My Second Life Journey – 4. Transforming

Money is a constant subject in Second Life, it being virtual economy and all. Just existing and to walk around talking to people is totally free, buildning and creating things are free as well. Like in real life appearance is important in Second Life. If you keep your newbie look you are likely to be treated differently than if you have a more advanced and realistic or in some cases crazy appearance. After all this is a virtual world an you have the ability to look however you like. You can be Pamela Anderson, Santa Claus or a small spider. I haven’t tried either but I’m sure it’s fun. Have been in the game for over half a year feel that I can say that most people choose to look somewhat like they look in real life. Or rather the avatar has some basic features that the person has in real life but then of course you make it taller, thinner more athletic etc. There are of course people that choose a very unique look which I find great. In the beginning when I had limited knowledge and made my appearence from only free stuff I didn’t manage to make my avatar look very similair to the real me.

These are two of my looks as a newbie.

 

My Second Life Journey – 3. Meeting other avatars and exploring

Some of the first other avatars I talked to/chatted with was a Welsh couple that lived together in a house in a Wales themed sim. They were both very friendly. People keep saying this and I have to agree that in general most Second Life players are very friendly and welcoming to others. At least this was the case when I started out. Nowdays the new people are so many so people get tired of explaning the same things over and over again. There are many “help-places” like Orientation Island and Help Island for “newbies”. After you complete Orientation Island you end up at Help Island. This was when the software started crashing for me. So I never took part of the information from the Help Island.

The welsh couple told me about places where I could get stuff for free in able to change my appearence. One of this places was The Freebie Warehouse – http://slurl.com/secondlife/Burns/92/146/79 A place with lots and lots of boxes of free stuff.

At this point I also discovered Second Sweden. Right now the largest Swedish community in Second Life. This was in March 2007 and by then Second Sweden wasn’t the large and active place it is now. By then it was a lot of empty red wooden cabins with white corners. A meeting place with a dance floor, a mid-summer flag pole, a replica of a traditional wooden horse and a fire place with a four to five avatars chatting. It was nice at first but I got bored of it fast.

So I went exploring. Every avatar has a Profile and in their profile they can list their favorite places and by checking out other avatars profiles I found my way to famous places in Second Life like The Lost Gardens of Apollo, Svarga, Dublin in SL and Wizards Alley (A Harry Potter themed sim).

 

My Second Life Journey – 2. The City Chic Female

When signing up for Second Life you can choose from a selection of standard avatars. I choose the City Chick Female. Her looking asian and all. Yes have a South Korean heritage.

I landed in Second Life looking like this. And the first place I arrived to was the Orientation Island Sim. The different places in Second Life are called sims = simulator. On the Orientation Island you were offered to learn to walk, fly, and some other important features necessary to play the game. This was a good thing for me. Not having basic knowledge on how to walk and move around in a game environment. I kept walking in to things and getting stuck. At this time Orientation Island had five or six different stations and that you could go through and when you completed the tasks you got to go to the next station. Later I have lerned that you don’t have to go through these steps in order to enter other places in Second Life. You can just teleport yourself anywhere and start playing. I think I got trough tree of the stations before I got tired of it and logged off. Then it took a week before I entered this world again, now more determined to learn how to play. I hadn’t discover the Search function yet so I went to the World Map and tried to get to places where there was a lot of people. Of course I ended up at a “sex-place”. A place where Second Life avatars can have sex. The software kept crashing and I just didn’t find it fun. On the third log in I started to search for places in the search field on the World Map. I searched for places like Sweden, Ireland and Scotland, since I’d heard that there was replicas of real places in Second Life.

When walking around in Second Life everything worked very slow and my the software (game) kept crashing. My Dell Inspiron 6000 didn’t work as well for Second Life as it had for The Sims 2. I had to do a major hard-drive clean up and delete a lot of programs that took up space to make my computer work faster.

 

My Second Life Journey – 1. The Sceptic

I don’t rember the first time I heard about Second Life but it must have been about three years ago, being a frequent web-surfer and being quite up to date on what happens in the online world. Previously I had read about the swedish Project Entropia that is now called Entropia Universe,but not being a gamer. For you non-computer geeks. A gamer is somebody who plays computer games a lot. I have been a frequent user of the internet since I got my first dial-up connection in 1996 (?) but computer games was never really my thing. So I never felt really tempted to join. However previous to start playing Second Life I played The Sims 2 for a month but got frustrated by the limitations of the game and having to deal with everyday stuff like cleaning, working out and such. So I quit.

I first thought of Second Life as a really lame idea for people with no lives. So I resisted joining for a long time. But followed the developemend in different medias. The web, national television etc. Eventually I got too curious about this “game” that was supposed to be like a big chat and an extention to the web. I signed up for an account on 21′th of february 2007. Just to have one. It took some weeks before I downloaded the software.