A Gamer Explains Second Life to Gamers

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau writes a smart blog devoted to online games, an industry she also works in, as a community manager at Metaplace. And after some frustrated first experiences, "I finally get Second Life," she writes, "I understand why it’s addictive, and why people spend so much time there." She makes that case to gamers in their language ("[Y]ou think EQ2’s housing system is good? Hah") and describes what they've been missing beyond the media stories of adultery and flying penises. Check it out here.

Comments

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Wow... the increased traffic to Cuppycake's blog due to your link crashed it down :)

[Cuppycake]

Wow, fail. Contacting my host...thanks for the link! =P

[Leondra]

SL is NOT a game. You can play games here, like I can in my living room. But...SL is a social network, a platform for 3-D creativity, expression and experience. It's an immersive learning environment. It is ever evolving content from the most creative minds I have known.

It is .... art... in it's purest sense.

(k... dismiss the griefers and the penis particle senders, I am adult enough to ignore.)

I do not want censorship, I guess I have those real American values of freedom.

[Tymmerie Thorne]

Thanks for sharing this, Hamlet! I am going to point to her post each and every time someone asks me what SL is. She explains it simply and well!

[Arcadia Codesmith]

SL will be competitive with World of Warcraft when a) download speeds improve to the point where loading dynamic content is about the same as pulling data off your own hard drive, b) the pricing model drops to the point where aspiring developers can reasonably afford vast tracts of land, and c) we've got the concurrency to host multiple raiding parties totaling hundreds of avatars on the same sim (or at least on temporary instanced copies of a sim).

I actually think a) and c) are technically feasible and inevitable, probably sooner than anybody believes. b) is the "twelvth of never" item. Only when the price is right for basement modders and hackers will the balance tip. If you have to hunt up a venture capitalist to use SL as a development platform... well, to hell with it. Might as well use a real game engine.