Second Life
Well, in wandering the net in search of something to do today, I noticed that the system Second Life allows for free basic subscriptions. The only restriction is that people on “Basic” subscription can’t own land. I’ve heard alot about Second Life over the last few years, especially in regards to their innovative grasp of intellectual property issues online.
So, I quickly made an account and downloaded the client (only 21Meg, kinda surprised me). Of course, the first thing you do is go through a small tutorial on how to get around. I also spent some time designing my avatar. I tried my best to get an avatar that looks like me, but after seeing some other users I think I need to do some more work. After figuring out how to walk, interact, and fly (yes, fly) I took off for the mainland.
After spending an hour or so in Second Life, I can understand all the parallels between it and the Metaverse (from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash ) . The “game” (I kinda hate to call it that) is really a “Life Simulator”. If you want to make money, which you’ll use to buy land and other things, you have to earn it. You don’t earn it by rescuing damsels or crushing orcs, but rather through making things & selling them to other players. Making things is a difficult art not for the faint of heart, and there are hundreds of in-game tutorials and classes to help you learn. They have a nice extensive in-game modeling system for objects, and an incredibly robust scripting language for making them interactive. But until you get the hang of it all, you can just convert US Dollars to “Lindens” from the various in-game ATM’s or the website (The exchange rate seems to vary, but right now it’s $L100 for $0.67US, or 67cents). The free basic account starts you off with L$250 (L$ is the currency symbol for Lindens), and you get a L$50 a week stipend. All of that in itself is pretty impressive for an online environment, but it doesn’t stop there.
They also allow for streaming video & audio to be piped into the gameworld, along with any other images or sounds that you want (for a meager L$10 each). It’s not unusual to walk into someone’s house and suddenly have a loud advertisement blasting into your ears about all the houses or avatars they have for sale. And these aren’t rinky-dink operations, some of these things are real companies that make several thousand dollars a month just selling these things in-game (For example, Tringo ). In fact, I even found a large video-rental store in-game where for about $L500 ( ~$2.50US) you could rent a movie for 24 hours that you could watch in your Second-Life home, all done via the ingame video streaming options. I also saw the streaming audio in use at a player-event where they had real-time a Streaming Radio station announcing an in-game Slingo tournament.
Given that I’ve already pre-ordered DDO and plan to start on that later this week, I’m not gonna put down any cash on Second Life right now. I do plan to investigate it a bit further, within the constraints of my free basic membership. If the news reports are to be believed, it may be on the cusp of a real digital revolution. I wish I had known about the free membership earlier as Larry Lessig gave a nice presentation on Copyright law in-game just last month. [tag:Second-life] [tag:Game] [tag:PC]
