Last Bit Of Second Life

I decided to carry on looking for freebies, like clothes etc to enhance the look of my avatar, this time I had a bit more luck and came across a bunch of green boxes. When I clicked on these boxes I was asked do I want to receive item, when yes was selected I was given a bunch of free stuff – success!

The items can be seen in my inventory at the bottom right of the SL interface screen.

I logged in for my final session of Second Life. I decided to change the appearance of my avatar a bit more; I gave him darker hair with also more spikes.
I decided to search for famous places/cities to see how they had been made in second life. The first place I thought of was London. However when I searched for this the places I found didn’t really resemble London that much.
I then searched for New York and was transported to the World Trade Centre memorial, I was expecting maybe Times Square or the Empire State but never mind.

I then searched for Las Vegas and captured a couple of screenshots of what I found there.

To sum up my experience of Second Life I must say I wasn’t impressed. I found it quite boring mainly due to the time I had to wait letting the software to load up. Sometimes I got so annoyed with the speed of it I just quit out of it. I think the tool to create and edit your appearance is poor and needs updating, to say its a well known program and supposedly millions of people using it, there seemed to be no one ever where I was, this ruined the experience somewhat as I expected more interaction with people.

Second Life

I have been logging onto SL quite a bit and I am still struggling to find anything interesting to keep me on the program. I don’t really know how to use the program and I am finding it hard to navigate and interact with the environment. However I stuck at it and when in search of things to do.
I found somewhere that appeared to be like an outdoor club/bar, I decided to check it out and even had a bit of a dance, the moves my avatar bust out where average at best and he looked even more of a tool than usual. I left him alone dancing for a bit while I read about SL on the internet.

I spent about 1 hour on it today just looking round and attempting to find these so called ‘freebie’ stores around to try and get some new clothes, because my avatar is quite plain and boring. This is the freebie room that I came across but I still couldn’t work out how to get free stuff and clothiers. I clicked on a few of the adverts but they were asking for money so I didn’t make any purchases and continued elsewhere.

I continued to browse for things to do and for more of these freebie stores. My search however was again in vain as I came across a Megastore. Again though, there seemed nothing available free and everything kept asking me for this stupid SL money. Rubbish.

Identities - GTA IV

The first thing i thought of when i downloaded SL and started to play it was that it reminded me a lot of GTA IV (without the meaningless violence and fun obviously. Its got a similar concept as in you can dress your own character and roam freely around a 3D environment. GTA IV allows the user to interact with the environment in many different ways, from talking to people, driving cars, going into buildings and so on. GTA can be played online with other people, this then allows you to communicate with other people from around the room.
The obvious main difference is the fact that GTA has a storyline. It is after all a game and is meant to be completed, unlike SL. The 3D environment which of GTA consists is very complex, the amount of detail it has can sometimes be astonishing. I know there are many differences between GTA and SL but the basic concept of making yourself, moving around an environment and the interaction is similar.
Because SL is based on using an internet connection, this can sometimes make the environment run slow and also cause the software to lag. This does not happen with GTA and it runs very smoothly. This issue was my major problem in SL, the speed at which the 3D environment reacted to my input was annoyingly slow.

Identities - Second Life

For the start of the identities module my task was to create an avatar and record a diary of what i did with my avatar. I decided to use Second Life to do this in. I downloaded Second Life onto my laptop and created my own account.



When you first open Second Life (SL) you can then edit the appearance of your avatar to make it more personal. I found that this was very hard to do and i couldn't really make my avatar look anything like i wanted. This could be improved greatly.



When i had messed about with my appearance i started in/on somewhere called help island. There were a few people in this area so i decided to have a look around, there wasn't much to do or look at. I then clicked on something that said start.



When i tried getting somewhere else i was met by this black screen all too often. It seemed slow to move around and a few of the people seemed grey had had no clothes or features when it finally loaded a new location. I wasn't sure whether this was my painfully slow internet connection or the standard for SL.



This was the map i saw which let me change location, the area of SL was extremely big and much larger than i originally thought. There were many different areas, however when i visited these areas there wasn't much to do.



One good thing about navigating through SL is the fact you are able to fly around areas, this made travel much quicker and cut out much of the slow walking that was annoying me.


When browsing through SL i came across R2-D2 on some kind of docks. I clicked on the object and was given the choice to sit - so i did, this entertained me for about 5 seconds! there seemed to be no one about on most of SL so i didn't talk to anyone really, i was just trying to work out what kind of things i could do.

I came across a car at one point while randomly walking round. I tried to 'Cruise' like the option gave me, however this seemed to not work and i just sat in the car doing absolutely nothing!

Hopefully i will find something more entertaining to do on my next visit. I also intend to talk to someone and find out why they use the program and also what they do.