Second Lifeness~~

This week in our workshop we were actually able to start 'playing' second life. Personally I do not see what all of the fuss is about, I mean, I can understand why some people would enjoy it, but personally it's not for me. I prefer to have a little more direction when starting an MMOesqe game. It's good if you want to meet some new people, but some of the features it offers are fantastic, such as; Fully customising your avatar, 3d modeling (Such as the replica of the titanic) a fully functional physics engine -- Flying, if you 'stop flying' in mid air, you'll hit the floor with a bounce -- without dying of course.

I would rather go down a pub for friend making, because it's more face to face for my liking. With the internet, it's not exactly personal, while it is at the same time. You are speaking directly with someones 'mind' when you're talking to them over the internet, but there's an absence of a face to put with this 'personality' you're getting to know. With online relationships, you have to take what is being said at face value and hpe that it's the real deal. It's a little bit harder for you to lie to someones face.


With that being said, thanks to these workshops, I actually have some direction for second life use, in the form of a machinima video.

1. Psychogeography - Using the teleport system provided by second life, we (as in our small group) could explore parts of second life that we previously have not, using a randomized way of using this particular feature. We'll be using in-game capture software in order to document this journey.

2. A documentary - using second life, or part of second life, we can discuss isssues raised by virtual worlds and how they interact with our 'real lives' and what other issues such subjects raise.

3. A creative video - So basically, a music video like subject, such as:



This is a video recorded within a game called 'Portal' also, the music on the game is totally 'new' as it is a remix of ingame sound clips along with a techno beat created by the 'owner' of this video. Fantastic song.

Second Life

In yesterdays workshop, we began to start a new block of work; Second Life Machinima. First we began with an introduction of what second life is.The first small block of the workshop was looking at 'Online communities being mediated', such as how we represent ourselves on the internet, on  social networking sites, for example. The second and more major part of the work was to being looking at second life and real people specifically.  We did this by watching some documentary videos on people who run their 'real lives' through this second virtual world.



This is the first video we looked at, there was another video clip about some woman that runs a business out of second life and began to make more money through that than she used to at her 'real job'.The very same woman actually met her spouse via this game too, they had been married for a year and a half when the video was filmed and released.

If there wasn't any technical difficulties this week, we then would've gone on to create our own second life accounts, then to just begin exploring second life. But this was not the case, as we share the same IP address at uni, the website automatically blocked it, because of the 80 plus people trying to sign up at the site at the same time. So we have to sign up for this by next wednesday.  I'm actually quite looking forwad to creating my own machinima, because i'm familiar with the concept of it from being a frequent web user for the past few years.