I met my real life girl friend and most likely future wife on Second Life. I will always be thankful to the platform for that. But we have a really big problem here...or maybe we don't. To me it is, to others it is not. What's the problem? Identity Bending. It is one thing to enter a virtual world and maybe make an avatar a little more thin, a little more attractive, a little more stronger appearing, then how you appear in real life. But where does it end? Fifty year old men playing 19 year old women? So called "Age Play"? Furries? More importantly, what responsibilities do you have to let others know that you aren't as you appear? Are people deliberately deceiving others about who they are so they can fulfill their twisted fantasies? If so, do they have any accountability for this? Are they doing wrong? I think so.
Read this article on the Second Life Herald found [HERE] for a sad commentary on Identity Bending. It is just another nail in the coffin for me in my thoughts concerning Second Life.
Reading this article, and more importantly, reading the comments made in response to this article, just made me sick. Is Second Life just full of a bunch of closet homosexuals playing out their gender bending fantasies?
Groups are making valiant attempts to use Second Life. I do think there is validity to the argument that encountering someone in a virtual space brings a greater sense of presence then say having a 2D chat or a webx or net meeting. Virtual businesses are trying to wrap their heads around Second Life and use its potential. I hail these people, and I am one myself to a lesser degree. You see potential and are willing to be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption. But we are continuously failing in Second Life. Why?
Let's face it. The potential for serious use and even game use if Second Life is there, but not really close to what it needs to be for SL to fly. So we have this crappy virtual world where we can't do much except text and voice chat in small groups and animate our characters and listen to music. We can't really game or do game type activities due to lag and the crappy game engine.
So where does that leave Second Life as? A virtual stalking ground for social encounters. And it looks like the primary draw of Second Life is to homo's and pervs. This is why serious users (except maybe the fringe world of academia who have isolated "islands" in Second Life and less accountability for immediate results) are failing. The target demographic in Second Life, I really, really, hate to admit, is a bunch of pervs. Not all, there are many good people in Second Life trying to make the crappy virtual world into something akin to the mythical metaverse (And hats off to Linden Labs for making a low tech stab at making the metaverse...you aren't there but you are closer then anyone who had come before you). But based on my own experience it seems like over 70% of Second Life's denizens are there to live out their perverted secret fantasies. Is this something I want to be involved with? It is too bad, because I've had some great experiences in Second Life. I've met some great people there. And I've seen Second Life enable physically challenged people in RL to enjoy being fully functional in the virtual world. But Second Life is just too full of whack jobs for me. The more I read, the more people I encounter lately in second life, the more I get depressed and find myself logging in less and less. The initial attempts at making more activities to do in SL besides cybersex are mostly abandoned or have disappeared.
Maybe one day I'll take the queue and vanish like millions of others already have.
Read this article on the Second Life Herald found [HERE] for a sad commentary on Identity Bending. It is just another nail in the coffin for me in my thoughts concerning Second Life.
Reading this article, and more importantly, reading the comments made in response to this article, just made me sick. Is Second Life just full of a bunch of closet homosexuals playing out their gender bending fantasies?
Groups are making valiant attempts to use Second Life. I do think there is validity to the argument that encountering someone in a virtual space brings a greater sense of presence then say having a 2D chat or a webx or net meeting. Virtual businesses are trying to wrap their heads around Second Life and use its potential. I hail these people, and I am one myself to a lesser degree. You see potential and are willing to be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption. But we are continuously failing in Second Life. Why?
Let's face it. The potential for serious use and even game use if Second Life is there, but not really close to what it needs to be for SL to fly. So we have this crappy virtual world where we can't do much except text and voice chat in small groups and animate our characters and listen to music. We can't really game or do game type activities due to lag and the crappy game engine.
So where does that leave Second Life as? A virtual stalking ground for social encounters. And it looks like the primary draw of Second Life is to homo's and pervs. This is why serious users (except maybe the fringe world of academia who have isolated "islands" in Second Life and less accountability for immediate results) are failing. The target demographic in Second Life, I really, really, hate to admit, is a bunch of pervs. Not all, there are many good people in Second Life trying to make the crappy virtual world into something akin to the mythical metaverse (And hats off to Linden Labs for making a low tech stab at making the metaverse...you aren't there but you are closer then anyone who had come before you). But based on my own experience it seems like over 70% of Second Life's denizens are there to live out their perverted secret fantasies. Is this something I want to be involved with? It is too bad, because I've had some great experiences in Second Life. I've met some great people there. And I've seen Second Life enable physically challenged people in RL to enjoy being fully functional in the virtual world. But Second Life is just too full of whack jobs for me. The more I read, the more people I encounter lately in second life, the more I get depressed and find myself logging in less and less. The initial attempts at making more activities to do in SL besides cybersex are mostly abandoned or have disappeared.
Maybe one day I'll take the queue and vanish like millions of others already have.
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