Second Life

“A little to the left…Yeah, no wait, tilt it a bit more…that’s it”. Standing with her hands on her hips, Sabby Fauna eyed our handiwork critically. We were assembling the new house. Three hundred dollars went into this white, two-bed room detached, it should’ve been worth the time to get the door on straight. It still hung crazily, but she pulled it to and went downstairs to get changed. In ten minutes we’d be off to Costa Del SL for a night on the tiles. What to wear wasn’t an easy question.

Incredibly, this isn’t a random acquaintance’s Live Journal. This is Second Life: Linden Lab’s starkly original MMO. Repetitive levelling, paper based skills, and turn based combat you’ve seen a thousand times before are all strangely absent here. In fact, SL plays like the developers had never set eyes on Eve or Linage. Could that be a good thing?

In a prime example of the MMORPG genre, player freedom might extend to fighting, trading and manufacture. SL’s career choices may encompass anything from interior design to sky diving, being a supermodel, or perhaps a choreographer. You could build motorbikes, or just sell them. You could even be the next Ann Summers. Joining the server for the first time, the infinite possibilities of professions and hobbies can seem almost daunting.

Only almost though. Because not only is the interface the smoothest in any MMO (more on that later), but the inhabitants of SL are lovely. Seminars for new players are held almost nightly, so there is help readily available, and the communal event allows you to meet others at the same time. Perhaps you’ll hit things off with the one in the red dress and arrange to meet at a bar later. It could happen.

It’s not just seminars either. Check the events list, and you’ll usually find something worth attending. A new store’s opening sale, or a hip party maybe. Bingo perhaps, if you felt lucky, or failing that, a spot of Gladiator style hamster-ball duelling might take your fancy. We found ourselves dropping in on the tail end of the August Miss SL competition, at a picturesque waterfront venue. The winner was a very sexy robot.

Alright, now we’ve covered, (scratched the surface), of the freedom SL holds, so you’re now wondering how it could possibly work. Well, the key is the net code’s ability to stream in-world content to everyone, instantly. A player can import from their machine any sound, animation or texture they can conjure up. Everyone will then be able to hear the sound you play, or look at the jacket you yourself textured as it loads in front of them.

Modelling is handled in-game, and while it’s not 3D Studio Max, it’s quite adequate for the standard primitive shapes you manipulate to create meshes. Pop along to the open build area, and you might find some player’s towering pearl unicorn under construction, as we did. Or weirder.

Scripting too; the C++ variation Second Life is built on is editable entirely in-game. That hamster ball game was coded by a player, it wasn’t an activity devised by Linden. Lots of scripts are free – ones to link audio tracks, govern elevators, record answer machine messages or provide automated sales clerks for your shop, but other more complicated functions might be sold.

In theory, you could open a gallery to display some of your abstract photography, then sell larger prints from a vending machine. In fact, line up a play list of some ambient techno for your clientele to enjoy as they look round. People do this, and it’s fascinating.

To top off the almost heady number of possibilities you’re provided with, even gravity bows at the player’s feet. The tutorial reads ‘Fly by pressing the button on the HUD, or the hotkey (default – F)’. You do so, and may well find yourself laughing out loud with the genius of it. Why not? Why wouldn’t you want to be able to fly? The experience is elating, and adds further to the wonderful take on gaming Linden has so acutely observed.

Here is where it seems like Linden Labs had never played an MMO before. Your inventory is arranged - as creatable folders -, into animations, objects, sounds, and so on. There are no false pretences here. There’s nothing in every player’s feet that allows them to fly, or any player advancing statistic. When you type, your avatar mimes typing, and if you feel like changing your sex, or anything else down to the thickness of your eyebrows, it can be done on the spot.

What this suggests may sound strange. You might say that you want to be in role, that you like the make believe worlds of high fantasy RPGs. It’s true, what we’re describing sounds like a developer’s sandbox of experimentation. The thing is, SL provides another kind of immersion. The open philosophy and the hugely creative community have built something that’s far more believable than any recent Ultima clone you could name. Another player experience anecdote needed? Surely not.

On a quiet minor note, it looks and runs a bit slowly sometimes. Avatar model detail is very high, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the world. The reason being that more or less the whole thing is loaded as you arrive to the location. It can be a bit disenchanting when you ram head on into some unseen wall as you fly past, then having to wait for the building to load before you can find your way around it. In the face of lots of other players, frame rates can also slow to a crawl, even on the highest spec systems. Fortunately, these irritations don’t affect play that badly, or all that often. We’d recommend 512kb/s connections and above though – ISDN users can struggle with lag.

The ability to show others your own work makes the game the unendingly original, organic environment that it is. But all said, Second Life is what you make of it. If you don’t know how to model or script, there are seminars held on every aspect of creation. If you don’t want to learn any of the skills needed to make things, it’ll still be a lot of fun - there are a hundred other things to do. But perhaps your focus may wane before someone who’s teaching themselves animation (as we found ourselves doing) to try and win the dance competitions.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of the game will come down to a single question. One that we eventually had to consider, how much do you want a second life? Because this is the closest experience to one you could hope to find. You may ask ‘why would I want to dance and a virtual disco?’. If you wouldn’t want to do that, you’re not for SL, but if you did…Check out Venus bar, the well dressed break dancer on the platform…

Sam Goldwater