which life

Classic description of a day just like one we spent in Second Life in the summer, when Kattan Honung and Porly Tang stepped out into second life. A soooooo frustrating afternoon. Personally, I never worked out how to fly properly. And being the kind of girl who plays by the rules (well, ok, maybe I'm not in my first life, but in my second life...) I stuck by the instruction not to leave orientation island till I could work my character. I have a very nice tshirt and jeans that fit snugly to a great figure that is the only sort you can have ('k, I can imagine people wanting to look great in the virtual world, but I would, frankly, have chosen to have the same kind of build as I really have), with the scariest eyes that you can't change - but that's ok, because you can't see your own face. And eventually I sort of got the hang of looking round things. Not perfectly, more like 30 % of the time I'd jump up in the air and make a fool of myself instead of turning round as I meant to. But flying? not a prayer. cannot do it. The only way I got off the damned island was teleporting to where Porly Tang's hideous green hair and purple catsuit suddenly made loads more sense cos I could see where he was. And then I kept getting stuck on a snowy roof of the log cabin we were in, or falling out of the window, instead of going up and down stairs. Hopeless. The only thing I could do with any class was sit in a chair in a mall for 3 minutes at a time to earn money (!) for free. Porly Tang on the other hand got to grips with it almost straight away. Must be a generational thing. Very interesting though, after having seen it on BBC newsnight. Very educating, seeing how it works. If I could have got into the kind of parties and live events then I might have got into it more. Mostly I just felt stupidly awkward, and barely even talked to anyone so noone said 'how come you cant walk properly'... But fascinating to get an insight into the kind of virtual world that people live in these days. (did I blog about this before?) We keep talking/hearing about needing to respond to the experiences that our students come in with. And ok, so a lot of our computer animation students will be used to gaming and these kinds of virtual worlds, the population of second life isn't necessarily, or even at all, the younger generation, but proper adults. Scary stuff.... Must remember to say hi to Markbeeb Vostok if I see him! What's even scarier - check out how much real money gets spent, not the free stuff we were sitting around for.

tags: geeky