Getting Into Second Life
The Second Life tutorials are done, so what next? I started by sending my avatar, Asa Mornington, out to explore rather aimlessly. I don’t recommend this; it got boring quickly. I found a lot of islands (Second Life is made of a bunch of little islands) that are still, I presume, under construction, because they don’t look all that complete. What I didn’t find while wandering aimlessly was a lot of people or
anything to do.
The people at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, anticipated that people might need help finding things to do and added a powerful search feature to the Second Life client software. Users can search by different parameters, very much like the Search feature on Ask Olli, making it easy to narrow your search. The Search window has Classifieds, Events, Popular Places, Land Sales, Places, People, and Group tabs. You can search for the items listed in each of these tabs further subdivided by categories like Discussions, Sports, Live Music, Commercial, Nightlife/Entertainment, Games/Contests, Pageants, Education, Arts and Culture, and Charities/Support Groups.
So, I decided to look for some Events. I selected the “Events” tab and had a look at the different categories. The Live Music category caught my eye as being the most interesting.
I quickly found at least a dozen concerts with guitar and vocals one-person shows and DJ’s being most represented. I checked out several artists, including Phoenix Fisseux and Blue Maverick, among others. The concerts were reasonably well attended with about two-dozen avatars at each concert. The performers clearly knew most of the avatars in attendance and put on a good show.
I was surprised at how many avatars were dancing at the concerts. The music wasn’t exactly dance-friendly either. Ironically, one of the video tutorials that I tried and gave up on before actually signing up for Second Life was about dancing. Dancing is basically done by programming a series of moves before-hand and then stringing your programmed moves together or setting them on repeat. While it looks pretty cool at first, the effect gets lost when you realise that the dancers aren’t synchronised to the music (technically very difficult) and that the dancers keep dancing while the singer is talking between songs. I quickly tired of the visual aspects of the performances and often, as is the case now, left the music in the background while doing other things on the computer.
I enjoyed the musical performances but, since I tired of the visual aspects at the performance, they became little more than glorified internet radio. The social aspect is, no doubt, very important and, being the stranger in the room, not something that I can fairly say I experienced. I am a live music nut and there’s a social aspect to live music that I enjoy. Second Life is convenient because you don’t have to leave your house. It also lets you hear musicians from all over the world, but in, Vancouver, where I live, there are plenty of great musicians covering virtually every style, so this isn’t so important to me.
I look at the other categories and can’t really see myself getting in to them anymore than music. I don’t see myself becoming a Second Life regular, but I gave it a try. What remains to be done is the big job: finding out about the different places in Second Life where you can learn languages, seeing how they are taught, and discovering the advantages of learning in Second Life.