Seventh group assignment

Second Life as an online community

What is Second Life?

I tried Second Life for the first time earlier today. Honestly, it was horrible. A terrible experience that I wouldn't want to experience again. First of all I logged in, did the tutorial island, which didn't even teach me a single thing. Next, I was put into some weird Lighthouse island, where people were afking (away from keyboard). I figured out that there were destinations that you could teleport to. Okay, this still makes sense to me. Then happened the thing why I will never ever play that game again. I went to London something, a new user place. There I was instantly "attacked" by a guy who looked like your regular emo-type person. Sexual harassment on the first hour? Well, that's new, and yeah, never again.

What kind of place is Second Life?

An online community, pretty much what it is named after, a second life. I am not entirely sure, what kind of a place it is, but to me, it seems like it is a home for some people. People can become what they want, and they can do what they want there. Just like the name implies.

Inhabitants of Second Life

All the characters in the game are people in real life. Everyone can make their own avatar which means the character they will play. Apparently, you can be pretty much anything you want to be. You want to be a tree? Yeah, go for it. You want to be a hybrid between an animal and a human? Why not.

I personally do not understand the "hype" of Second Life. I only logged in for a moment, but it didn't really hit me as anything special, but like I earlier mentioned, it definitely is a home to some people. I used to think that WoW was my "second" home back in the golden days of WoW. I spent hours and hours of every day there. Maybe it is a little bit like that? I guess the freedom part is what interests people the most, you can be whatever you want, and you can also do whatever you want.

Second Life as a community?

From what I have seen, it seems that there are lots of smaller groups, and I can only assume that people tend to look for groups that interest them. This of course lets the community grow. Considering Second Life has its own economy system as well. Even bigger companies have their own islands in the game. An island is a private place for their company, or whatever they are using the place for. Here is a destinations guide for Second Life. You could pretty much turn these into all sorts of categories for people to check out. http://secondlife.com/destinations?lang=en-US

I am not sure if you can really be a vampire in the game, but I found this ad from Google image search. This just shows that there are so many different kinds of groups and what not in the game. Be what you want, and get friends doing that, I guess? It is a good question what kind of community it is. To me it seems to be very fluid and capable of change. I guess it is dependent on what is hot right now and what is going to be hot in the future. Back in 2014, it already had 1 million regular users. So it is quite a big community, for an online one.



Anton Pajakko