Learning the Facts of Second Life

Part I: Broke as a Joke
As a lifelong video gamer I’m accustomed to two things (well, far more than that, but for the sake of brevity): 1) Paying for my game; and 2) Not paying a dime after accomplishing #1. So I went into this “free” game called Second Life prepared to pay something, at some point.  But the virtual “Man” held out his virtual hand far earlier than I imagined.  I was prompted to enter a credit card number and receive, in exchange, my “ Linden” dollars, practically the minute I pressed the orange “Join Now” button on the homepage.  I opted not to pay, and thus entered the game naked and without a dime.

Being broke in Second Life is like being broke in First Life, so an A+ goes to Linden Lab for getting that one right.  My justification for not purchasing any Linden dollars was that, well, I can’t use those bloody things at Heirloom’s for coffee, and I can’t use them to pay for a First Life shirt (which I actually need), so why would I stock up on Linden dollars?  I’m not used to playing Monopoly with actual greenbacks, know what I mean?  I’m not buying a 2-inch x 4-inch rectangle called “

Park Place

” for $1,000 real dollars because, well, we all understand that we’re not buying anything at all.  That’s the fun of Monopoly.  There’s nothing really at stake.  Some people would say the reality of the Linden dollars is exactly what makes the whole thing tick, but I don’t know.  The idea of buying “virtual stuff” didn’t make enough sense to me.  And selling virtual stuff feels even more suspect.

Expensive (virtual) real estate in Second Life

I came to realize fairly quickly that the primary purpose of Second Life is to buy and sell things.  Sure, there’s other stuff going on, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but the plain truth is that the boys at Linden Lab aren’t doing charity work.  It’s a business, and a business only works when money exchanges hands.  There’s ample opportunity to buy various things like clothes, samurai swords, couches, land, helicopters (you know, the normal stuff), but once again, even after finding many of these virtual items, I couldn’t justify paying good scratch to get something I can’t sit on, wear, drive, or fly in First Life, so what’s the point?

Anyway…the point is that I got bored pretty quickly, because, like I said, the objective of Second Life is to buy and sell things.

There it is.  Buy stuff, sell stuff, or be bored.

Well…actually…that’s not entirely true…

Part II: Where the popular kids hang out
When I first signed on there were, according to a list on the screen, 1.2 million people registered on Second Life, and at that particular moment, about 10,000 were online.  But within my first half hour, I only saw two people.  Needless to say it got pretty boring.  So I hit the search button and clicked on “Popular Places,” figuring I would definitely find the other 9,997 people that were supposedly logged on to Second Life.  Here’s the list they showed me:

Top 5 Popular Places:

1. Club Arsheba: Hot Sexy Girls
2. ELEMENTS at Goddess of Love 2
3. IceDragon’s Playpen Island
4. Odds & Ends/Club/Casino/FreebieSto…
5. Bad Girls Dance & Fetish Club

The rest of the list – about 15 more titles – was a mix of more casinos and more sex clubs, so once again, Second Life got First Life right: if you want to find a lot of people, go to the sex clubs and casinos!

I chose Odds & Ends as a place to see what social life in Second Life was all about.

It’s overdue that I mention the feeling of joining Second Life.  I felt like Tom Cruise’s character in Vanilla Sky, or, I guess, like the way you might feel meeting Tom Cruise at a Scientology clinic.  Either way, there was something cultish about it.  I had an option to add music to my journey, and the chosen piece at the time was a jazz piano number that you’d expect to find at the spa in Mandalay Bay.  And speaking of Vegas, there’s something very similar about Second Life and that Town-of-Towns.  You feel like you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, which is exactly what you want to be doing, and I guess that explains why Club Arsheba: Hot Sexy Girls is the single most popular place in Second Life.

Anyhow…

At Odds & Ends Casino I noticed that I stuck out like a hobo at the Oscars.  I had elected in the beginning to not alter my appearance.  I went into the Second Life the way I came in, a white boy with a white t-shirt and jeans.  Everyone at Odds & Ends was avoiding me for that reason.  I was the guy at the Halloween party without a costume.  You look at those people for a second, trying to guess who they are, but they look back at you with an expression on their face saying, “I’m not dressed up, stop looking at me,” and you eventually realize that and feel sorry for them because the best part of Halloween is meeting complete strangers dressed as complete idiots, and so you walk away.  That’s the way it is in Second Life.

I had to do something fast, so I turned myself into a black man, gave myself cloud white hair and a white soul patch, put on a white tank top, took off my jeans and replaced them with tighty-whities, and rocked knee-high white socks with white fingerless gloves.  I looked like Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty, if they ever filmed a scene of him at bed time after a night at a drag club.  Suddenly, everyone wanted to chat.

“Nice tan!” someone said.

“Thanks!” I replied.  I then pressed and held the “Page Up” button and flew around the casino for a while.  That’s right, you can fly in Second Life.  In fact, that might be the catch phrase you’ll hear most often as Second Life grows.  “You can even…wait a minute…Are you listening?…Are you sitting down for this?…You can even fly.”  It didn’t take long to get bored with that too, because like I said, unless you’re buying something, you aren’t doing a thing.  And besides, is flying in a video game still a surprise?  You could fly in Super Mario Bros. II, which was released in 1988.

Part III: Slower than Sunday School
I’m demanding when it comes to the speed of digital media, and Second Life is very slow.  Painfully slow.  Alarmingly slow.  Slower than a Paul Simon concert.  Slower than Refrigerator Perry with a broken foot and a refrigerator on his back.

I’ve read glowing reviews about Second Life’s 3-D landscapes and architecture.  Well, put simply, that’s just not true, and if you play video games and have tried Second Life, you know exactly what I mean.  Sure, it’s fine, but it’s more standard than groundbreaking.  It isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done many times before (though the precedent that it’s setting for slowness reminds me of the color printer I had for my Apple computer when I was 7).

Enough said.  Second Life is slow.  There you have it.

Part IV: Did I mention that Second Life is slow?
Here’s something I came across on a Second Life blog:

Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Good morning everyone!

Our website is going to be slow. Yahoo put us on the front page at about 6:00 am PDT.And logins are going to be slow today with the influx. Thank you for your patience as we welcome our new residents!

The responses from Second Lifers were appropriate:

Robertt Bulan Says:
More than slow… I can’t even connect. How will Linden Lab handle it when the population really explodes?

Fair point.  Here’s another one:

Muerte Valencia Says:  
CONGRATS TO LL
BUT YOU KNOW SINCE MORE PEEPS ARE COMING SINCE YAHOO POSTED SL ON THEIR SITE GUESS WHAT OLD PEEPS … IT IS LAG TIME AND SLOW TIME IN SL. AND LETS NOT FORGET THERE WILL BE MORE PROBLEMS THAN WHAT WE HAD BEFORE.  OKAY NOW START WITH ALL THE MANY UPDATES EACH WEEK AND SEE AFTER, LETS SAY, 2 MONTHS TIME IF THE POPULATION IS STILL AT 1 MILLION…I FOR ONE DOUBT IT.

Also accurate.

Anyway…as I said:  Second Life is slower than a Ben Folds concert in Second Life (which actually happened).  Try wrapping your brain around that one!

Part V: Guess what?  Avatars aren’t the only ones selling things…
Guess what else is for sale?  Linden Lab!  This is according to Daniel Terdiman’s CNET blog anyway.

And why not?  Running Second Life appears to be a huge headache.  The technology doesn’t work very well, yet somehow new “residents” keep popping up.  Now the line at Linden Lab appears to be: “Let’s get out of here before the avatars leave Second Life and come find us in our First Life sleep!”

It seems Second Life wasn’t built for the long term.  How can you grow an economy that has so much trouble accommodating new citizens?  The idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t seem to be working right.  I’d rather drink a Tabasco milkshake through my nose than deal with Second Life’s troubles any more.

Here’s another thing: How are companies like American Apparel, Reuters, Sony, and everyone else who has dealt good cash to join Second Life going to continue justifying the investment in a place that works so poorly?  Not to mention, with so many people making friends at Archan Free Sex Community, and not a single person at the American Apparel store at the time I visited, what’s the purpose of running a legitimate business in Second Life?  Is it really that lucrative?

One day a company will figure all of this out, though, and the concept behind Second Life will be a relevant one.  For now, I’m going to kill off my avatar.

Scott Goldberg

Related Links:
Second Life Takes Off, Gains Interest of Older Generation
A Gallery of Marketing and PR in Second Life
"Second Life" Online World Creators Linden Lab Raise $11 Million
CNET: "Second Life" Members Engaging in Virtual Pedophilia Playacting
Linden Lab's "Second Life" Online Community Hits 100,000 Residents