My Second Life Experience

The past week, I have been exploring the virtual world of Second Life, and it has surprised me and brought about a new outlook on the functionality of Online worlds in my mind.
In the beginning, I found it strange and incredibly slow. I also had a big urge to close it and forget about it. However, my curiosity to figure out why people liked the game preserved.

I did research to learn more about Second Life and I chatted with the locals as well. Soon I found out that unlike other virtual worlds, in SL you can actually write code scripts, design objects and see your object come to life. Not only that, you can put it up for sale and watch with satisfaction as people buy up your designs and walk around with it. In Second Life, the sky's the limit in terms of imagination, as long as you can code it or design it, it's possible. As a CIS student learning C++ and other codes, the concept of it is just so amazing. And apparently, in Second Life, instead of C++ , they code in a madeup computer language called Linden language, where Linden is the name of the game company.

Also, there's no way that one can see all there is to see in SL in a lifetime. With users being able to code their own environments, there is so much to see. This is starting to sound like an advertisement for SL but the concept is revolutionary to me. But it isn't without it's shortcomings. Because content is user created, is isn't uncommon to come across Mature content or swindling. However, the problem I have the most with is that the SL, instead of doing the work on their servers, forces the user's computer to unpack and calculate all the physics of objects in the SL world. This makes loading incredibly slow, and often I have to wait 10 minutes for a few advertisements on a wall to finish loading. With so much to explore, it makes the waiting frustrating. Of course, a better computer with a better processor speed would help.

I still feel that it is worth the wait. And as of right now, since I have started writing this post, I am still patiently waiting for those advertisements to load.