Just when you though your first life was too much to handle…they offered you a second one.  Second Life embodies the fantasies of its users; your second life is everything you want it to be.  Yet, amoung numerous opportunites to seek adventure and run a business, second life offers people the opportunity to hide behind a mask and socialize.  The average avatar, the virtual represenation of the person, looks nothing like its user.  Inherently wrong?, I think not, but to what extent can someone pretend to living an “imaginary” life before being a virtual puppeter moves from hobby to a livelihood?  As an online multiplayer environment with unlimited potential does Second Life pose the same problems that exist in other MMO’s like World of Warcraft.  Yahoo Game’s recently told the story of WOW causing such marital discord that a couple divorced.  Now I’m not saying that Second Life will increase the divorce rate in America, but I’m sure that it will impact the way relationships are conducted.  Does a digital date count as cheating, is intellectual property extended to the digital realm, these are questions that address real life issues and are taking on new meaning in Second Life.  A European software company Vollee thinks that second life shouldn’t end on the computer, but is developing a second life application for cell phones, so users can bring their second life into their first.  Second Life offers unlimited potential for creativity, entrepreneurship, and fantasy, but every action falls on a spectrum and that line begins to fade more and more as the distinction between reality and fiction becomes blurred.

What if our current life was a test run, and Second Life became reality as we know it? We’d scramble to establish our avatars, buy cell phones that have no purpose, and wait for Mitt Romney to launch another run at President.

It might not be a healthy approach, but it’s a marketers dream. Product Placement anyone? Take a look around Second Life and you’ll see some big name investors, Time Warner, Pepsi, etcetera. Ebay has even gotten into the mix, helping out with land auctions, and corporations are scrambling to establish their position in second life.

I think its more fitting, in a way, to have a video explaining Second Life than text. So, checkout this YouTube video of Second Life. (4:13) I thought the part about Star Wars "roleplaying" was a hysterical idea. Sorry, but I can just picture a bunch of these "avatars" playing from their mom's basement.

Bizarre. Trying to grasp the concept of Philip Rosedale’s Second Life is quite akin to grappling with the mind-boggling concept of life in Alduous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. The success of Second Life – attracting approximately 10,000 new members daily – seems to prove Huxley’s point of artificial happiness. As the windows provided by technology seem to be opening – are we losing a sense of true human individuality as people attempt to gain a newer more individualistic existence online? Is the internet serving more to numb our pains in this “first life” than it is to benefit humanity? With use comes abuse – and I must wonder if Second Life is a pure abuse of the internet, putting all apparent “advancements” aside. Regardless of its aims to provide “meaningful connections” among people, Second Life seems, rather, to cause people to neglect the true human relations they would have had at the outset. People are quitting their day jobs to commit themselves to some online ‘marketplace’ where they can gain a “foreign” currency – Linden dollars – through sales of artificial real estate and other means – that they then can exchange into US dollars.

While I must concede to innumerable differences in the workings of the worlds of Rosedale and Huxley, Huxley’s point on human happiness is well made and fairly applicable. While Huxley’s “drones” seem to float around in a slight, self-indulgent state of oblivion, they lack the true, deep joy and profound experiences that often result from the trials and the messiness of real life (seen in the Savage). Second Life seems to clearly advocate that one would foresake real life for the sake of another, duller existence cloaked in all the glitz and speed of modern technology (analogous to the scientific achievements prevalent in Brave New World). Bizarre. Very Bizarre.

I came across this great article by Sean Ammirati, a Grove City College CIS grad and VP of Business Development and Product Management for mSpoke. He came and spoke at Grove recently and was an incredible speaker. Very inspiring! A few interesting points from the article… The attrition rate for Second Life is horrible for the first 3.5 hours of a user's experience (overall 90%) . If they meet another avatar their chance of staying increases greatly.

1) Do the users who like it, like it a lot? Yes 2) Do a lot of users like it? No