Second Life? Bah, Humbug!
Trawling Google News, I came across a gem of an anti-Second Life column from Darren Garnick of The Nashua Telegraph, clearly the leading Nashua-based newspaper that's based in Nashua, NH.
Garnick rages of the virtual world: "Clearly, I am not a visionary. Because I think Second Life is for losers who cannot achieve anything or pursue meaningful relationships in their first lives. At best, Second Life sounds like a rehab program. At worst, it is the ideal brand name for a satanic cult."
But wait, there's more: "The bizarre aspect of the game is that there is no universal objective. No bad guys to kill. No magic caves to explore. No alien invasion to repel. SL is marketed as real life in cyberspace. You can work hard, get in with the right social circles and become a Second Life mover and shaker. Or, you can dye your hair purple, get a tongue ring and whine about how this virtual society doesn’t understand you, either."
His conclusion? After an explanation of his 4-year-old son's 'virtual world' stories involving a “Kangatai” (a creature with the body of a tiger and the head of a kangaroo) and a “Tigerkang” (body of a kangaroo and the head of a tiger), he expectorates: "My biggest fear is that if I stop paying attention, my boy is going to grow up to become a Second Lifer. God forbid."
Comments
I feel bad for this guys kid. The modeling tools in games like Second Life are an incredible and fertile ground for imagination and building computer skills in a playful way that can also be shared with others. Unfortunately, Dad only sees "a waste of time".
Hope the kid has fun growing up to be a lawyer.
Posted by: Hambone | October 26, 2006 7:56 PM
The Telegraph is a rag, full of spiteful views on just about every subject you can think of. It's for bitter people to have something to be justifably bitter about. So this story doesn't surprise me very much.
Posted by: Aaron | October 26, 2006 11:50 PM
Wow, what a toad.
I was wandering one of Second Life's sandboxes a few days ago and someone had built gigantic, 40-meter-tall LEGO men around the place. Last night someone else had recreated part of a Sonic the Hedgehog level in 3D, right down to rings that could be collected and a tunnel you could walk down. Anyone who thinks it's all boring should hang out in the sandboxes for a while. (Be prepared to wander past a lot of lesser creations first, though, and maybe search through the skies a while.)
Second Life rocks.
Posted by: John H. | October 27, 2006 8:25 AM
Second Life is a waste of Time ! wake up ! Go and get yourself a Real Life !
1.Breathe
2.Think
3.Do
Posted by: Fred | December 5, 2006 11:26 AM
Well some interesting stuff has certainly been created on Second Life. But just as in real life, it's the people who make a community. And the people on Second Life ARE quite clearly disturbed in some fashion. Many seemingly ordinary people will tell you it's perfectly normal to get enraged when someone insults their avatar's appearance, as though it was their real life body that had been insulted. Also, people tend to get a little nuts about the whole "Internet Power" deal. It's relatively easy to own a large amount of virtual land on Second Life, if you're pathetic enough to spend money for anything virtual. Many land owners will open their land to the whole public (seemingly making it public land), and then act like jerks to anyone they don't like. And if the person stands up to them, they get banned from the area, which is clearly an abuse of power, and indicates that these people ARE pathetic, since they clearly feel a need to gain some virtual power over strangers that they could never have in real life.
So in a nutshell: Second Life is a great idea, and COULD be great, if 99% of its users weren't psychopaths.
Posted by: Arlo | November 5, 2007 4:28 PM
Second life is marketed as a fertile ground for the imagination but the compromise involved is far greater than that of "real" life and that is fact. If this is imagination and community people have been watching to much tv!
Posted by: overtaken technology | March 7, 2008 1:47 PM