Second Life -- "a virtual environment."

Second Life, a potential escape from the first one. Kind of? Over the past week in class, we've gotten to experiment with this new environment. I had heard of Second Life already because of my love of the TV show "The Office", as Dwight creates his own avatar. Philip Rosedale, or rather Philip Linden, created Second Life a few years ago as a means to create a virtual world for others to use. You can literally be whoever you want to be. Plus the options for names are somewhat hysterical. For example, my avatar is named Hilary Adored. She looks kinda like me I guess. Brown hair, brown eyes. But I made her thinner. A girl can dream. And she's wearing pink, and I hate wearing pink. But I ultimately gave up on "personalizing" her because it was frustrating. You can make them look however you like, jump, fly, and even go to St. Joe's.

Residents, as we're called in this virtual environment, can interact with each other by means of conversation or, as my friend as I figured out, running into people. From my experience, these conversations are similar to someone IMing you. This is part of the whole experience that I didn't like so much. You have no idea who these people are, which can be good or bad considering it's not really REAL life. You can purchase land and essentially recreate yourself through this world that can be as similar or different to yours as you want.

So, this brings me to my main question: why create an avatar? Why become a Second Life "resident"? I feel like people could be wanting a brief escape, or possibly just for fun. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it just didn't do it for me. The concept of a virtual world is becoming more common as our society becomes increasingly more dependent on technology. I think it's safe to say that at this rate, what with online shopping, online classes, and now Second Life and other technological resources, eventually people won't have to leave the house!

However...I think Dwight sums it up better than I do:

"I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great I literally wanted to create a second one. Absolutely everything was the same...except I could fly."
"Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have winners or losers."