Get a life…
Posted by bbc on 28 Apr 2007 | Tagged as: musings
OK, so I have SL but is the original one FL or RL? I’m voting for FL, because I can see there could be argument about calling it “real.”
A while back my friends were on me all the time about stopping the madness of working 75-80 hours a week and being on call 24/7 for an employer that was somewhere in the minus column on appreciation. They kept telling me not just to “get a life” but to take back the life I’d had before I segued off into obsessing about that project. Eventually, even I understood that it was a losing proposition and I started working on regaining both my health and my life – now known as my First Life.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you just haven’t (yet) run into anyone obsessed with Second Life (SL), the online experience that is variously called a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) or an alternate universe. I wouldn’t consider it a game simply because it doesn’t have points and scores or levels like most of the programs I think of as games. It’s a 3-D virtual world where people interact and do many things they’d do in our regular world, such as buy property and build or buy objects. It’s possible to have a free account and an avatar (your character) and spend a lot of time in SL without spending any US dollars (it has its own money system as well). The whole process is interesting to me because I’m interested in the use of social software systems and their effect on interaction in our real (first) lives.
But I can be interested in things and only read about them – I don’t always have to participate. So I wasn’t paying it a lot of attention until somebody mentioned to me that you can fly in SL. I’ve always wanted to fly – and tried it on a few occasions in my younger years (with predictably bad results). Jumping out of a high barn opening just isn’t recommended. It was my good fortune that I landed on grass instead of concrete. Anyway, flying is right up there on my list of plusses. Then I learned that the standard mode of transportation in SL is teleporting. Well, I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I saw an episode of Star Trek. So I signed up to be a resident of SL. I haven’t done a lot with it yet, but I can see how easy it will be to spend huge chunks of time in that world. In the first place, the avatars are customizable and you can spend endless amounts of time getting exactly the look and costumes that you want. I’m not too seriously into that as anyone who looks at my FL wardrobe can attest, but it’s interesting to have tattoos without going through all that stuff with needles. Lots easier to remove as well.
So you’d think my friends would be happy, wouldn’t you? Not only did I get my FL back, now I have a SL as well. And, as long as my graphics card isn’t quite up to the intensive demands of SL, I won’t be spending anything like the amount of time I used to donate to my old job.
And, just so you know, flying is wonderful.
My desk was behind this column.