Misadventures in Second Life

Posted on February 12, 2014

This week’s assignment was to create a Second Life account and interact on the site. Prior to this assignment, I have never been on Second Life. Based on what I’ve heard in the lectures and read as part of this week’s readings, I had envisioned that Second Life would be more of a professional virtual reality space where meetings could be conducted and education seminars could be performed. The experience that I received from interacting with Second Life was anything but professional.

When creating my avatar, I chose to depict my immersed self and be seen as a vampire. Obviously, if I was creating the avatar for professional reasons, a vampire wouldn’t have been my first choice. Once my avatar was created, I chose to teleport to Duke’s Country Club. The area was Dukes of Hazard themed. Several avatars were dancing in front of the stage. I found out fairly quickly that dancing in Second Life wasn’t really my thing. Once I even figured out how to move, I was dancing like an awkward middle school boy. Yikes. This is where I had my first conversation with a Second Life native. The conversation was very generic, until he asked me to send him a picture of myself. I promptly left that conversation. Although I really enjoyed the country music, there were only a few people in there to chat with. I then decided to transport to a completely different destination, Ajax and Katie’s Romance Garden. Based on the pictures, it looked like a very pretty place to go. Well, wrong choice.

One of the first things that I noticed about this destination was the low quality graphics. Perhaps the graphics were poor because my computer is not well suited for graphics. I was able to walk into a bush and see the 3D plane (my avatar was being cut in half by the bush). Strange. In addition to the poor graphics was even poorer conversation. I was disturbed at the types of conversation that was occurring at this destination. There were virtually (pun intended) no restrictions or warnings that I was entering that type of chat room. What if I was a 13 year old girl and just happened to end up there on accident? It was very disturbing. In addition to the chat, avatars were groping each other everywhere I looked.  Instead of conversing with the perverted avatars in the Romance Garden, I decided to fly around and view the scenery.

I know that there are educational and business reasons to use Second Life. Perhaps because I was not there to enter a meeting or educational seminar, I missed out on those types of experiences. I might just have had a bad experience based on the destinations that I stumbled upon. Either way, I found it interesting that Second Life even has ads on their webpage talking about privacy and showing two avatars kissing. Would you really let your children on this website? I don’t have children, but if I did, this website would be blocked at my house.