USC Student on Second Life

From Chris Guitarte, Annenberg Program on Online Communities, on 3D worlds: "I’ll admit, this past week was the first week I’ve taken a good look at MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). I have always been wary of taking a deeper look in fear of how much time I could potentially invest in joining one. But since I’ll be taking care of school work and a curiosity I’ve had, now would be a good time for me to spend some quality time in an MMOG. There were a few hiccups that I’ll mention briefly. First I’m primarily a Mac user and that caused some problems when trying to jump on to the suggested MMOGs for this week. There and MTV Virtual Worlds both don’t have clients for the Mac. Also, even though Second Life has a Mac client and all, I ran into a problem logging in from my MacBook (waiting for region handshake, then times out). I suspected something with my wireless router or the firewall on my Mac but couldn’t pinpoint the problem so I just booted up an old PC of mine, installed it there, and it ran fine on that (update: it was PeerGuardian that was preventing me from connecting, I didn’t even realize to check that, silly me). I also started up a trial for World of Warcraft which runs fine on both my Mac and PC. Interoperability between computing platforms is important, but since Windows is the leading operating system on most home computers, Mac users often get the short end of the stick. It’s a good thing there’s Boot Camp if you’re on an Intel Mac.

I’ll start by talking about Second Life first, which has pretty much consumed all of my time this past week (both in exploring and waiting for textures to stream into my SL viewer). I’ve always heard some sort of news about Second Life since it first started, and I was always curious, but I never really jumped in like I have this past week. I’d say that the Betsy Book reading: Virtual World Business Brands was the motivator for me to explore Second Life. To read about Cubey Terra and the amount of work that went into creating the successful brand in Second Life, it was pretty cool to just jump onto my computer and see it for myself right away. Everything at Abbotts Aerodome was so elaborate compared to when I first logged in at the SL tutorial place, it was really well done. From the layout of the Aerodome to the different planes you could actually purchase, I spent over an hour just looking at everything. This in addition to visiting UCI’s own Anteater Island and USC’s Annenberg Island. I picked up a free USC shirt too while I was at Annenberg Island (can’t do that in real life). I’m barely getting into the game and I feel like I’ve covered so much just by looking at things. So even though it was nice and easy to move around, teleporting from place to place, flying even. I can’t say the same about the more advanced functions. The interface seemed pretty complex, even for me, so I could see how some people can be turned off by SL. Even though the orientation island in the beginning taught me the basics, I can only imagine how much time it would take for me to learn everything I would need to know to fully take advantage of the more advanced features of SL. I suppose it would be one of those things you learn more about as you go. I only wish that Second Life made it easier to get into and discover all the neat little things you can do. Something similar to the set up of Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS. I admit I’m more of a console gamer (and a Mac user) so I expect things to be much more simplified and intuitive than what I’ve experienced with Second Life. Maybe Playstation Home will fill that void. Now if only I had enough time for World of Warcraft… 7 days left on the trial."http://tangiblebits.wordpress.com/