Been working in Second Life
Wow. Been working in Second Life a lot for the past couple of weeks. It's really strange, because everything happens in world. What's stranger is that you get used to it quite quickly!
When I first started to use it, i thought it was too strange, cumbersome and unfriendly to really be useful, but once you start to create in there, it all changes.. It's odd because when we go in there, most of its users are asleep in real life, so it's like wandering around Westworld when the park is shut - lots of empty buildings and vehicles left around. There are vast empty malls with nothing and no-one in - it's like Day of the Dead. The only places where people seem to be are strip bars and casinos. - When i first got shown second life, i though it was rubbish - a strange lonely place with nothing to do, no real objective, seemingly populated by man-geeks dressed as virtual women. - And you know, to a large extent it is rubbish, but the real life version would be too - imagine if you got a load of people, put them on an island and said, there you are, do what you like, chances are not a lot would happen, but it would be only a short matter of time before the stripping and the bingo started!
That's the 'first life good, second life bad' bit over, here's what's converting me;
I've started making costumes for characters (see yesterday's pics). I didn't find it easy at first, modelling in world is a funny old thing - you can only use a few shapes (prims, thsy're called) and it seemed stupidly restrictive to me, i thought it's be easier to make them in MAYA or something then upload them. There's 2 main reasons for this, one is the complexity of shapes - over worked models would be way too slow on the server, and secondly, there's a strong argument that SL (ooh, get me, talking in geek-speak!) should be easy for all users and not a showcase for show-offs - you can't really disagree with that - SL is potentially a democratising of game design and development. Once i got my head around the modelling space, it became easy to translate my character design.
Once you get over the weirdness of the world, it becomes quite a nice place to be. Instead of downloading a PDF manual of how to model prims, you actually travel, as an avatar, to a place called 'Ivory Tower Library of Primitives', a big building where you learn in world how to model. I thought it was really clunky at first, but i got into it.
But the really good thing about second life is the community. Over the past two weeks, we have been having in world meetings with some people from a company called electricsheepcompany.com - it's so odd, we actually meet in the world, as avatars, and chat.
Chat is generally stupid - just loads of creepy predators asking 'How old RU?' and talking nonsense, or jumbled conversations as everyone tries to talk at once. Second Life has a funny trick though, when someone speaks, you can see their avatar 'type' in game - it sort of looks like they're doing Reiki, so you know to wait. What also helps is that we have work to do, so we're not just goofing off, and it really begins to make sense. I'm getting lots of ideas about secondlife as an art space and film set, but more of that as it happens.
I've started to see the creative potential for Second Life, and i think that's the key - if you've nothing to do, you'll just start chucking away your linden dollars (fake in world money) on bingo and swords, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
Wow, that was a long post; does that make me a blogger now?
