I must admit, the experience thus far has been quite a bit different than what I expected. My first session began with the creation of my character, who I must admit, looks absolutely nothing like me despite my best efforts to change his appearance:
He's a little more "Ron Weasley" than I'd like him to be. Yes, that is a dragon statue behind him, and no, that in no way inspired my little quip there. Pure coincidence.
Anyways, as I learned to control and use the best feature (in my opinion) which is flying, I discovered right away that I was going to have a tough time with Second Life. Because of the amount of traffic in the program and the constant updating of images, the screen often becomes 'blocky' and tends to slow down due to it's continuous generating of new scenery. After you get through the tutorial that teaches you all the basic functions, you come to what appeared to be a launching point, or basically a place that told you where you could go and how to get there.
I guess they have people who like to hang out around there though, and two of which were talking to another couple about how they were just engaged to be married on Second Life. It was very bizarre. Later in the session, I ended up at a virtual club where people discussed how on Friday nights they would all meet at this place, drink tequila in real life, and then go nuts with the program and make their characters do ridiculous things. Now, as I'm on here to learn and not be critical, I found it very interesting to note through these 2 encounters that it seems that people in real life like to use the game as a channel to express themselves in ways they may or may not be able to in real life. As I'd find later, this hypothesis wasn't too far off, but that's for another post.
Discussion question for tomorrow: "Are virtual communities simply an advanced way of interacting with others in an online forum, or do they provide a gateway for personal expression that users feel they cannot do in real life?"
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