What is Second Life? Second Life is like lucid dreaming together with other people. Second Life is more open-ended than any other 3d world you've ever entered. Second Life is the name of a 3d "metaverse" of sorts. The weird name does not do justice to the elegance of the system. The wildly dynamic graphics engine along with the snappy networking code, all working together in a massively-multiperson environment makes it one of the most impressive online systems I've seen in a while. Second Life is a lot more technically advanced than the other "virtual worlds" and MMO games, such as Active Worlds, There, and The Sims Online. In Second Life, you have nearly complete freedom to create whatever you want, with hardly any limitations.

Orientation Island

Creating The team that maintains Second Life continue to invest all of their time and energy into providing us tools to create, rather than waste time on the neverending uphill battle of trying to feed us all of the content. This way, we may create content for each other, rather than becoming bored within days or hours of release of new content, like in most MMO games. In Second Life, you can build things in 3D; anyone nearby will be able to watch you as you're building. You can even give them permission to join you and help you build. You can create nearly anything you can imagine. Once created, you can store it away in your unlimited inventory, share it with friends, put copies of it up for sale, or just leave it to persist on your own property for others to stop by and see. Building is easy; it's not much different than playing with LEGO blocks or Lincoln Logs. There are several basic 3d shapes (spheres, cylinders, cubes, etc.) that you can connect together, stretch, rotate, cut, shear, hollow, twist, and so forth. Once you've built an object, you can set colors and/or apply textures to it. You can upload your own texture images to "paint" them onto your object's surfaces. Once you've applied textures, you can adjust the texture scale, repeats, offsets, rotations, and so on to get the exact look you want. There are no limits to how many objects you can create. You have unlimited inventory storage, and you can upload your own textures, sounds and animations to apply to your objects or your avatar's body.

A resident's hilltop home Maxx Monde's towering skyscraper A slot machine at White Star Casino

Scripting You can use the power of scripting to bring your object to life. Scripts are capable of making your objects communicate, move, create sounds, change shape or textures, sense the environment, etc. Your scripts can be as simple as telling an object to slowly rotate in place, or as complex as a fully featured MMORPG game! The scripting language is easy to learn, yet flexible. Your scripts are automatically compiled into bytecode and then run on the servers to affect and/or sense the environment. You can share scripts with others, or set permissions on your objects to keep your scripts private.

Scripted exploding lemmings!

Physics Second Life also uses a very sophisticated physics simulation engine, Havok, to control the behavior of physical objects. You can create a bucket full of ice cubes, tip it over, and watch all of the cubes fall and behave naturally as they pile, roll, and tumble onto the ground, all without writing a single line of code. And of course, everyone around you can see this too. Second Life is a very social environment, and any changes you make to the world are immediately visible to everyone nearby. This creates a very interesting atmosphere for collaborative building, exploration, and discussion.

Though it may look complex, building is actually quite easy to learn. There are free building classes held regularly.

Socializing Nearly everyone agrees that the employees and the residents in Second Life are some of the friendliest people you'll meet in an online environment. A good part of this is probably due to the fact that Second Life residents must be of age 18 or older. This creates an environment for a fun and mature online community that you can't find anywhere else online. Avatars are extremely customizable, and you can have as many as you want. The avatar editor has about 200 slider adjustments, each of which can be adjusted with a hundred units of granularity. You can create 3d objects and attach them to any of 30 skeletal points on your body to create accessories (glasses, jewelrey, gun holster, etc), or even a wildly different appearance. Clothing is an extensively customizable way to be creative, and a good market to make some money. You can upload several layers of textures as skin, pants, shirts, dresses, shoes, socks, gloves, tattoos, hair, and even upload a custom image for your irises =)

Town hall meeting with the devs There are dozens of events every day

Commerce Second Life has a very open and healthy economy with it's own virtual currency. You always get a weekly stipend for free, but you can make more money by using your creativity to build things to put on the market and sell to other residents. The virtual money used in game can be traded on third-party websites, such as Gaming Open Market for real money. The designers of Second Life not only allow this, they encourage it, so that Second Life residents are motivated to make great and entertaining content. Building and selling content of exceptional quality can easily earn you hundreds of real US dollars per month.

Avatar Central was one of the first public "malls" where people could buy and sell creations made by residents of Second Life

Subscriptions and Land Second Life has a 7-day free trial, however a credit card is needed to verify that you are over 18 years of age, and to ensure only one free trial every 90 days. One really outstanding thing about the subscription system in Second Life is that you don't have to pay monthly charges to hang out in the world. Once you pay $10 for a basic membership, that is it; after that, you can live in Second Life forever with no additional monthly fees. I know this might sound too good to be true, as nearly NO other MMO has a one-time fee plan. This can be done because the land owners pay for their land space like websites pay for their hosting. They pay the costs to run the servers; the more land they own, they more they pay in monthly fees. If you just want to hang out, build in the public sandboxes and be social, you never have to pay again once you pay the initial $10 to sign up for a basic membership. A basic membership lets you do everything in the world that anyone else can do, except you don't get to own any land. This is a great way to hang out and socialize in a really cool online world, where most other online places will charge you a monthly fee to even get in the gate. If you later decide you would like some space of your own to build something persistent, you can always "tier up" and buy a small chunk of land.

Wide open terrain is a blank canvas ready for your imagination

Finally Before pointing you to the Second Life website, I'd like to make one last note. The website really does not do it justice. The first time I visited the Second Life website, I was not really all that amazed or impressed. A few months later when I decided to finally give it a try, I got in world and found out it was a really amazing achievement, and I was kicking myself for not having signed up sooner. Hopefully you'll give it a try and see what it's actually like in-world rather than rely on the just the website =)

Themes vary from tropical islands to snow-capped mountains

Thanks for reading, hope to see you in world!

-- Kex Godel