SecondLife

When I first heard about Second Life I was very dismissive of it, but then I read several articles in New Scientist, and I finally created an "avatar" a few months ago at an IBM Conference, which helped give it an additional air of legitimacy. Since then I have been alternately enthralled and repelled: It seems to be a powerful platform for education and simulation, but it also seems infested with advertising, gambling and pornography.

Upon reflection, I realize that my feelings are roughly similar to my feelings about the Internet when the first hints of commercialization were appearing. I think this means that the whole "virtual world" thing is at a place where the Internet was circa 1992. I remember when WWW, Gopher, WAIS and other embryonic efforts were being launched. As we all know, WWW left all the others in the dust. So, the question I am pondering is: are "virtual worlds" the next big thing? I suspect that they (or something like they) are.

Starting Out

I was very disoriented the first time I logged in. Beyond the basic orientation, you are given very little guidance as to how to proceed. There are actually many classes and resources for newbies, if you know where to look. I figured it out the hard way. Here's some information I wish I had when I started:

Free stuff is available at a variety of places including:

• Yadni's Junkyard
• Vienna Freebies
• Free Bird (high quality stuff)
• GNUbie Union
• The Bazzar at Stillman
• Many merchants will offer an item or two for free, sometimes very nice items.

Beware that there are many unscrupulous merchants who take the free, full permissions, goods and set up shops selling them for low prices, sometimes as little as L$1. My advice is to accumulate all the free stuff you can before buying anything. Then go find a camping chair and try things on and organize your inventory (an activity that will occupy much of your time from now on).

http://www.vtoreality.com/2007/sl-freeloaders-paradise/1384/

Many organizations offer classes in numerous topics, from newbie topics to advanced scripting/building. Hit the search button, the "events" tab, select "education" and hit "search".

Scripting

Here's a great intro: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/r-dw-r-radsl.html

http://dev.aol.com/article/2007/04/second-life

Second Thoughts

Shortly before the birth of my daughter, I sold my land and ditched my premium membership. I found Second Life to be an extraordinarily lonely place. My friend list was nearly empty, and I had found no place to meet like minded people. Having a virtual persona does not suddenly erase one's lifelong shyness, in fact I found it worse, as most normal social cues are missing (e.g. is that person afk, or just ignoring me?) In the few events I was able to attend, I was almost always ignored (except for the Quakers).

Unlike most other forms of social networking, it requires people to be online at exactly the same time. That sort of spare time was not forthcoming before my daughter arrived, now? Forget it.

Now the programming and building was quite fun, though time consuming. The programing language and tools are extremely primitive, it felt like I was transported back a decade: a primitive editor, a programming language lacking modern features, no version control and no debugger. Building was kind of fun, but the prim limits made things quite difficult, the only way around these limits were to buy more land or get very good at external graphics tools to do advanced texturing and 3d modeling to make sculpties.

Whatever. I will still log in as time permits, drop by and ignore me :)