My Second Life

So you know about “Second Life,” right? It’s a role-playing game that is played online and there are literally 10,000,000 players worldwide who play.

Last year Ace had me sign up for an account. I did, but then found our computer video card was not compatible with the game. Ace quickly became addicted to the game and would email me some mornings claiming he had been up until 3 or 4 a.m. the night before.

This past weekend he had me log into my account (I hadn’t used it so it took a while for me to find the emails in my email account that had my name and password). Since he has been on for a while he knows a lot of people and it took a while for my head to wrap around the concept of people being so into this game.

Ace had one of his SL friends send me free stuff for my avatar (I wanted a cute Audrey Hepburn type avatar). And by “free,” I should explain that SL allows you to earn fake dollars with which you can buy stuff like clothes, hair, jewelry, etc. Ace “loaned” me $1,000 but then also had his friend give me free stuff.

I had been working on a cute pixieish avatar, but then Ace had his friend send me a complete avatar that I could personalize. When I activated it, this was what I came to realize: 99.9% of all female avatars on SL look like hookers. No joke. My new avatar couldn’t have been more slutty if she tried. I immediately went into the appearance editor and made the avatar a bit more realistic but even after changing a few things she still looked mildly…loose.

Then Ace had me go to some nightclub that he “owns” in SL. He had headphones and a microphone and apparently he’ll sit there and talk with these people while watching the avatars dance (since the program limits your dance moves it looks like one big line dance after a while). After about an hour of this, I went back to editing the avatar, which was way more fun than sitting around watching whore-y avatars do the electric slide.

I’m so NOT into Second Life – at all. The ONLY reason I would sign on again in the future is to mess around with avatar appearances and try to create an avatar that truly reflected what *I* want it to look like (picture non-ogre Princess Fiona in “Shrek” but not as skinny and with super short hair).

But the rest of it? Pretty stupid.