Creating Your Second Life - Part 2

In the last post, I discussed the capabilities that Second Life provides for creating objects in the 3D world through a processes called building. This is by far the most impressive feature of Second Life. You can create interesting things for others to see and you can see the interesting things that they have created. It is a public and synergistic sharing of creative imagination; sort of like a global 3D art show.

However, not far behind that is the ability to create your own persona in Second Life. Instead of being all that you can be, in Second Life you can be MORE than you can be. You can be better looking and more interesting. You can dress better and be more adept at business and technology that you ever could be in real life.

If you are short and fat in real life, then you can be tall and slim in Second Life. If you are unpopular and socially inept in real life, then you can have a long friends list and belong to lots of groups in Second Life. If nobody takes you seriously in real life, you can teach a class or start a philosophy discussion group in Second Life. If you can't hang on to a job in real life, you can start your own business in Second Life.

This ability to create you own persona has many significant implications. It builds confidence. It helps you explore the possibilities in your own personality. It can help you over come a variety of social anxieties. It can allow you to see the world from the perspective who are not like you in real life. Whereas the building capability in Second Life allows you to imagine and then create a new world, the various means of altering your persona in Second Life allow you to imagine and then create a new self. Once you have created a new world in Second Life, you can live in it. Once you have created a new self in Second Life you can experience that new world through that new self. It is no wonder that people get so addicted.

So, to sum up what Linden Labs got right with Second Life, it is the ability it provides for its users to create possible worlds and then experience those possible worlds. This is stimulating to the imagination and satisfying to the emotions. The question is - how can this amazing capability be put to best use? And that is where Linden Labs starts dropping the ball. In the next post we will begin to look at what Linden Labs did not get right.