{"id":885,"date":"2007-07-21T12:21:04","date_gmt":"2007-07-21T02:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=885"},"modified":"2007-08-07T18:53:06","modified_gmt":"2007-08-07T08:53:06","slug":"885","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=885","title":{"rendered":"What is SecondLife?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/brokentoys.org\/2007\/07\/14\/utopia-hidden-underground-another-look-at-sl\/\"><strong>Broken Toys blog has an excellent discussion\/analysis of SecondLife<\/strong><\/a> &#8211; one of the best I&#8217;ve read that provides a balanced and informative insight into the virtual world phenomenon. The writer takes as a starting point the notion of SL as a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, as a useful analogy with which to unpack SL. <\/p>\n<p>Some key insights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s about community &#8211; so the top players in the game are women<\/li>\n<li>Levels are climbed by social interaction and participating in social groups<\/li>\n<li>Blokes, if you&#8217;re in it for the laggy sex and violence, you&#8217;re in the wrong place and you&#8217;ve missed the point<\/li>\n<li>Fashion favours the feminine &#8211; the range of blokes gear is limited and largely unimaginative<\/li>\n<li>As a mutli-level game you gain experience points (XP) by, well, gaining experience &#8211; newbies with default avatars and free clothing and bad hair mark out the newcomer &#8211; and experienced users will often (a) shun newbies; (b) prey on newbies (c) help them. The emphasis seems to be on (a) and (b).<\/li>\n<li>Searches have been skewed by dubious practices, like &#8216;camping&#8217; (exploiting newbies with the promise of cash for camping) which adds artificially to the popularity count and moves a site up the search ranking, while paying sub-cent values to the campers.<\/li>\n<li>Avatars are sexualised &#8211; almost to the point of caricature &#8211; most female avatars (avs) have exaggerated breasts and hips, while male avs have six-pack abs and huge shoulder to hip ratio, and invariably with perfect skin and youthful appearance &#8211; it is actually quite difficult (need XP) to find more realistic shapes and skins.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So blokes, if you are after violence, go to Warcraft, and if you are after porn, check your email spam box. But if you are after a space in which people can share a sense of community and imagine and create, then SL has a whole world to offer. <\/p>\n<p>For me the attraction is meeting people from different parts of the (real) world, and the possibility of finding a different venue for sharing my music performances.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/metaverseterritories.com\/?p=383\"><strong>Metaverse Territories<\/strong><\/a> for pointing to the Broken Toys post.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers<br \/>\nJerry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Broken Toys blog has an excellent discussion\/analysis of SecondLife &#8211; one of the best I&#8217;ve read that provides a balanced and informative insight into the virtual world phenomenon. The writer takes as a starting point the notion of SL as a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, as a useful analogy with which to unpack SL. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-new-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}