A Pilgrim’s Digression

For at least a year now, a friend has been advising that I give something called Second Life a try. At first glance, it seems like another MMORPG, “The Sims” made into a multiplayer online roleplaying game. My friend assures me it is not a game, however.

I registered a character name one night last week, and I installed the client (again, I am at a loss what to call it, since I can’t refer to it as a game). That first night, I didn’t play much, however. Set down naked on the orientation island, I couldn’t even move. I later determined my immobility, and even my nakedness, was due to lag, even though I signed into World of Warcraft soon after quitting Second Life and was able to play just fine.

Yesterday, I was home for the day and, the WoW servers being down, I tried Second Life again. My connection was much stronger at home than in my place in D.C., and it turned out that my character was fully clothed after all. But I still noticed a very slow load time at the start, and some lag later on that made it nearly impossible to enjoy whatever it is I am supposed to enjoy about Second Life.

At one point as I was passing through the Communication part of the orientation, my character completely disappeared. I was spamming the movement keys, trying to get some response from the “game,” and then all of a sudden my character reappeared in the water off the coast of the island, where I had apparently walked or flown while invisible.

My first impressions of Second Life are not positive. The “orientation” is non-intuitive and does not really give any clue as to what I am supposed to “do” once I am off the island and neck-deep in this “virtual world.” I stopped at one of the “Exit to Second Life” signposts after growing tired of the orientation that wasn’t really telling me anything, and I chose to teleport to a survey where I could supposedly make some Linden dollars by taking a survey. The survey “room” was full, though, so I stayed on the orientation island.

Then I chose another Exit and was teleported to a place where I could supposedly watch streaming video and listen to audio. Upon teleporting, I was greeted by a cacophony of people chatting, overlaid by what sounded like promotional clips for Second Life itself. Whether because there were so many people just wandering aimlessly around, or because of the stress of streaming audio of dozens of conversations simultaneously, the application lagged out. My character was moving one frame at a time.

Finally, the first time I heard someone say, “Kiss my ass, motherfucker!” (Not to me specifically, I don’t know who he was talking to), I decided I’d had enough. It wasn’t the cursing necessarily that made me call it quits, it was the general sense of pointlessness of it all. All those voices talking over one another…it gave me a headache trying to make sense of what was going on. I am often confused and bemused by my First Life; why do I need a Second Life that is far and away more confusing?

Anyway, I exited the application…and the audio continued on long after the application had seemingly closed. I had to Force Quit the application to get the audio to go away.

The graphics are bad, far worse than the website indicates in its pictures of character models and landscapes. The client is laggy and seems to bog down even on a strong broadband connection. The Inventory system works like a Windows Explorer file browser, which is to say it really sucks to burrow through a dozen directory levels just to put a shirt on my character! And again, I was just left with this sense of pointlessness. “Ok, I’m here. What do i do?”

I know, I am coming to Second Life from World of Warcraft, a highly polished, commercial game from a game maker with millions of dollars in the bank to spend on development. Maybe some people who come to World of Warcraft for the first time experience the same kind of confusion. I only remember feeling awed the first time I logged into WoW. Trust me, I had no such feeling upon logging in to Second Life.

I would not even evaluate Second Life’s graphics on Blizzard’s level, if it were fun. A fun game can cancel out bad graphics; thus many people still like to play Mike Tyson’s Punch Out after all these years. Second Life is not fun.  Now I’ve given it a second chance; I don’t know if there will be a third chance.