I finally got around to reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. His description of the metaverse has re-sparked my interest in trying to find a working (sort of) metaverse like program out there somewhere. I re-found Second Life after hearing that it went Open Source and decided to give it another shot.

I originally tried SL several years ago. I thought that the idea was really cool, but I couldn’t really get the hang of it, and I had plenty of MMO games to compare it too. What I really wanted (and still do want) was a game with social networking abilities. Somewhere that I can have a small presence (just like on the web) and be found by people, but still have fun wandering around on my own. I also wanted people to be there on a regular basis.

In my new journey to SL, I’ve decided to give it a bit more of a chance. I read some articles about how major businesses have created their own online presence in SL and it has greatly benefited them. So I created a new account under the name Red Arkright (I still don’t like that you have to choose a last name from a list.) and did some mild modifications on my avatar to make it look remotely like me (which it still doesn’t) and ran through the tutorials again.

I found the tutorials a lot easier this time, probably because they broke it down into basic tutorials, for wandering and talking, and advanced tutorials, for creating and texturing. I got off and running pretty quickly and made my first jump to Dublin, Ireland. I had trouble controlling my avatar because of all the lag, even with no people around. It takes a long time for everything to render clearly and I often find myself staring at a sign for a while before the text becomes clear enough to read.

I’ve wandered around a little and figuring out how to use various objects can be quite difficult, but it’s still too early to judge if this is worth investing more time into. I’ll try to keep you updated on what happens and any interesting adventures that I have along the way.