Get a first life!

Last night, I decided to try out Second Life and see what all the hype was about. After all, Sarkozy, Segolene Royal, Le Pen and Bayrou all had virtual offices there, many churches are paying big bucks to have streaming video sermons playing there, companies and libraries are opening offices, and I even read about a french école d'ingénieurs teaching english by putting all of their students in front of Second Life. I've also heard of virtual universities... etc...
So I went to the website, and was pleasantly surprised to see they had a Mac OS X version, as well as Linux versions. (alpha) I took the Mac OS X version because it seemed to me that it was further developed and I wanted to give the game a try in the best possible conditions.
I signed up (free), got a name (which I won't disclose because I don't really plan on playing much anymore so what's the point?) and opened the program.
A note about the previously mentioned best possible conditions. I have an iBook G4, 1.33 GHz PowerPC, and only 512 Mb of memory (which I plan on changing soon, to 1.5 Gb.). I also am on a wireless connection, with DSL. So my system isn't extraordinarily fast, but it's not too bad either. I'll try the game again when I have more RAM.
I noticed a lot of lag. Sometimes I would be pressing my arrow keys like a maniac just to get my character moving, and realize 2 seconds later that I had run into a wall. The game was very slow, and not very pretty. Graphically it's quite disappointing. I know that's not due to my system because I've subsequently seen screenshots and videos on youtube and the like.
Then began the fun (and somewhat frustrating part) : making myself look unique. I love creating characters, I had a lot of fun making my sim at a friends house, making my Mii on my Wii, and this was kind of fun too, although frustrating because of the lag, and because every now and then she would get out of focus. I was also frustrated because I wanted to make her skirt a bit longer because I took the trousers off (pants is such a loaded word in some countries.... :p) and the game didn't let me. So now I'm walking around with a mini-mini skirt. Oh well. It's just a game. I made her face look nicer and gave her pretty eyes. My major frustration though, was the hair. The hair feature is very poorly designed and I have no idea how people actually manage to get nice-looking hair - definately not through the game's interface, at least not without spending hours at it. So I got acceptable hair (by making it black it looks ok) and a nice face, got rid of the exceedingly unrealistic curves given to me by default and was fairly happy.
Next I tried flying. Was fine until I landed in a bush and was stuck. I tried all the menus to see if there was a way to get out of there like go back to the starting point of the orientation island. There wasn't. However, due to the lag, even in the menu, I accidentally took all my clothes off. I didn't really care - I was stuck in a stupid bush and couldn't move, and it's not like the character was actually me or actually anatomically correct (I later understood that you have to buy the right to exit Barbie-doll status). But I was in a PG-area none the less, and I don't like walking about naked, so I looked for a way to get my clothes back on, and there was none in the menu. So I quit the game and started back up. Still in the bush, still naked. And half of the menus were frozen, this time, so I couldn't even try to get them back on. I quit again, and did a quick search on the internet. Apparantly, this has happened to a lot of people. I eventually found out that I could use my inventory to get re-dressed. Which I promptly did. (after re-starting my poor computer)
I (eventually) figured out how to leave orientation island, and then help island, and make it into the real world. Now I didn't want to spend any real money, so I decided to look for a job. Well, good luck with that. Either you dance on a dance-pad for L$1 per 8 minutes, (virtually nothing and a waste of system resources IMHO) either you become a stripper. Basically. Other jobs require paying money and knowing how to design skins. Now I don't want to become a stripper, even in a stupid game, and I couldn't anyway with my fairly default avatar. Choosy choosy choosy. So I decided to just forget this and explore.
I teleported to Japan (obvious choice). Well, most people there speak Japanese (surprise) and with the lag and the not-so-cool imagery, I eventually got frustrated. I now understand what flying is for : when you fall off, or end up in the sea by some strange miracle, it's useful to get out of that situation.
I tried going to France. I feel like the game is empty. People there aren't very talkative, and when they are it's like "hi. where are you from? oh that's nice. bye".
I guess you can only have fun with this game if you have lots of patience, RL friends on it, a fairly new computer (but not one of the newest Vista PCs), and are willing to dish out RL cash. (building houses and getting pretty clothes and REALLY customizing your hairdos could be fun, even I, the proverbial stick-in-the-mud, can see that) Oh - and IF they get more servers. Seriously. And update the graphics. And gameplay. Ugh. Think very first playstation except less cool.
The most fun I actually had was laughing at my avatar with my sister, and reading other people's (negative and sometimes quite funny) experiences on their websites. So why another post? Aren't I just making the hype bigger by blogging this?
Well, perhaps also to vent. I find it really stupid that people assume "geeks" necessarily like that stuff. They can - especially since the game is on the path to becoming open-source - find interest in programming it, in creating stuff, but it's a myth that geeks care about social networking and are the ones inventing all those horrid spellings on the internet AnD TyPiNg LiKe ThIs. Geeks actually care about grammar and are more particular about spelling than most people. Geeks would be the type to point out that the phrase "I can't get no satisfaction" should mean, because of the double negative, "I'm quite satisfied". Geeks care about knowledge in general. Sometimes they can be quite picky. (just read some of the talk pages on Wikipedia articles) They care about detail and exactitude. Optimizing. Social networking can be a bonus (becoming friends with someone in a Linux User Group, for example) - but I don't know any geeks who have a MySpace page, except for the ones who were curious to see just how the basic code is (is it W3C-compliant to start out with and the users mess it up? actually it's rotten from start to end), but don't actually put anything on there. And thinking Second Life is cool, doesn't prove anything about being a geek, or even about being tech savvy. It just proves you have a lot of patience and not much of a Real Life. However, don't generalize what I'm saying to all gamers. I actually have quite a bit of respect for WoW. (when used in moderation), although I have never played myself.

This was originally posted on my website