Tricia's experience with Second Life

As I read through the posts of some of our classmates, I can say that many of your thoughts resonate with me regarding our class excursion into Second Life. It wasn't as engaging as I expected, and left me feeling disappointed. I suspect that if I spent more time with it, I might get more "hooked", but unlike facebook, I didn't find an immediate draw that will make me want to go back. Some of my experiences were less than enjoyable -- like when my avatar accidentally "flashed" a group of people (though I checked repeatedly, I still don't know what I clicked that led to the sudden loss of clothing) -- others were moderately interesting, like the chance to fly over land and water to arrive at a new destination, and playing with features to change the appearance of my avatar-- while still more were somewhat humourous like my avatar's repeated banging headfirst into the wall at a geological center as I tried to navigate and "fly" out the window (I am glad avatars don't feel pain, or mine would have had quite a headache!) I was cautious about interacting with people -- especially after my unintentional flashing -- because of an awareness that I wasn't interacting with real people, but rather with the personas that people were projecting. I believe it was Lavie who made comment in one of our chat discussions during class that people often present themselves differently than they really are even on social networking sites, so SL isn't that much different from some platform like facebook. There is truth to that, but for me, seeing "people" as cartoon characters made the experience that much more surreal. Bottom line, I just didn't enjoy the experience that much and will probably not try it again.