My Story of First Hours of Life in Second Life

 Activity 6 -week 1

For all of my life, I’ve been fascinated by animated movies and cartoons and suddenly they are telling me that I can be flying ET in the island of fairies now and rainbow hair man the next minute…isn’t that just great

However, my first attempt was far away from fantastic… I had to create 3 avatars before the system will accept any and spent long time to get the system going but all seemed to be ok as long as I had that fairyland in my mind and ………..   The dialogs within my mind continued….

3, 2, 1, and BINGO, I’m there… oooo…what is this? Where am I? Who are these gray creatures around me? Why I’m being pushed? Someone seems to be on my head? This is not like the picture of the SL page? Am I in the wrong place? So what should I do?…

Anyway, after standing still in the same spot (which I didn’t know is the telehub place) for 5 min, I find the courage to make my first moves. I realized after a while that I’m in orientation island so I was excepting to have some kind of slide show (maybe even a web based one) before I actually started to control my avatar. I even tried to talk with some people and ask for help but most of them were in the same situation as me.  The island was far more boring than what I had in mind and it was not helpful in getting me around as well, so I searched for “fun” and ended up in “club” without knowing how to control my avatar. While I was amazed with people’s ability to manage their avatars (they were dancing I didn’t know that animations exist), I bumped into a guy which with my definition at the time was “virtually cool” J (it was completely unintentional J ). That night I was lucky though, he helped me a lot regarding knowing SL. He added me as a friend and taught me how to use the map and mini-map, teleportation and my mouse view. After some time, he suggested showing me some interesting places; first we went shopping for virtual items which I couldn’t really digest it at the time. He even gave me L$100 so I can buy things if I wish to and showed me freebies places such as “deva luka” to get things for free. After fixing my look, he teleported me to “titanic”, which is still one of my favorite places in SL for chillaxing (chilling and relaxing).

After that night, I find the confidence to live my SL and started to explore different places. I started to wonder around and build my network of people which for a while was my only source for help. Afterwards, I decided to search web for how to use SL and I found videos the most helpful tool, specially Torley Lindens posts. In order to gain some experience I would randomly open one of his videos and try to experience it in-world simultaneously. When I started to build things in SL, I found my knowledge on previous 3D application (such as 3dmax) quite helpful to have an idea about the perspectives of different objects and how to handle sets of them as the link objects.

Hmmm, long story short, after more than a year I’m still being surprised everyday and learn as I go along. Now, I see myself not only as Anna but Viki also, with the belief that behind each avatar is a person with all human feelings that controls them.

Message to newbies: In second life you will not face even half of the problem that you face in the first life J and don’t expect your new born avatar run like an adult. Finally, if you are not comfortable in-world use outside sources to learn what you should do in SL.