Why did you start Second Life?

My o/l family left our last chat to come here, I tried it & hated it! Spent more time looking at walls than anything else, couldn't move, nightmare. Anyways I came back for someones b'day just to drop in etc & everyone really sorted me out & it just clicked. Now i'm never leaving! I still can't walk great but i'm liking it

I got hooked on SL by my brother. Made some awesome friends and even found love in SL which will be in RL soon! It amazes me everyday how beautiful some sims are and what a pleasure it is to explore. I visit help and orientation Island now on regular bases to help out new residents if I can. (And ignore the requests for sex LMAO) LL volunteers helped me out as well when I arrived so I guess I'm returning the favour.

Mandy C

I am so incredibly naive that I wasn't even aware of any sexual aspect to SL for about a month after I joined (seriously). A friend introduced me and a small group of us RL friends went through orientation together. Two of four of us are full on in SL.

I wasn't certain what I wanted to do in the first month, but simply explored. I enjoyed, and still do, seeing other people's creations. I'm actually shy and find it difficult to socialize but some how I kept meeting cool people (despite my best anti social efforts HA HA).

I didn't really "get" SL until I bought some land and began creating my dream. Now I love it.

This for me, is the biggest pull of SL. I'd first come across this phenomenon some years back in a text forum supporting Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic.

I was terrible for socialising but all of a sudden there was the world thrown open to me with lots of people all wanting to chat and exchange views and have fun.

And now, SecondLife .. Wow!!! My fiancee sums it up well in one word .. seductive. It is .. in many ways. I reiterate I came into SL with no idea of what to expect, my previous experience being text only forum. The sex I found fairly soon but heck, live and let live I thought. Vampires, angels, Star Wars characters, dragons, cats, foxes, daleks ... hell, the sex seems an also ran in comparison. Seductive, yes ... I'm seduced .. and intoxicated .. even after seven months.

No, I didn't join for the sex .. but I'm not puting it down either .. it happens in real life too ya know?

Hey! You wanted to check out my hips! Dirty little hobbit!




It does?

Mandy C

ermm .. is that a promotion? .. I was an evil little hobbit last week? *blink*

LMAO! Less evil, more dirty?

Mandy C

Wow Shirley - your experience sounds almost identical to mine. I read about SL in Regina Lynn's column on wired.com, joined because of all the hot stuff she mentioned, got totally hooked on it, upgraded, got first land, put up a house, found some people worth playing with, and the rest is history.

I was part of the Duranie Influx of August 2006, when Duran Duran announced they'd be playing a virtual gig in Second Life. (Which has yet to happen . . . but I am told it's still in the works, really, honest, they promise.)

Anyway. When I signed up, I found out to my dismay that it wouldn't work on my iBook, but that it would on my parents' computer, which meant I could pretty much only play by borrowing their machine. I signed on intermittently and had some nice chat sessions with some of my fellow Duranies that I knew from the message boards.

Meanwhile, I'd developed a friendship in RL with someone who also played SL and we wound up meeting in SL on a regular basis. Next thing I knew, I was buying Lindens with my PayPal account and figuring out what it would cost to get a new laptop so I could play more regularly than once a week at the parents' place after Sunday dinner.

The Universe must have heard my request for a new computer, and forced my hand by causing my iBook to falter. So I bought a MacBook Pro (the minimum required for SL on a Mac laptop) and, fortunately, the Universe was kind enough to hand me a check for the full amount within a few weeks of my purchase. (It was sort of spooky how it worked out.)

So I installed SL on my shiny new 'puter and I've been on there just about every day ever since. I bought a membership, bought land, built a house and now my friend and I are looking at opening a store together as soon as we get enough product created.

I've become enough of an addict that I honestly don't even care if Duran Duran ever show up!

A friend suggested I should try it out but she is no longer playing.

I am learning to build but scripting is like a foreign language. Love skating around and exploring - there are some wonderful and also ugly things in world.

I am not here for the pixel sex so all the mature stuff pretty much passes me by. That must go against the assumption that all newish residents are only here for sex.

/points at start date....... naah they wont find us here .....

What pulled me in was an article about Tringo. I was interested in learning about game design and a platform where a beginner could make his own game was very interesting to me.

What I actually wound up doing here doesn't resemble that at all. Instead, I've reprised my RL experience doing a support group for bisexuals, with socializing and eventually political advocacy thrown in the mix.

So for me, SL has become a mirror of an earlier phase of my RL.

Once you're past a certain age, virtual sex is *funny*. You can bond a friendship with it, but it's pretty insubstantial except as art backdrop.

That is so very true. After a number of months in SL, I'm just now dipping my toe into the sex scene to expand my SL experience repertoire (LOL). I confess that some animation creators are pretty damn good, but as always, never enough to replace the real thing. Although, as you say, you can certainly bond over the amusing explorations of the sex scene in SL with someone of like mind

One of them can be amongst you even as we speak.

Unlike many posts from all the good, upstanding SL users, sex was part of the reason I joined SL.

I'd been involved with IRC since '95, and had recently left The Palace due to a disagreement regarding censorship with the person running the particular palace I frequented. I often listen to the podcast "This Week in Tech", sometime around March '06 they were talking about SL, including the sexual aspects. I was looking for something to replace The Palace (I had looked at there.com but found it lacking), and that little tidbit convinced me to check out SL.

Ironically, sex has not been a major part of my SL existence (in that regard, it might be a bit too much like RL), However I have met many interesting people and have made some true friendships.

I am glad that SL has both PG and Mature sims. I tend to stay in mature sims as I prefer intelligent, uncensored conversation. Also, in RL I am something of an "in-the-closet" nudist, and find nudity-friendly sims good places for exploring that aspect of my being.

To me, SL is something of a spiritual laboratory where one is allowed to be both researcher and guinea pig. I'm now in my 14th month on SL and while it has many trying moments, it is a very worthwhile experience.

Glad to see something positive on the forums! This is also some interesting reading!!

I'm just sayin...

I joined SL so I could walk around in my underwear just like I do in First Life.

...saw an article in Wired about SL...forgot said article, forgot SL...

...saw another article in Popular Science...remembered Wired article...tried SL...


Came in to create...

Stayed to watch people walk around in their underwear...

I think it was around Christmas 2005. I was frustrated with something I was attempting to do in Photoshop and I googled the problem which landed me on a texturing second life web page. I promptly forgot about my problem and starting reading about second life and how people were able to create things and sell them in this virtual world. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard of and signed right up, only to discover that my ancient computer wasn't up to the task. A new graphics card and some extra RAM later, I was finally "born" in sl in March 2006.

RL got very "interesting" just then and I wasn't able to login for a long time, but SL was in the back of my mind. Finally in February 2007 I started exploring and I haven't regretted it (although my books are gathering dust, my tivo is overflowing and my house is a mess)--I haven't sampled the SL sex ...but I'm not ruling it out. For me creating is more of a pull than socializing, probably because I have a lot of people clamoring for my attention in RL. Too, I'm on the U.S. west coast and don't log on till late at night--a lot of the places I explore are deserted. But that's cool, I'm enjoying the peace and quiet.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what SL can be, and in spite of the recent problems, I almost always find something new to marvel at or inspire me. Although the first person in SL I interacted with was a guy who kept bumping into me over and over until I logged off (I didn't know how to TP yet), I think there's a high proportion of creative, intelligent, witty and just plain good people here....so I'm staying. At least until my poor old computer can't handle the upgrades anymore.

Of course, sometimes I'm so busy reading forum posts that I don't get around to actually logging in...

::tiptoes back to lurking Lurksville ::

Ditto, clicked a referrer link, whoever they were hope they got paid!

I started due to a friend who had gotten on this. Now this and one other site are the only places I go anymore. I stopped all my other MMORGP's, and I'm getting my Fiance to make an account here too.

OK hand up here: it's all about sex and the net.

I started RL sex bohemian behaviour in 1984; went on line in 1986 with BIX and the UK Version (CIX) and got about two months in before having a weird chat relationship with an alleged-female. My bohemian behaviours in RL with the London Fetish underground gave me plenty of material to talk over online in the sundry pre-net forums and BBSes that were all we 'ad in those days (cue Monty Python sketch): what came out of that was a lifelong interest in what happens when people use restricted media - of any kind - to express their character in a sexual way. Clubbing was then, restricted: you could dress up, you could pose, you could chat up others, but you're all home by 2am and you are surely not going to do anything in public. Being online was similarily restricted - you could describe stuff in text, you could maybe move a picture to and fro if you planned the thing really carefully: there seemed to be a common thread there, I thought.

Roll forward rather a long time and I took a look in passing at Active Worlds, when that first took off. My life is and was way too chaotically full to invest a lot of time in that community and it seemed to me to be a classic case of promising too much too early, so I pretty much gave up on 3D web apps - besides, RL was going nuts. For a while there I was deep inside the team running Europe's biggest regular fetish event, so half a decade or more zipped past in an insane blur. Even now you may still see my MTV interview or the HBO pieces on the Skin Two ball... but as always happens, eventually, life slows down a tad. In conjunction with a few other mates from the early days of the Net I have always been interested in what people do with sex and the net, from the floridly technical (teledildonics??? Virtual Eve? pay-per-view webcams?) to the nakedly creative (www.mcstories.com is a pretty perpetual source of astonishment, for the minimalism if not for the theme)... so looking at SL came as a natural progression to plenty of other investigations.

I was prepared to be jaded and jaundiced, but I ended up fascinated. The way that there's complete liberty in some respects, and complete restriction in others, produces a genuinely unique experience - and personally, I am intrigued by my own reaction to being offered the chance to look any way I want (principally because, I don't take it. Why... your guess is as good as mine). I really like the way that people otherwise left high and dry by the computer revolution, suddenly blossom into superstars inside SL - and I'm really depressed by the way that some people can't discard their preconceptions when they come on line. I think SL is a fascinating experimental room for looking at gender roles, social interactions, the nature of play and the nature of sex - and I'm very pleased to see echoes of the spirit of adventure which I enjoyed back in the 80's, in an environment a hundred thousand times larger and more varied.

I came to SL by chance after seeing a feature on a BBC news programme about it last summer. I thought it looked fun.

I always liked the idea of fantasy lives - like being able to decide who you are when you get up in the morning - 'Ah! I think I'll be a little old lady today' and tomorrow, perhaps, a pretty young woman, or even a big fat man for a change.

There was a childrens' TV cartoon on British TV about Mr. Benn, who was a kind of Walter Mitty type who used to go into a costume hire shop and be a fireman, pirate or whatever.

But since I've been in SL I've been just Conifer and apart from wearing different clothes and sometimes having my hair tied back I don't become someone else - Funny, that!!!!

I read an article about it in the Times on Sunday back in June last year. I was bored/it was raining/there was nothing good on TV, so I logged on to have look.