Hi there, welcome to Second Life and ZEN METAL Hatchlings!
This is a quick newbie orientation guide as to what is possible on Second Life, not so much HOW TO DO everything on Second Life, as there is SO MUCH TO LEARN. You will have to pick and choose what interests you.
What do we do?
I am not going to lie; Second Life is WEIRD. I joke that Second Life is 3D internet where we go to get catfished and to play with each others’ emotions – both positive and negative. We want to move you and to get moved. It’s about collaborative creativity with both friends and strangers; one person creates the mesh, another creates the textures, a third one rigs, scripts, or animates it, and possibly a fourth one markets them… Each object and scene features a ton of other combinations of humor, talent, and creativity.
What makes Second Life so special is that its content and “games” are created by the users for the users, often from scratch, apart from the very platform, of course. The platform belongs to a company named Linden Labs, a name you’ll get familiar with very soon. Everything else… Is at the whimsy of its users.
If you think of Second Life as a 3D-creation tool you can walk into and interact with the creations on it, you pretty much have it covered. It is the Internet in 3D form, and this means that basically… It is whatever the users make of it – them, you, your friends. And it is very stable; launched on 23 June 2003, it’s been around for 20 years now, although you’d never believe it. It has out-lived MySpace, Yahoo, Altavista…
Make it yours
Truly, Second Life is something you customize for yourself. It’s truly an ANYTHING YOU WANT -kind of platform. You pick the places you go to, the people you hang out with, what you look like, what you do, and the possibilities are nearly endless. AND YET, there is much to improve on. It is FAR from a ready platform even though it is pretty mature in… more ways than one.
When you first come in, do teleport yourself to a variety of locations and pay attention to what’s going on in there. Just woosh around and make notes as to what you like and what you don’t like. What you don’t like, you can change. What you like, you can copy… At least up to a point. Much of the stuff it is created with is sold by the users for the users, using the in-world currency Linden Dollar. Today’s rate is L$240 = US$1. This makes you feel SOOO RICH when you get in. Also, you can buy a beautiful mesh house for 450 Lindens, or you can pay thousands of Lindens for a dress, or pick up a sports car for free, so it pays to shop around – iiif you want to spend any money on the platform at all, that is.
Keep socializing to a minimum. 🙂
There are people who view newbies as snoops or intruders. Therefore, unless they speak to you, you better leave the oldies alone for the time being. There are a lot of people who know Second Life as an “adult platform” and come looking for a quick fix for their acute issues, if you catch my drift. A lot of oldies, females especially, are tired of this. Therefore, you want to look like you intend to stay before really talking to anybody.
The exception is locations that are marked “newbie friendly” (in the search) and people who are quick to welcome you to Second Life in an IM or in Local Chat.
There’s nothing you MUST do
One last thing.
Second Life is not a game. If you think of it as a game, you’ll get bored in a second. Nobody has done your thinking for you. They’re not going to tell you what you must do here. You’ll have to figure that out. I often laugh about how my Second Life is basically just my first life I see it from 3rd person’s perspective… Me sitting at a computer looking better than me sitting at a computer in real life.
If you want it to be a job, it will, with a lot of work, of course, but there’s nothing you absolutely must do there. You do as you do, play as you play, and find the people you like playing with. You’ll find all kinds of weird and wonderful, especially in the adult areas, that you don’t have to go see at all, but… You can if you want to! Accessing adult areas requires a setting in your viewer; it’s under me or avatar – Preferences – General – I want to access content rated…” Pick your content rating, and you’re good to go explore adult areas as well. Just a small warning – they can get pretty weird. 😉
Learn the basics at ZEN METAL Hatchlings
There are many newbie tutorial joints around Second Life. Mine is a combination of things I found difficult to figure out on my own but would have loved to know from day one, combined with some basic-basics. Some things are very helpful to newbs but took me months to find… Granted I remember walking right past the “focus, zoom, & pan” -tutorial on Orientation Island when I first joined. :p It would have been a good one to know.
(Alt+click focusses you view point, it can be used to focus on a static object or a moving one. Holding down left button and using mouse wheel or track pad will allow you to zoom in and out the focussed object, and adding CTRL will allow you to pan around it. Start with alt and add keys.)
Once you know what you want to try, find a tutorial
There are TONS and TONS of tutorials for Second Life stuff. Scripting your objects, customizing your avatar, creating your own skins for them, recording mocap animations for avatars, building houses, cars, whatever. Anything you need to learn has a tutorial online, and after that, you’ll just have to invent your own solutions, which is entirely possible on Second Life. If you know 3D design at all, you will be interested to know Second Life uses collada file format for objects and animations.
Figure out what you want to do, then google it. You’ll find help that makes sense to you. It may also be a good idea to search “Second Life” on YouTube to see what others do there.
There are also forums for residents to ask questions on, but personally, I do prefer Google and YouTube. It tends to be faster. Here, have a look at what’s under “Second Life Tutorials” on YouTube, just to give you a broad idea of what’s happening there.