Second Life’s strange second life | The Verge
The people of The Verge revisited the world/program/simulation Second Life. Even though you barely hear about it in the news compared to seven years ago, the world is still alive and kicking.
When mainstream media outlets touched down in Second Life seven years ago they tended to focus on the strangeness of it all. People were having sex through a game and dressing up as foxes and kittens. The reality, says Tom Boellstorff, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is more prosaic: “Humans already live many different kinds of life: online is just one more of those kinds of lives.”
“You can do anything in Second Life,” Boellstorff continues, his voice rising in a lilt. “You can do crazy stuff. You can be a ball of light or you can be 500 feet tall, or you can be a child, or a dog, or whatever.”
You can do all that. But most people?
“There’s huge areas of Second Life that just look like suburbia and people will build a house and put a TV in it,” he says. “They’ll watch TV with their friends online.” An entire world of opportunities out there and people choose to be couch potatoes. It is, eerily, just like real life.
A real ironic story. Because as a former user I can say that I’d would take more effort to watch TV in this world than offline. All these simple things required more effort because the world wasn’t like your average game. Entering the world was like stepping back into the game scene 5 years ago. With a lot of crappy animations and worlds.
And people just looked like people. And some did not take kindly to people looking differently, stating that it ruined their immersiveness.
“Reportedly Adidas spent a million dollars on their sim in Second Life,” Berry says with a laugh. What it got them was a single store selling sneakers. Problem was, the sneakers slowed down the universe: “Anybody running an event would say if you’ve got Adidas trainers on, take them off because they were lagging the sim so bad!”
One of the interesting notes about the above comment is that Adidas did not take technical restraints of SL into calculation while designing something. Every 3D designer has to do this. Sadly, SL does not really lend itself real good into offline testing of propducts. All their sims, at the time, where closed down products. This was more an example of both world showing their shortcomings.