A Second Life

So I am on secondlife.com and I am making a virtual me.

My name is Rouri Magic.
My Birthday is February 5, 1985.
When you are deciding on a name for the virtual you, they provide a list of last names and check to make sure you are not duplicating another persons virtual name.

Now I am choosing my avatar. They don't have many choices to pick from. Two of the choices are not even human lookalikes . . . . and for some reason it didn't let me create one... so I will try again.

So before I skipped the community part. Now I am going to join Avatar Island. Hopefully it works. . . . yay! It worked. Same name, same birthday. And now I am installing the software. I just logged in and it says there are over a million people who visited second life in the last 60 days!

When I entered my island, I learned how to fly and teleport. I also learned how to buy things and sell things. I met a couple people on the island. One girl was a person who had the job of helping people who are new to second life. I was chatting with her and she gave me all kinds of new free clothes. So I changed my appearance and my clothing. When you go in to edit your appearance it asks you all sorts of things. I made my girl look like me, but I wonder if people who are using this all the time create an avatar thats looks like what they would like to look like or what they presume to be attractive. While I was chatting with this girl (her name was myst), there was a guy who entered the island and asked, "What is the purpose of this game?" Only guy there named Craig answered him saying that it wasn't really a game. He called it a "socially virtual life". He explained how people can get jobs and earn money just like in the real life but you very rarely have to spend your own money. He also said you could go to school and learn different things to get a job with a better salary, etc.

So then I decided to leave to conversation and transport to explore. I looked at the map and since I can't really tell what each place has in it I just clicked on one. It was a vacation spot with an ocean that had a diving board off the edge and a boat that was docked. So I tried to go on the boat and drive it but that didn't work. There wasn't anybody in site on this island so I couldn't ask around. And then I tried to dive and it actually worked. You can select what type of dive and your avatar will do it. They have back flips and twists and all sorts of cool moves.

This is literally like a video game, except it can be, and generally is, used as an actual second life for people who spend all of there time at there computers. I can definitely see getting addicted to it because over an hour passed while I was doing it and I completely lost track of time. It takes time to learn the moves and different types of things the program allows you to do. I can also understand, from the perspective of someone who isn't social, meetings friends and possibly a person to date on here. I don't know how "real" the relationships would be if they are over the internet though since you don't really know who the other person is.