My Second Life experience was confusing, boring and well plain weird, similar to the other bloggers entering into this virtual world. Originally, it sparked my interest. I chose an avatar who, in my opinion, had the coolest outfit. It was fun to choose a name for her. I chose “superdiva Moonshadow”. I became excited to find out what she could do and whom she would be able to meet in my second life. But, what started out has creating a fun, imaginative character quickly turned into confusion when I entered “my life”.
Second Life tells you “connect with real people”. But, its not real people! While you are having conversations through text and/or voice messaging and a real human is responding, the conversation is based off made up characters. You find yourself in a surreal world with funky characters where you feel a social connection but it isn’t reality; you aren’t connecting to a real human nor do you know who is behind the face of this character. Can this be considered a social life when technically real human life isn’t involved? I suppose this is similar to WOW in the sense they are bonding over the Second Life experience, but still it didn’t make much sense to me.
On the same note, the events calendar struck me has odd. Avatars are attending fake events, for example fashion shows and concerts. There were even make overs for your avatar. It made me feel I had a social life and to be honest, I was pretty curious to check out some of the events. For example, over the weekend I was invited to an “easter egg hunt” which I sadly missed out on. While each avatar may have a busy events calendar in reality these events aren’t real. Are virtual social events replacing real social events for heavy users of Second Life? Or on the other side is it helping people feel socially accepted because they are popular on Second Life?
Maybe I’m just technology challenged, but I struggled to move to destinations and meet people, etc. I feel for a fairly simple idea, and especially if they want to attract more players, it should not have been this difficult. Lastly I was surprised you had to pay money… I do not find it healthy for people to invest money in their virtual life instead of their real one. You pay for things on Second Life with L$, which you buy with real money, in order to make your Second Life more complex. Shouldn’t people be paying money for real houses and events, not fake virtual ones with fake friends…? I see the appeal to be imaginative in playing Second Life, but find it confusing to navigate and a distraction from a real social life.
All of the Second Life users in our class found Second Life dull, but in their descriptions, I think about ways SL could be utilized by other people.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, attending online Fashion Shows and Concerts may be a more convienient and affordable way for some people to access these events. I know there are music artists I never experienced because they never came to Madison, if I had a SL I could just teleport to the concert of my choice!
Everyone also mentioned the complications involved with going to different places and 'finding the tutorial.' I think the sight is designed to be complicated so you have to spend a long time in SL figuring it out and exploring the SL world.
I've watched my brother and dad play video games that do not have a clear path set for them. They wander around the video game 'world' trying to discover how to win. Figuring it out seems like half the fun to them.
Therefore, I think if this was not a class project and we were interested in SL- spending months figuring out the ins and outs of the world would be fun and addicting. Since we all have real social lives, maybe we can't quite grasp the allure of Second Life.
It seems from your post, and others from the class, that Second Life is not the ideal way to meet people in real life. People go to the site to make avatars--that aren't that similar to the real life creator--in order to have their own fantasy world. I know this sounds strange, but I never played Sims, so all I could compare it to was playing with Barbies in the imaginary world I would create when I was growing up.
ReplyDeleteI would dress them up fancy, have them meet people, have kids, have boyfriends, go camping, etc. I feel like Second Life is like an adult accepted form of playing with dolls. That's fine, but it doesn't really encourage too much social interaction from what I've read in the blogs.
There was the grad student from Oregon State who wanted to share real info about himself, but there is no way to verify it and I'd have to agree with our classmate, in that sharing personal info online is not only a bad idea, but kind of scary.
Overall, I think Second Life works as a computer game that will entertain people and engage them online, just as Sims or playing with dolls can be entertaining, but as far as social networking goes---I don't think it functions very well. It's a place of make believe that encourages fake personas. I don't think that many real life connections come out of the game.