Second Life - Nothing Like the First
If I was really sick of my live-in programmer, what I'd
do is give him a subscription to Second Life for his birthday.
I'd never have to speak to him again, or do much except
dust him and occasionally refill his Coke.
 Second
Life is wish fulfilment for geeks. No, not like the Sims:
WISH fulfilment. We're not talking 'always wanted to have
two kids and goldfish'. We're talking, 'always wanted to
live in a gothic castle with three vampire chicks', or 'fill
a Mini full of tribbles and then make it explode'. You can
build anything, absolutely anything, in SL.
Basically, it goes like this. You throw them ten bucks
(after your free trial expires of course), you get into
the game forever. You want to rent land to build on, that'll
cost you more. Character creation is unbounded. There are
130 different sliders to adjust appearance, or you could
just upload your own shirt fabric. It's the same when you
build: you can design your own textures in-game, upload
them from other programs, buy them from other users, or
use the free ones the game provides. If all that sounds
a bit daunting, the community is really supportive, there's
a tutorial, and residents run classes to help newbies learn
the ropes. Basically, you can run the whole gamut of technical
skills here, live in a CAD program, or you can make do pretty
happily with the ready-to-use stuff.
 And
if you're done with building, you can go play in stuff other
people have built. Whatever takes your fancy. Basically,
whatever weird-ass communities you've run across (and away
from, at speed) on the Internet, they're here in Second
Life. You want Furries, you've got Furries. You want to
avoid the Furries at all costs, you can do that too. It's
a big world. Stick with the vampire chicks and the BDSM
nightclubs.
And if that freaked the heck out of you and you just said,
'goodness gracious, I don't know about that', you can filter
your results with a PG rating, play carebears and kittens
and never see a PVC g-string. There are also designated
combat areas for people who want to exercise their democratic
right to play with their flamethrowers.
The game has even started developing its own urban myths.
It's so big you never know what might exist somewhere if
you could just find it. It's big enough to have other games
inside it - a recent addition is Chinatown, which features
what's basically Unreal Tournament, and its own skate park.
There's a real sense of achievement when users band together
and create something huge. And... you know, just maybe,
there used to be this guy flying round in a UFO 'abducting'
people...
 You
can make money building and selling, but you can also sit
down for an afternoon to play bingo to keep yourself financial
- soothing on a Sunday after a hard night at the BDSM nightclub.
People paying the extra ten bucks a month get a bigger stipend,
too, so they can do more in the game.
Obviously, new content is constantly pouring into Second
Life, and being streamed to its users. What this means is
some lag, and no chance at all of playing over a dial-up
connection. In fact, Second Life also won't run on Win 98
or ME, only Win 2K/XP, or Mac OS 10.3 and up. It's pretty
demanding, and there will still be times you'll have to
wait for screens to load up when you're flying or teleporting
around. On the other hand, you're flying or teleporting
around, and that's just cool.
In essence, yeah, Second Life is really just a big sandbox.
But it just has to be the most inherently cool sandbox out
there.
Overall Rating: 8.3/10
Screenshots from http://www.wickedtoast.com/article.php?id=108
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