Game Journal Entry 3 - Thu, Jan 15: Starting Up A Second Life
Background Info
I've never really played a social centric MMO before. I think the closest I've come to are MOOs, MUDs, and IRC, which are text-based virtual worlds. They do contain games, but I primarily used them for real-time social interactions in my teen years. I grew out of them when I reached my mid-20s when i started to feel more comfortable with myself in the real world. So I guess Second Life would be my first foray into the 3D based online social virtual world.
Avatar Creation & Interface Discovery
Having played computer games a very good percentage of my waking life, I don't find it hard at all to quickly get into to the game. But regardless of my experience, I can tell right away that Second Life's interface is quite complicated. This makes sense to me given the fact that Second Life has a million and one degrees of freedom. Second Life gives you a myriad of tools to create objects. not just specific ones that are templates, but you can literally create any object. Its like the Adobe Suite for MMOs.
In the last 6 years or so I have a habit of trying to make my Avatar look like my real self. I know very well that this is impossible because they don't make fat bodies in games, but in second life i have that opportunity. I spend about 2 hours trying to wade through slider controls for body construction. On the top of the 3rd hour, I get bored and opt for just buying one from the body vendors. The vendors only have pretty ones consisting of 48-38-48 bodies. Why did i get bored trying to customize my avatar? Some people spend hours and hours on avatar customization. I think its because I hate control box dialogs with sliders. I'd rather have a immerse 3D "push and pull" system. I'm sure there's a way to circumvent this cumbersome system, but i'm not in the mood to discover it.
I am big into shopping. At the vendor shops I was very entertained to see what items people have created. Much of it is quite impressive. Variety is much like real life: you can buy items for home, work, clothing, even body shapes and hair styles. You can also buy non humanoid avatars. I was especially entertained by the BattleTech vendor where you could buy a mech avatar. There seems to be a lot of crafting going on here in this world. And a lot of transactions, because like real life, nothing worth having is free. Yes you have to pay for all this stuff. The exchange rate between USD$ and L$ (Lynden Dollars) is about USD$2 for L$1,500. The scariest thing i bought was a vagina for my avatar which cost something like L$100. In the end I go mad over anime flavored costumes and avatar mods and gestures -- spending just a little over USD$15. Go anatomically correct cos-player me!
Avatars and Self-Identity
What am I doing here creating an avatar that's nothing like me? or is it? It is "me" in a sense, a "fraction of me". I like anime and this avatar became the vehicle within this virtual world to express my enjoyment of anime. What made this activity fun? Well though there was little to none story, the perspective of the events was centered around me. The interaction between the environment and myself felt engaging. The most provocative portion of Second Life is the ability to become anything or anyone in this game. But that requires a substantial amount of skill or money -- a limitation that puts me off. It should be easy and fun. Wearing someone else's mods gets dull fast.
But what can an avatar do for us within the context of a virtual social environment? If we use Maslow's hiearchy of needs, it seems that that avatars are channels of opportunity towards fulfilling our social and esteem needs without endangering our security or physical assets. We also have a medium where we can explore, experiment, and obtain self-actualization, where we can perform analysis of reality in order to change our views of the world and of ourselves not as a special singular event, but as a usual common place thing.
I've never really played a social centric MMO before. I think the closest I've come to are MOOs, MUDs, and IRC, which are text-based virtual worlds. They do contain games, but I primarily used them for real-time social interactions in my teen years. I grew out of them when I reached my mid-20s when i started to feel more comfortable with myself in the real world. So I guess Second Life would be my first foray into the 3D based online social virtual world.
Avatar Creation & Interface Discovery
Having played computer games a very good percentage of my waking life, I don't find it hard at all to quickly get into to the game. But regardless of my experience, I can tell right away that Second Life's interface is quite complicated. This makes sense to me given the fact that Second Life has a million and one degrees of freedom. Second Life gives you a myriad of tools to create objects. not just specific ones that are templates, but you can literally create any object. Its like the Adobe Suite for MMOs.
In the last 6 years or so I have a habit of trying to make my Avatar look like my real self. I know very well that this is impossible because they don't make fat bodies in games, but in second life i have that opportunity. I spend about 2 hours trying to wade through slider controls for body construction. On the top of the 3rd hour, I get bored and opt for just buying one from the body vendors. The vendors only have pretty ones consisting of 48-38-48 bodies. Why did i get bored trying to customize my avatar? Some people spend hours and hours on avatar customization. I think its because I hate control box dialogs with sliders. I'd rather have a immerse 3D "push and pull" system. I'm sure there's a way to circumvent this cumbersome system, but i'm not in the mood to discover it.
I am big into shopping. At the vendor shops I was very entertained to see what items people have created. Much of it is quite impressive. Variety is much like real life: you can buy items for home, work, clothing, even body shapes and hair styles. You can also buy non humanoid avatars. I was especially entertained by the BattleTech vendor where you could buy a mech avatar. There seems to be a lot of crafting going on here in this world. And a lot of transactions, because like real life, nothing worth having is free. Yes you have to pay for all this stuff. The exchange rate between USD$ and L$ (Lynden Dollars) is about USD$2 for L$1,500. The scariest thing i bought was a vagina for my avatar which cost something like L$100. In the end I go mad over anime flavored costumes and avatar mods and gestures -- spending just a little over USD$15. Go anatomically correct cos-player me!
Avatars and Self-Identity
What am I doing here creating an avatar that's nothing like me? or is it? It is "me" in a sense, a "fraction of me". I like anime and this avatar became the vehicle within this virtual world to express my enjoyment of anime. What made this activity fun? Well though there was little to none story, the perspective of the events was centered around me. The interaction between the environment and myself felt engaging. The most provocative portion of Second Life is the ability to become anything or anyone in this game. But that requires a substantial amount of skill or money -- a limitation that puts me off. It should be easy and fun. Wearing someone else's mods gets dull fast.
But what can an avatar do for us within the context of a virtual social environment? If we use Maslow's hiearchy of needs, it seems that that avatars are channels of opportunity towards fulfilling our social and esteem needs without endangering our security or physical assets. We also have a medium where we can explore, experiment, and obtain self-actualization, where we can perform analysis of reality in order to change our views of the world and of ourselves not as a special singular event, but as a usual common place thing.