the play girlz gaming blog

Second Life Lessons

by Erin on June 14th, 2006

Last week marked my first in-game exposure to Linden Lab’s Second Life, not by choice really but out of a desire to attend an event that was occuring in the game space a few days later. I certainly didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the other attendees, so I made sure to download the client and boot up before the big day. The first thing I noticed was how horrendously slow the game ran on my system. I’m talking overheating, graphics at minimum settings, oh god let me click the save button on the character builder before you implode.

(I think, in fact, that my little computer is on its way out, so if anyone wants to subsidize my purchase of an iMac…)

Second thing I noticed was how bloody long it took me to customize my avatar using this darling computer, which took an average of 10 seconds everytime I adjusted the slider bars, to show the changes in the model. Needless to say creating Isaac was like performing my own root canal. Not only that, but after completing my masterpiece, saving it as Issac1, and tucking into bed for the night, I awoke early the next morning to start the game and see how he was doing, only to find that he had returned to his ugly standard self. Gone was the lovely mussed dark brown hair, replaced by an unnatural reddish brown mop with emo fringe. I had no idea that you had to save each and every little piece of him separately. No one told me this. He didn’t come with a user manual. So there went another 2.5 hours trying to get him back to the way I had him.

Next, I had to master the controls. Nothing says noob like getting your avatar wedged between two sofas and not being able to get out. This, unfortunately, was around the time that Isaac, without my permission, decided to take a swim and dropped completely off the intro area. Serious glitch the likes of which I had no idea how to fix. So I turned him off, hoping upon reloading that he would magically be on solid ground again. No dice. It was then that I saw the fly button, figured that I couldn’t possibly make things worse, and shot out of the ocean and over the intro zone like Free Willy jumping rocks. Thankfully landing was much easier than trying to control his in-flight antics. I blame it on lag.

I shan’t go further into my control misadventures except to say thank you to the kind soul who pointed out how to reset my camera view. I no longer get stuck looking INTO walls when I’m trying to get a different view of Isaac’s bum.

It’s hard for me to say whether I would get involved in a community like Second Life. It was fascinating to walk around the mall and shop for shoes, look at housewares and just general be immersed in something so creepily like real life. That though, is its one downfall. I play games as an escape and as stress-relief. Sure I might get pissed off when I grenade myself in Wolfenstein:ET, or be annoyed that I have to redo half of a quest in Guild Wars, but the settings are unreal, the stress is less about “do I have enough money to buy shoes” (oddly a scenario I myself faced at the mall yesterday), and more “man I hope I can cast this ice shard meteor shower combo fast enough”. I don’t want a Second Life per se, I’m quite happy with the real one that I have. Nor do I want to worry about buying a house, working a job, or dating. I want to ignite things, blow things up, snipe, you know…all the things the authorities won’t (rightly so) let me do in real life.

The experience however, was really quite surreal, and I will likely give it a whirl now and again just to see what’s new and exciting. The potential to expand beyond a simple social video game is definitely there and already being taken advantage of by many virtual entrepreneurs. It saddens me though, that a game that has so much potential to be used for limitless educational, professional, business, and networking applications has already been mired in the two subjects that plague initiatives like this: sex and money. It literally took less than a minute for the word ’sex’ to appear on my chat log, and for me to see my first pickup attempt. Sheesh, if I wanted to see that crap, I’d just walk through downtown. Disappointing.

So if you happen to see Isaac in Second Life, come and say hi, he doesn’t bite, he just doesn’t sleep with anyone on first chat.

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POSTED IN: MMORPG, Musings, Second Life