Brian's World

First Life

Yesterday I was bored and hanging out thinking of things to do. Out of the blue, Second Life popped into my head. I had looked into Second Life last year, maybe around this time… and didn’t really get it. It provides a free alternative to WoW, kind of like the MMORPG setting, minus the quests and stuff like that. I struggled to find 3 machines that could play second life without crashing, it seems Second Life, or SL, has higher system requirements than WoW. Unfortunately none of my machines have awesome video cards, and my primary desktop just has the cheap onboard one. Even my T60 performed terrible running the game. Luckily my brothers beastly dual core athlon 64 laptop handled the game like a charm, as well as the new Vostro we bought to replace the old family PC.

I played around with the game, strugging with a terrible UI (at least in comparison to WoW) and poor physics. I guess SL doesn’t care too much about that, focusing much more on the social interactions. And are there plenty of social interactions in the game. While I won’t go as far as saying SL is for Sexual Predators and Deviants, it certainly has facilitated lots of interactions along those lines. I guess it kind of makes sense, the internet has a very strong red light district.. but through google and some common sense helps to steer us away from that. On Second Life they don’t have Google’s searching skill, and I lack the common sense to stay away. I’ve found just about every area I enter to be rated “Mature” and its difficult to rotate 360 degrees (graphics cards issues aside) without seeing something potentially explicit.

This is coming from the user who commonly feels MTV is a little to riskque for his own taste. I don’t have a problem with sexual images and associations (I was born once), but I strive to minimize my interactions with them. In Second Life, its difficult.. at least for me as a n00b, to do so. I search for popular areas and 90% of them have something explicit in the title.. I disable Mature listings… and now 80% have something explicit in the title.. and an additional 10% have clear implications to something I find inappropriate.

I shouldn’t be raising my gripes with Second Life itself, at least I think I shouldn’t be. I see SL as a platform; a platform a game like WoW or any multitude of MMO-immersive worlds could be built. Maybe one of them is the Red Light district, but I would also like to see some forests to explore or something cool like that. Who knows. If I had the time and energy I would look into building a forest or something neat… but there are like 80 things I need to do first. Everyone has been talking about SL as being one of the next big things in technology, and idk. Right now it seems to me SL has a very strong focus on an mature audience, something that people usually don’t wander into as they first enter the internet. I would be interested in seeing that condensed… not removed.. and other content areas expanded so people actually want to be there. For example tonight while playing I attempted to ride a see-saw. Of course I was the only person in the park so that didn’t work well. There are people playing the game, and lots of them. Tons of people are exchanging Linden money on a daily basis.

But idk, this blog is half finished.. just like everything I’ve got going on right now. You all should add my facebook application, which does a decent job of expanding your Quotes offerings. Its technical name is “QuotesForAll“, but I call it “Quotes“. You can join the other 14 users, very few of whom have actually added a quote to their wall. Alas, it seems I am terrible at coming up with good ideas. I spent several months (since Octoberish) working on it and learning FBML and the Facebook API and everything, but my implementation was probably poor and overly optimistic.

Good night moon.

Its snowing hard out there.