In truth, in the years since its peak in the mid‑2000s, Second Life has become something more like a magnet for mockery. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or a sudden sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces, “He is risen.” As one Second Life handbook puts it: “From your point of view, SL works as if you were a god.” At church, they cannot take physical communion-the corporeality of that ritual is impossible-but they can bring the stories of their faith to life. They celebrate their “rez day,” the online equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined.
These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up, get married, and make money. Its vast landscape consists entirely of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has been built by someone else-an avatar controlled by a live human user. This was meant to suggest something more holistic, more immersive, and more encompassing. Many are tempted to call Second Life a game, but two years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insisting that no one refer to it as that. In 2013, in honor of Second Life’s tenth birthday, Linden Lab-the company that created it-released an infographic charting its progress: 36 million accounts had been created, and their users had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding territory that comprised almost 700 square miles. The longer answer is that it’s a landscape full of goth cities and preciously tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rainforest temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs and trippy giant chess games. W hat is Second Life? The short answer is that it’s a virtual world that launched in 2003 and was hailed by some as the future of the internet. She wakes up at 5:30 to inhabit a life in which she has the luxury of never getting out of bed at all. I’m slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning.
(Melissa Golden)īut each morning, before all that-before getting the kids ready for school and putting in eight hours at the call center, before getting dinner on the table or keeping peace during the meal, before giving baths and collapsing into bed-Bridgette spends an hour and a half on the online platform Second Life, where she lives in a sleek paradise of her own devising. to spend an hour and a half on Second Life. Bridgette McNeal, an Atlanta mother with severely autistic twins, wakes up at 5:30 a.m.
0 kommentar(er)
