After my rather bitter experience with the Second Life sign up procedure, I was ready to jump in and start doing things in Second Life. I launched the Second Life client software for the first time and… got a message that there is a new version of the Second Life client software. It seems that they don’t give you the newest version of their software when you register your account. No big deal, 15 minutes later on my wireless connection and I was ready to go.

I signed in and was taken straight away to Orientation Island. The people at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, were very thoughtful to create an island with tutorials, in English, Japanese, and Korean, for new visitors. There are four areas on Orientation island devoted to learning how to do different things in Second Life: communicate, search, move, and editing your appearance. The grammarian in me wants to see consistent titles (communicate, search, move and, edit your appearance or communicating, searching, moving, and editing your appearance), but the tutorials do a good job of helping learn the basics of Second Life.

I was greeted on my first visit by a naked avatar who ran around Orientation Island saying hello to all the newbies like myself. I don’t know what this person was trying to prove; it wasn’t particularly funny, clever, or shocking. The avatar just moved around Orientation Island, walking up to other avatars trying to get through the tutorials, and said hello, naked.

Aside from the juvenile distraction, the tutorials were mostly pretty straightforward. They stuck to the basics and made Second Life seem simple and manageable, unlike the online tutorials that I tried first. I think this is quite a feat considering how much you can do on Second Life. I would have liked to learn more about Inventory. In particular, I would have liked to have learned more about the difference between My Inventory and the Library because they seem to do much of the same things. Still, considering how easy it would be to overwhelm beginners, Linden Lab did an excellent job of communicating the basics.

There are still a lot of things that I could learn, but I feel confident enough to start exploring Second Life.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.