I heard a lot about Second Life before I actually experienced it, and now that I’ve gotten a little taste of it, I’m not sure what’s so great about it.

As other people said, choosing the avatar really does take up a whole chunk of time. I didn’t even really care how I looked, but somehow I found myself trying to tweak this or that to make my avatar slightly resemble me. There were so many options that I finally got tired of changing them – eye separation, inner eye shape, outer eye shape, ear shape, forehead shape…it’s too much! I kept thinking, “who cares, it’s only online,” but I suppose I have the wrong mentality, because some people really are attached to their avatars. My avatar still doesn’t look anything like me, but I got frustrated with the little sliding bars so I finally stopped. I was extremely amused, however, to see that I could choose how much “gravity” was being applied to my avatar’s breasts. Who thought of that, I wonder?

Honestly, I thought Second Life was a little boring. When I first arrived on Help Island, I somehow landed in between two naked people. I don’t think they were trying to do anything weird. I hope not, at least. I couldn’t get my figure (whose name is Eilonwy Trevellion, by the way) to move away. I suspected that my computer was being laggy and that their clothes were simply slow in loading, but it didn’t seem to be the case. I was stuck there (fully clothed) for quite a while, and the clothes of the two people never appeared. Go figure.

I finally teleported to the Louvre after 4 or 5 tries, and I had a lot of fun looking at the reproductions. It was a little scary to watch the buildings slowly appear, like I was stepping back in time to see some haunted castle slowly rise before me. It was completely empty, and that added to the creepiness. Everywhere I went, there was nobody around. I even searched for the most popular destinations, but at most there were two people at the same place as me, and they refused to talk, even after I said “hi” in my nicest tones. Someone also kicked me when I said “hi” to them, which I thought was pretty immature of them. I can imagine it would be pretty hard to coordinate a time to meet people. I went twice, once in the early afternoon and once in the evening, and both times Second Life was empty. Where does everyone go?!

My favorite place in Second Life is probably Amsterdam. I thought it was really beautifully done, and I can virtually walk on the roads I walked on last summer, which was really mind-boggling. It all looked really accurate to me, and I can’t begin to imagine how long it took to create. I also enjoyed a place called Fairytale Gardens of Sinano, which had really beautiful gardens and little cottages. I have to emphasize again, though, how odd it is to be in these places (real, established places like Amsterdam and Dublin, especially) in Second Life and to be completely alone. I really felt like I was in a sci-fi movie where I was the last survivor of some disaster and was roaming the perfectly clean and deserted streets of Amsterdam trying to find a sign of life.
Second Life is diverting, but I don’t think I would go there in my spare time. I spent a lot of time doing things I didn’t think I wanted to do, like fixing my hair, and I can see that learning all the tricks of Second Life would take quite some time. I flipped through the tutorial, but it looked too complicated, so I decided to wing it. If I could start over again, maybe investing a little more time into the tutorial would be a good thing to do. All in all, everything is a little less polished than I expected it would be, and the isolation really got to me after a while. I felt like I was playing a weird version of Myst, except there were no clues or anything to help me along. Perhaps if my friends decide to join Second Life, it would be more interesting. I was a little disappointed not to meet any foreign people, because I couldn’t try out my skills. Haha, just joking.