Research: Second Life

I have heard about it many times, but I don’t have any friends that use it, so I didn’t know anything about it. The only thing I had read, was when a newspaper wrote about some guy that sold his house in Second Life for 1200 euro. I was shocked, but intrigued. So when given the opportunity to take a class in Second Life this semester, I couldn’t say no...


Journalist Joel Stein wrote his first impression of Second Life in an article in The Times: “The growth of Second Life is particularly impressive considering that the program takes forever to download, requires a computer with a graphics card for gaming, sucks up hours just to design your character and—this is the genius part—has created the perfect capitalist system in which you pay for fake stuff (clothing, housing, hookers) with real money. People make thousands of U.S. dollars selling designs for cars or flipping virtual property. Many companies, seeing an opportunity for marketing and sales, have created virtual branches on Second Life: American Apparel has a clothing store, Adidas hawks shoes, Starwood previewed a new line of hotels, Reuters has an embedded journalist, Jay-Z played a concert and the Sundance Channel is setting up a virtual screening room. Apparently, people want to cram their second lives full of the same stuff they have in their first.“

So I had to try it out myself, and made an avatar (a personality), and went in… The first thing I thought about was “What do I really want to do in here?”, since it is so popular and millions of people are users. “What are they all doing?” I started to search for the free-stuff, and changed my clothes and body. But then I wanted to talk with people, so I try to find somebody to talk to. First I talked to one guy that seemed to be sitting on a bench doing nothing. I asked him what he was doing, and answered with the same question to me, so I didn’t get a lot out of that conversation. I asked everybody I met, “What can you do in here?”, and everybody answered “Whatever you want to!” But what did I want to do? I don’t know. So I sat on the back of a horse, and checked out some free jewelry, and then logged out. I think my approach to Second Life is my interest in the people that use it, not using it myself. So I decided to do a research on relationships and people inside of Second Life, with special focus on “long distance relationships”.


(notice my fantastic "mouse" avatar, yeah it is me on the right, sitting...)