Day 2

What I clarified for myself after Orientation Island is that everything I need for the first time is the “search” button. SL client has an in-built search engine allow-ing residents to find nearly everything they need. It is a kind of Google within Second Life. So, I searched for educational events for beginners because I was still not sure what SL was all about and what I supposed to do next. The list of upcoming lectures for the following day included around 30-40 events each of them had a description and a time schedule. There were several building and scripting tutorials, a couple of language classes, and a dozen of other kinds of events. I was lucky enough to find a meeting that was entitled “New resident question and answer”. It was free for everyone and it was going to start in a couple of minutes at a place called Slate Docks.

I had no idea where Slate Docks were located but there was a teleportation but-ton right on the search panel. So, in a few seconds my avatar was transported to the destination point.

That was where I met Bob Bunderfeld for the first time and started to realize that SL should be taken much more seriously than I thought. Besides me, there were a couple more people who came to that lecture and all of them were newbies too. Bob started with asking us to enable voice chat and I suddenly understood that in SL everybody can easily talk with each other using microphone and headphones. It was much more convenient to listen to the Bob’s speech rather than to read help notes. Moreover, everything appeared to be like a proper real life master-class where Bob answered our endless questions and taught us different tips and tricks. The only significant difference from the conventional lecture was that our tutor looked like a dragon at first and then transformed into a rhino trying to show us that there is just no limits in expressing yourself in an avatar. Consequently, in spite of visual contact with a person (or his avatar) the conversation is still much more like a Skype chat than the real one. But what I really liked in SL is that instead of traditional “smilies” for representing emotions you can use animated gestures that definitely vivify the conversation.


I asked Bob about what people usually do in Second life and as expected it turned out that people pursue quite different goals there. Some of them search just for communication and new friends, others use it as tool for their creative work, and lots of people make real business in Second Life. It was also very surprisingly to know that in this virtual world being considered by me as a computer game, nearly all famous brands were represented in some way. Large and well-respected companies as well as ordinary people take this virtual world seriously enough to spent time and money on its development. Moreover, statistically the most part of active users are aged 25-34 (35%) and the second highest age bucket is 35-44 (24%). (http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php)


Meanwhile I started to realize that Second Life is a very efficient system in terms of education and sharing experience. It is a sort of self-sufficient organism which is being developed by its own community. Though SL has its own Wikipedia, the ability to get information personally from the members of community seems to be a very convenient way of education. All the more so because most vital for development tutorials are free and held by experienced SL users. Some of such tutors are employed by Linden Lab (the owner of SL), others do it on a voluntary basis just because they want this world to evolve. And a huge part of SL appears to be based on a wiki philosophy of sharing ideas.