I am not entirely sure if it is true; that the average Second Life user is a tad smarter than the average flat Internet user. I think it is. Naturally, the whole complication of Second Life appeals to a smarter person. Scrolling through Instagram Reels hardly requires a high IQ from anybody. However, just logging onto Second Life already requires a level of intelligence that leaves it inaccessible from most Internet users.
And that, my fellow residents, is brilliant.
Still, the reason why we stay is the incredible level of creativity you’ll encounter. There is a caveat, however, if you do not KNOW that Second Life visible content is largely created by the users for the users, you don’t really GET IT, do you?
You walk into another person’s fantasy.
As all the content is created, modified, curated, or displayed by individual users, when you visit a new sim or parcel, you’ll walk into another person’s imagination. Whether it is pure, cute, and cuddly or rough and rugged in adult themes, it is someone else’s mind on display. (“You’re a sick punk baby, and I like your work…”)
What is also unique about Second Life, and definitely appealing, is that you can combine all of a person’s multifaceted personality traits, from their romantic side, their cute playful side, to the most dark and “adult.” Nobody on Second Life needs to be a over-simplified flat surface… Quite literally.
In the current culture, where sexuality is talked about nonstop but rarely offered as a source of actual joy and enjoyment anymore, Second Life is a very different beast—a breath of fresh air. There is very little judgment, a lot of joy, fun, and pleasure around it all.
If a visitor fails to understand how Second Life is built, the charm of the place will not truly translate. A huge part of the Second Life appeal is that you understand it comes from regular users, and it’s largely non-commercial fun.
The sense of humor of it.
Second Life is not serious. Well. Not all of it. There are people who take it waaay too seriously – I’m probably one of them! Still, you can get tortilla slappers! You can flush yourself down a toilet. You can drive a 5-prim car. You run into the weird and wonderful as soon as you dare to step out of the serious lane.
And you’ll easily die laughing sitting on your butt on your friend’s snow board on your way down hill when your animations don’t work at all. XD If you understand Second Life properly, you even love the errors.
People of all skill levels and styles
What I find so enthralling about Second Life is the fact that the creators exhibit all levels of skill, from absolute beginner to a fully seasoned professional. They’ll create anything from cartoon characters and stylized scenes to photorealism. It is pure passion!
Yes, we get rubbish in exchange for our Lindens sometimes. Some of the objects in our inventories are absolute… Weird… Adorable junk.
And yet, every piece is in some way romantic and charming. Someone’s joke, someone’s love, another person’s creative outburst. Appealing? Definitely.
The collaborative effort.
We may all be sitting alone doing our own thing, but nothing happens on your sim unless you look for help from other creators. No matter how good you are, you’ll have someone’s work helping you out.
And when someone becomes known for their amazing work, you start seeing them as some type of a celebrity, and their work displayed like art on other people’s sims.
Rules, rules, rules – Second Life appeal is a good bunch of RULES.
While Linden Labs basically throws you into their world saying: “You’re all adults, sort it out!” I love the fact every sim can decide on the rules of their own community freely. Although a lot of it is repeated over and over, the rules make for a fantastic reading: “In a utopian society, this is how the creator(s) of this sim would want to live…” From a life coaching/psychological/societal perspective, all that is gold to me.
Who cares about the frame rate?!
Yesterday’s update to Firestorm Viewer knocked my socks off. Everything loads up in a snap now, and I love how everything looks EVEN WITHOUT advanced graphics loaded anywhere yet. I can only imagine what it’ll look like in 6 months.
Still, graphics, performance, all that crank power is really not what keeps anyone on Second Life. It’s for patient people. It’s for relaxing and chilling, and computing power isn’t really the main thing in anyway.
But how good is the new Firestorm!!! 8o
The pig I like to wrestle.
Everything on Second Life is complicated, starting from deciding what you want to do there. It’s marvellous. It forces you to think for yourself as there is no real path to follow. I love to solve problems, and Second Life is full of them in the best sense of what makes an appealing problem. “How do I make X happen…?”
Nothing has been marked – and yet everything is marked, ruled out, decided… You just have to find the right place, the right people… Or finally decide what it is that YOU want to build and be famous for.
Today I read about Blender including an option for the creator to animate their objects so they can be transferred animated to *any* third party engine. My heart sank. “Nooooo! Don’t make it easy! I want to animate my own damned objects!” I groaned, knowing full well how much I HATE adjusting animations… ALL THE TIME!
Second Life is truly the pig I like to wrestle.
You either get it or you don’t, I figure.
When I first joined Second Life in 2009 or so, I felt the pull very strongly. I LOVED it from the very start. In fact, I loved it SO MUCH I forced myself to get off it before it’d take my arm along with the little finger. I rejoined in 2018 with a new avatar (as I couldn’t remember my old avi’s login then) and this time, I figured Second Life is welcome to my arm…
And all the money I can spare. 😀
Image: Work in progress. Basic scaling objects around already scaled ones, working on those blasted animations.