The 3 D's of Second Life
There's something deliciously surreal about a world where you can fly, force the sun to rise, or change gender with a few mouse clicks. Second Life is also the only place I know where money literally grows on trees: You can pick 20 Linden dollars (L$20) at a time, the equivalent of about 7 U.S. cents on the LindeX currency exchange. Collect enough Linden bucks, and you can buy new threads, rent an apartment, or obtain land.
But this virtual world also has some real problems, and they all start with d.
It's deserted: As of this writing, SL claims more than 5.6 million residents. But I never saw more than 35,000 people logged on at any time. My avatar wandered through many ghost towns and vast empty landscapes. Catherine Smith, Linden Lab director of brand strategy and communications, says roughly 10 percent of people who sign up for an account become active residents, which puts the real population at around half a million. Visiting Second Life without human interaction is like playing Myst without the clues: It gets boring fast.
It's difficult: Ninety percent of visitors don't return because SL is hard to use. I spent most of my time colliding into buildings. Creating objects requires both serious design skills and familiarity with the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), the lingua franca behind all SL objects. (The intrepid can visit a wiki for programming basics.)
It's demanding: Unlike browser-based 3D worlds, SL is a downloadable program that takes over your system, sucking up bandwidth and as much graphics processing power as your PC has. My computer is fairly new, yet buildings and other objects sloooowly drew themselves in as I flew by overhead.
Ad Choices