Second Life

[deathboy]

"Played" Second Life a bit more last night at theinnocence's urging. Met a few nice people, enquired about land and suchlike.

I still think you'd have a more solid gaming experience if you replaced your PC with a Playstation 1 and a scratched copy of Tomb Raider, and ran IRC at the same time, but I'm beginning to see some of the draw. It certainly helps when you know a few people.

Highest on my list of weird things was to have been "shown the ropes". A friend asked me, given that I was a noob, if I knew about sex in Second Life. "Negatory", I replied... he then obligingly summoned another friend, who I believe cybers in SL for money to give me the lowdown.

This began with her giving me a range of penises. SL males have no external genitals by default, they're a wearable item. Though I later discovered that it is bad form to attach the penis to your eyeball in polite company and cry "Look! I am quite literally a dickhead!" Wasn't received well.

With my array of peni, I was first instructed on the more efficient ways of dressing / undressing, then how/where to attach my penis appropriately.

Next up, a quick tutorial on poseballs (which, contrary to expectations, were not a pair of particularly impressive testicles), objects which can control a user's animations, thus allowing two users to appear to be cuddling / rutting like wild monkeys, etc, and finally a bed object that had a wide array of fuck-specific animation control functions.

Surreal moment came half way through testing my new 3d penis when I realised I'd not friended the young lady assisting me. How rude of me. We'd not met five minutes and she'd given me a bag of cocks and proceeded to squat on one, yet we weren't even friends.

Thanked the young lady for her hints and tips, then popped over to join theinnocence, who was picking out bits and bobs for a room she'd just acquired.

It's a rather strange setup over there. It's definitely more fun if you have a few mates guide you round "the good bits" because lots of it is shit and most of the fun could be had on IRC, because most of the fun is other humans. Cynically, I'm now going to research into how (if at all) the band can exploit SL to release music / provide "gigs", etc. because while it's not going to be my new living space anytime soon, it does seem to be slowly building in popularity.

Weird shit.

Comments

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

I'm really suprised SL has so much exposure, they must have one hell of a pr department. Especially as they are a MMO with what looks like (from the analysis i've seen) a relatively small userbase (they claim over 1,000,000 population, but it's more likely well under 100,000 people actually playing regularly) And yet they get a write up every week on the BBC website and most major papers, it's the informationsuperhighweb bubble all over again :)

[sogoth.livejournal.com]

It seems to be getting lots of attention because it's so freeform, allowing people to write their own additions to it. Plus it's actually become it's own online economic empire as you can buy and sell the SL currency and items for real life money.

Lots and lots of cash seems to change hands as was shown by that guy buying the space station last year for millions (thousands?) of real dollars.

It certainly has potential.

[drcuriosity]

I think a lot of its popularity with the media is that - following the money.
Of course, a whole bag of flying dicks every now and then probably doesn't hurt matters as far as media sensationalism goes, either.

(Yes, that is a SL subdomain on Reuters.)