When I entered the world of Second Life, I really did not know what to expect as this was my first experience dealing with virtual worlds. I found it easy, however, to move around, navigate camera angles, and alter my avatar’s appearance and gestures. In the first land, where we are required to go through the four tutorials, I was making use of the “fly” ability as I noticed it took too long walking around by foot. I was also extremely entertained by the fact that you can operate vehicles and other pedestrian devices in Second Life. As I wanted to test out the boundaries in this world, I tried to run over other people with a car, and although I learned that this was not possible I was laughing at how I was pushing people around and at the mere idea of someone trying to run me over with a car in the game. Soon after doing this, however, I walked up to the people I had been trying to crash into earlier and apologized for my behavior as I said I was new to Second Life and I was just having some fun.

I also visited a location somewhere near, or possibly within, Korea where there were just a few buildings, a small grotto, and a bridge overpass which lead into the mountains and then, to my disappointment, suddenly ended. When I flew back to the grotto I walked up to a group of people who were standing around having a conversation. I could not understand what they were talking about and assumed that they were using some sort of Second Life/online lingo that I was not familiar with. As I was put off by this, I decided to look up another location and decided to teleport to a place called Pleasure Island.

Pleasure Island, having such an intriguing name, actually turned out to be a privately owned land which advertised the owner’s personal artwork and featured her domestic creations. I was very impressed by the architecture of her four level Japanese-style home which included an outdoor sauna, was surrounded by a rock garden with a waterfall, and a backyard beach with a bonfire and hammock. While I was busy exploring the rest of this world I received several notifications that I was in a private location and that I would be logged off in a certain amount of seconds. I was never kicked out, like I was expecting I would be, but I decided to leave as I did not want to upset any other users or the Second Life administrators.

I was very pleased with my first experience with this virtual world and I can see how people can become immersed in Second Life as there are dozens of places you can visit and people from all over the world you can converse with. Not to mention tons of clothes and appearances to play around with.