A Second Life, More Polygonal Then the First

You begin your second life on Prelude Island as an avatar complete with facial expressions, body movements that react to your input, and a head that follows wherever you’re pointing the mouse. Your avatar also has the customizability of a piece of clay. After about fifteen minutes of walking from instruction point to instruction point to pick up clothing, modify your appearance, drive cars, and fly like a bird, you’re off to see everything that Second Life has to offer. Navigation is based on the arrows on your keyboard, and interaction works by using context menus which appear upon right-clicking a person or item; and the heads up display can show a mini map; your inventory, where you keep clothes, money, and other body parts (for replacing your own. And no, you don’t take them from other people); a chat interface; tutorial information; and it also includes buttons for basic actions and indicators for things like location and amount of money. The program can also display videos using Quicktime, and can be made to download other programs to your computer which run within Second Life. From a gaming perspective, it’s not an intuitive control scheme for a world based on navigation, but like any game, you get used to it. Additionally, this world is about human interaction, not the controls.

The number of people and businesses that own land in Second Life is astonishing. Zooming out to the maximum level on the map yields tens of thousands of locations, all representing stores and clubs on property owned by individuals. Traveling can be a pain with so many locations, and while it is a cool experience to fly around in a virtual environment, walking, driving, and flying are all just visual attractions, since you can teleport anywhere by clicking a location on the map.

Second Life offers some variation from your typical MySpace or Facebook. Anyone who has an interest in anything has a good chance of finding a group, website, or forum just for them somewhere online. The odds of finding comradery in Second Life are just as high, but instead of the many drawbacks of websites and forums, like impractical navigation and lazy webmasters, you fly to your destination, and “see” the webmaster.  In this way, you have personal interaction with a more human feel: you get to see “where” the organization is, and you get to address a room full of people, making you feel more involved, You’re able to quantify and conceptualize your relationship with the virtual world and it’s inhabitants. Simply put, you’re able to “browse” the web in a more fun way. It seems someone who wants their own website now has the option of paying Linden Lab, the program’s creator, for some Linden Dollars (L$), and “building” their website in this new virtual world, instead of paying for a domain and writing code the old fashion way.

One can even use second life to become a virtual movie producer, though I haven’t quite figured out how. Users can create movies with theirs and other people’s avatars, using any and all objects in the world; and the diversity of movie genres is complete. Users have made action, drama, horror, sci-fi, comedy, every other genre, and some that defy classification. Second Life’s movies are definitely one of its most expressive elements, second only to the buildings, and its most expansive feature is the building tool.

The building tool is easy to learn, familiar to anyone who’s used a graphic design or CAD program, and can be used to build anything. Users can design their favorite car or motorcycle, history buffs can recreate battles and make replicas of just about anything they want, while architects and other designers can construct models of buildings or entire complexes for viewing by clients. The clients, however, view the building by walking in the front door and looking around. Every part of the building can be functional: elevators and lifts, access panels (keycards can even be distributed to other users for entry), and most importantly, computers and other electronics within. For this reason, companies can and commonly do use it to recreate call and training centers, so that they can train their employees without having to build structures for the sole purpose of training, conserving supplies in the real world. Users have even gone so far as to construct the Sistine Chapel, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous monuments and buildings.

From a technical viewpoint, Second Life is a slow-paced, jumpy, hard to control game-world, with relatively low texture detail and a very basic graphics engine. However, the amount of data and new code that go into to it, and the number of users connected simultaneously creates huge obstacles for its programmers, so they get a star in my book. Also, designing a graphical interface that will run on platforms and machines of every type, while also allowing those machines to network with each other through the same server, is an incredible feat.

The downside of Second Life and similar programs is, of course, that it takes a lot longer to fly to your e-mail box at the end of your driveway than it does to click on a link and acquire whatever information you seek instantly. You have the option of teleportation, but teleporting from one area to another is still much slower than the world wide web. It is definitely not a program for those who want their internet experience to be a short one, and it is not for those gamers who expect exhilaration around every corner coupled with graphics to die for. For typical internet use, including social networking, Second Life is probably the least efficient way to go; but for those of us who have grown tired of the typical internet experience and want something a little more tangible, and a little more personal, Second Life is the life to have. It’s a life where going to an online store means flying there instead; where playing internet poker involves sitting down at a poker table; where finding pictures of a monument calls for going there and taking them yourself; and where you can meet people online, about 100,000 at a time, by walking up to them and saying “Hi.” It’s as real of an internet experience as there could be.

 By Tim Wilson