In late October I came across an article in Adverblog about 'Adam Reuters', a tech journalist journalist from Reuters who's heading up the first real world reports about the latest and greatest happenings in Secondlife (a large online gaming community).
It'd been about the 9th or 10th time I'd heard of it, and it'd become increasingly trendy to mention it and name drop it in marketing meetings. It'd get thrown around in brainstorms and round the office (just like how 'Friendster' and 'Myspace' are thrown around very flippantly ie:'Hey lets make a talking bottle of pop or a shrine to the legacy of intrinsic refreshingness or an avatar for sanitary pads!') Of course these comments are often greeted by 'oh thats quite cool, but I don't really know pig Latin' kind of looks and everyone kind of just looks around for a bit, stretches, and says let's go back to cracking the big TV idea for now.
So deciding that I am the new-dog in my agency, I went to the website to check it out. (and that was the last time I posted a bloc entry, bought another computergame, received any phone calls, did any work, had a life)
Fristly, Secondlife - it's whats known these days as a 'MMOG' - Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It's boasts a population of 1,500,000 + players, with thousands of players joining each week. It's free, and works like... well it's easy enough to play it's kind of like the sims. But whats blows the bottom out of it and what really excites people about it is the 'economics' of secondlife : Second life runs on Lindens - virtual dollars that are roughly pegged to the US currency so you can always trade them for real cash and walk out a rich an happy person. Anyway we'll get back to that later.
So I was born sometime early in the morning, on a Sunday Night, naked, into the tutorial module of second life - this funny garden like place where all the virtual fetuses (affectionately known as noobs) learn to walk, fly, push, move, and interface with things, so flies, pushes , moves, and eventually passes the final test.. after receiving the standard issue set of clothes, skin, eyes, teeth etc, I jump into the portal and go straight into the big bad world, in to what would be known as my 'home' for the next couple of months. I large car yard in the middle of the desert with lots of exotic vehicles (any by exotic I don't mean Ducatis and McLarens I mean like General Greviou's wheelie missile scooter thing from Starwars episode III). Anyway there are a few others standing around, and for a while I feel like the Arnold in the Terminator, only wihtout any dignity or purpose.
It's dark and there are dodgy people who look like departmental store mannequins running around bumping into things yelling 'I'm new here!' 'Hi!' 'Hello!' 'Do you speak Espanola?' (clearly I can't speak or spell it either). I spend the first 40 minutes adjusting my avatar to look like ... Well, hot I guess. And then go out and make some small talk and within minutes meet this other newish person who asks me to teleport with her to this tropical island with many little colored balls. I'm instructed to sit them on with her and it activates a pashing sequence where our avatar's lips are locked with each other and wet kissing sounds are coming out from my PC speakers. Damn. This is kind of fun in a really demented way.
So Secondlife, affectionately known as SL to the insiders. Is a fantasy world where there are no boarders between game content and your imagination, it's a gigantic sandpit where everything conceivable is buildable, possible, and achievable - if you have enough Lindens. You can start a bar, gamble, an army, a design a line of fashion, meet members of a virtual band and record a song with them, painstakingly recreate all of Frank Loyyd Wright's houses, and all the while having lots of cyber sex and (hopefully) earn a buck or two. It's the manifestations of 1.5 million people's deepest and most disposable fantasies and it's HUGE.
By the end of my first month, I'd also started a Girl character because well - it's rather boring being a guy seeing as I already know how hard/shit it is/can be. And Besides you get to adjust your own body proportions - yes breasts - and then see yourself naked! Which was more than enough incentive for me.
I'd be rushing home from work to work on virtual relationships, earn Lindens anyway I could and then turning to the shops to work on my avatar's look. I took just about everything I could get my hands on from wigs, to inflatable unicorns, to sex organ 'attachments' to a giant singing/spinning fish. I even got to having a bit of 'sex', which well... is weird and not very inspiring, more often than not just made me feel a bit sad and awkward.
Anyway long story short, I had a pretty good run, I met alot of lesbians, freaks, geeks, held an art exhibition, and collected a huge amount of junk, from high heels, to samurai swords to well the giant singing bass. So weird but so good (in a awkward way).
For more information (or to simply sell your soul to the lindens) check out SL
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