It's a pretty amazing concept. Like someting out of a science fiction film.

NOT CRAP.

Marsupialized wrote:I read about it and you can buy shit and sell shit, drive around, fuck, talk and whatever else...it dosen't say anything about murder...can you murder other players?

yes.

not my thing but i think its great that theres something that original out there.

Even if i feel its a waste of time, who am i to speak
im listening to music and playing video games right now haha

kenoki wrote:i only heard of this last week, actually after an episode of law and order svu about something like second life. i looked online to see if this sort of stuff really existed and happened upon second life. sadly i was intrigued because i like the sims 2 a lot. heh. so i downloaded it and played for a few hours until i realized that i would have to interact with real people, then it just became super, super creepy and i deleted it off my hard drive.

second life is creepy.

Yes! I saw this episode, and it played out just like the myspace SVU--I didn't know until this thread that something so similar existed, though--I thought they just lumped the sims, wow and gta into one game as it was convenient to the plot. The best part of that episode is when they're linking suspects together based on screenshots of their online character's hanging out. Screenshots of an executioner and a normal dressed avatar playing skiball, dancing, etc.

When I joined facebook and was trying to figure it out I noticed that you can "give gifts" to other people--stupid stuff and every day there's a new gift (today's is a yummy cupcake). I had to have my girlfriend explain it to me.

"So I get one free gift, but after that you have to pay for them?"

"yes"

"what do you get for the dollar? does the person get a cupcake for real?

"no. You don't get anything."

I spend my money on some stupid shit. especially if it's only a buck. Our house is littered with multiple mr potato heads, mold-o-ramas, groucho marx glasses and other cheap thrills. This boggles my mind.

I recently read about 'griefing', ie playing an MMORPG with the sole intention of fucking with other players and ruining their enjoyment of the game. While this is obviously mean-spirited and crap, two specific examples of griefing in Second Life very nearly made me cry with laughter.

Example one: Griefer 'punched someone's avatar so hard they went into orbit and couldn't get back down to Earth'.

Example two: Group of griefers spent some time building a giant penis-shaped aircraft that they then flew into someone's virtual skyscraper.

I work with PhD students for whom most of their thesis contrives of wandering around second life, under the guise of something called "cyberpsychology".

Last week I minuted a managerial meeting at my university to discuss creating a "University brand and presence on Second Life, and using Second Life as a marketing/recruitment tool for the various courses the university offers". They were all stoked about the idea of being pioneers. If I wasn't worried about a serious breach of confidentiality I'd love to go in to detail about their plans and paste some of the transcript of the conversation that took place here.... Needless to say it was pretty mindblowing stuff. Lecturers having avatars of themselves in a virtual university, etc. I haven't quite understood the point yet.

night_tools wrote:
Example one: Griefer 'punched someone's avatar so hard they went into orbit and couldn't get back down to Earth'.

Example two: Group of griefers spent some time building a giant penis-shaped aircraft that they then flew into someone's virtual skyscraper.

This made me laugh loud enough to scare the dog.

Example one, because it sounds like one of the Chuck Norris things, and Example two, because it wasn't just one guy, it was a group, working together, taking their time, with the sole goal of imagining the reaction (which they won't see) of a group of people (who they don't know) who similarly got together to build a virtual building, only to have a virtual flying cock destroy it. You can almost hear anthropologists treating it with awe as a milestone - like the cavemen in 2001 or something - when a society moves from co-operative action to co-operative willful dumbness.

There is hope! Hope for us all!