I sat down this evening to try and get some Second Life time in. I’ve played with it a bit in the past, but not substantially since I could never really get it to run well for very long. It seemed to behave for now, which worked out for me.

I spent a bit of time customizing my avatar, “Bug Roux,” for a while, since she was mostly made of default clothes and pieces and I wanted her to be a little more unique.

This is Bug!

She looks like she’s pretty much totally skeptical of absolutely everything, all the time. I find this somehow very appropriate.

Not really knowing what else to do, I decided that I was going to try and provoke some kind of interaction with some random strangers somewhere in the SL world. My rules changed as I went along based on the situations I found myself in. First, I needed a place. Second Life is massive, so I did a search for “gallery,” not really sure where else to start looking. I hopped into a gallery called MMCA, which seemed to be a multi-purpose space for displaying art, music performance, and other cultural types of activities. There were a few people around, but quite honestly, it was pretty boring. I stood up on a stage in front of a bunch of people hanging around and yelled random phrases (“THIS! IS! CAAAAAKE TOOOOOOWN!”) only to be met with absolutely no reaction. I tried to physically put myself in the middle of their gathering, but no one took notice. I needed excitement. I needed drama. I needed furries. I did a quick search for furry related areas, and hopped into the first one I saw. (I don’t mean to offend anyone if you actually are a furry, but really it seemed like a good place to start my mini-social-experiment since they seem easy to provoke and that was what I was aiming for. No offense, really.)

This place started off looking pretty normal.

…and then I met the residents. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on here, so I just tried to draw attention to myself somehow. I tried dancing, putting myself uncomfortably close to people, everything I could think of. Nothing worked.

Bored again, I pulled up a list of “popular” places in the world and picked one at random. Some type of jazz/dance club place, with what looked like a large gathering of people. Perfect. Let the chaos and evildoings begin!

There were people dancing everywhere, and the music was really pretty pleasant, so I couldn’t really bring myself to try and cause trouble. It just seemed too nice an atmosphere to ruin for everyone else. Instead, I sat down at one of the gaudy tables and struck up a conversation with a rather quiet avatar named “Karmayogi Zheng.” We chatted for a bit about hardware and getting SL to run smoothly, and realized that we were both pretty new to the world. We ended up discussing the different types of avatars people have. We wondered how many people were actually the same gender as their avatar. I’ve played other online games before where it’s often the case that people will play a character with a gender opposite their own, but it’s not something I’d ever put much thought into. We talked about places we’d been in the world so far, which between us didn’t amount to much. He did, however, tell me about a place a new friend had shown him: a botanical garden within SL. I was intrigued.

He teleported me there, and I spent a good half hour just exploring. The amount of detail and care put into the space was unbelieveable. It was a very relaxing and peaceful environment, much like a real garden.

Bird’s-eye view. There are all kinds of places to explore here.

There are lots of water areas, which I found especially pretty. There are boats you can take out on the water, and a small canal system through the island itself.

There’s a large arboretum on one side of the island with huge palms inside. If you visit, you have to go in, switch to mouselook, and look straight up. The view is incredible. I wanted to take a screenshot, but I wasn’t sure how to from that view. It’s something you really need to see yourself, anyway, which sounds odd for a virtual world, but it’s true. These screenshots really don’t do it much justice.

I’ve visited botanical gardens before, and always wanted to be up among the treetops, but unfortunately I can’t fly in the real world. While the gardens in SL paralleled a real garden in so many ways, this was one small but very meaningful difference.

After checking out the arboretum, my new friend and I walked around a bit more and then parted ways, since it was getting pretty late.  I found it odd that the most interesting place I found (so far) in an entirely virtual world is one that I could easily visit in real life.