a place to bring my mistress/owner into after checking out the various alternative lifestyles and knowing at least one of the people involved in this whole venture was involved in that, that this would be an extremely kink friendly environment.