Saturday, January 26, 2013

Rant: Second Life’s Revealing “Secret”


As a surprise to no one scientists and people living under a rock, female avatars in Second Life expose more skin than their male counterparts.

“The human tendency to cover up stems from climatic, environmental, physical and cultural constraints,” say the researchers of a Canadian study, “so measuring people’s propensity to reveal skin can be difficult in the real world.” So they donned their lab coats and tripped around an unreal world called Second Life for awhile, scribbling in their virtual notebooks and measuring with their virtual.. skin measurers.

Their exact findings?


Having the time of my Second Life

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

Thank you for this lovely thought, Madame Troly-Curtin, because there are some of us Second Lifers who feel we spend far too much time in our virtual world, and we appreciate your assurances. The key word in this quotation is “enjoy”. How many of us can say we explicitly enjoy Second Life enough to justify our time investment?

Discovery and Adventure


Well, the awe I feel when I stumble upon an impossible and fantastical place in SL, the intensity of emotion I feel about those I love here, the thrill of creating something or of marveling about the profound creative talents of others-- these distill into a sense of discovery and adventure, which I do find extremely enjoyable. Those times, however, are fewer and fewer, and I find my time in SL is often “wasted” (as in bored and thus unenjoyable) time. So I log in less often.


Why?