My Second Life experience

Until I was given the assignment to do a story about Second Life, I had never heard of the virtual reality phenomenon.
Apparently neither have most people in Amarillo. Yet this 4-year-old online game boasts 9 million members, is making more than $1 million a day and is growing rapidly.
To explain Second Life in the space allotted here is, well, virtually impossible. In a nutshell, it’s a fantasy world where one can live a true second life as anything or anyone imaginable in a world where anything is possible. OK, there are limits, but in the real word you can’t fly, teleport, change your skin, eyes or hair on a whim or have the body of a hot model.
To try and understand what Second Life is all about, I downloaded the game and created a character. In choosing a name, you must select from a limited number of last names but can pick whatever first name you want. With the help of Troy Rydalch, the corporate information technology guru who had to set up the game on my computer, I ended up creating an avatar called Spock Maximus.
You can try Second Life for free, but eventually you will need to earn or buy Linden dollars, the inworld currency. Since this was on the company dime, I had to settle for a free ride.
Getting Spock to come to life was difficult. My home computers were too outdated to support to graphics-intensive 3-D game. The firewall on the system at the Amarillo Globe-News created a few bugs we had to work out. When I first got Spock up and running, he kept right on running. By the time I figured out how to stop him he was miles from shore and several feet above the ocean.
I had a problem which allowed me to only make a few moves before Spock would go offline. When he did, he would just continue to walk through walls, mountains, water, you name it. I couldn’t move him forward or backward, but I could still spin him around, zoom in and out and make him twist is arm.
There were two times I got the game to work properly. The first time, my new virtual friend, Eliz Watanabe, teleported me to her lounge. She was visiting with friends and I dropped in on the conversation. One of her friends was casually changing hair styles and clothes. The items would simply take on whatever she wanted to replace them with. One time she was bald with Princess Leia buns on the sides.
When half of one of her shirts materialized on her back only, I got an unexpected look at just how anatomically correct the avatars are.
That is one of the major pitfalls of Second Life. It is very sexually oriented. There is a teen version of the game, but the adult version is hard to play without getting a virtual eyeful. I learned that on my second outing. I don’t know where I went, but I saw a lot of shops that were essentially peddling porn.
There was one store that was selling Star Wars things. I could have purchased the Millennium Falcon or R2-D2 if I had any money or something to do with them.
As I explored Second Life I found that time vanished in a hurry. It is too easy to get caught up in a virtual life. It was fun to play, but I came away feeling dirty. I was ashamed at having seen some of the stuff I did and having so quickly lost two hours of my real life.
The game is over for me, probably for good. Spock Maximus was an interesting character, but he is now in cyber hibernation, where he’ll spend the rest of his pixilated life.
For some people, Second Life is a good thing. Most video games are addictive to me. I know enough to stay away from them like a recovering alcoholic knows to stay away from the bottle. I wish Eliz Watanabe and her friends Fingers and the clothing-challenged lady all the best.
If you’re thinking about getting into Second Life, remember that it will become what the name implies. You must learn to do it in moderation and to not let it interfere with the real world around you.