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Second Life
Second Life

A virtual world developed by Linden Lab.

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Second Life - Virtual World, not a PC Game, the best one at the moment

  • Apr 1, 2009
  • by
Rating:
+5
Second Life should not really be in the PC Game category.  It's a free-form virtual world, without goals or rules or enforced competition in the common sense that the word game is used by many people these days. 

Second Life is in my view the most advanced free-form virtual world in operation today.   I've looked at  number of them, including There, Active Worlds, Cybertown, various OpenSim worlds, Hipihi, Novoking, and others.  Second Life basically works, and it's out of beta, and offers features that others lack or don't have to the same degree.

Linden Research, Inc. is the actual name of the company that operates Second Life, but it is more commonly called Linden Lab, singular on the Lab. 

Second Life has:

A building system built in that allows folks to create objects relatively simply.

A micro-economy that allows users to trade and convert their earning to real dollars,  if they are good enough at their business.

A scripting  language that  allows users to create scripts and attach them to objects which can then be made to  move, change size, nature, colors and textures,  all on the fly, read and respond to messages from users and other scripted objects, and other such behaviors, communicate with programs running on web servers, and so on. 

Second Life allows considerable flexibility in customizing one's avatar, allowing you to be a humanoid in a broad range of sizes and builds, and by attaching properly shaped and scripted objects to the avtar body you can effectively transform your avatar into something other than human, such as a furry, a robot, a bookcase, or other such things.

Second Life allows users to import textures, sounds, and animations, thus providing more customization possibilities.

Second Life allows owners of regions to customize their landscape with considerable flexibility.

There are many clever builds in Second Life, places worth looking at for visual enjoyement alone.

Second Life 's makers are working hard to make their virtual world available in multiple languages, which I feel is quite desirable.

The main portion of  Second Life is limited to users 18 or older.  There is a portion of Second Life for users age 13 through 17, called Teen Second Life. 

Second Life uses several different real world locations to store it's virtual world.  Each real world storage and processing center is a "colo",  a colocation center, where network, storage, indexing and processing take place.   Second Life's virtual geography is divided into rectangular regions,  each region being represented or created by a simulator program running on a server in the colo.  Different servers may run a different number of simulator programs, depending on the type of virtual region the simulator program, or sim, is producing.  Some regions can hold more virtual objects or allow more avatars than others; those regions which hold the least  can be run  8 to a server, and those than can hold the most can be run 2 to a server.   Since a simulator program corresponds to a virtual region,  and the simulator programs are called sims, the terms region and sim are often used interchangably by Second Life users to mean the same thing: a virtual region.

The region simulators play an important part in Second Life's operation, but they are far from being the whole of it.  There are asset servers that store the contents of the virtual world, the objects and textures and sounds and so on.  There are messaging systems that transmit all the chat text from users and the messages sent by scripted objects to users, other scripted objects,  email message sending and receiving systems,  and http messages that communicate with the internet outside of Second Life.   Second Life is an extremely complex system that involves a tremendous amount of realtime data transfer, and operating such a system is not a solved problem, it's an experiment.  There's no book on how to make such a massive, non-sharded virtual world that Linden Lab system designers and programmers can turn to for easy answers.  They are having to discover how to do it while it is operating and implement changes to the system with as little disruption to it's users as possible.

Second Life started out as primarily a recreation place, an activity engaged in for fun by early adopter types of folks.  With the additon of the in-world economy with a currency that can be converted back and forth to real money,  it became attractive to folks that  wanted to do business, either as  a hobby, to make the time spent there pay its way, or a part of the way, or increasingly as the population and economy grew, for real money, significant money.  There are a number of cases of people succeeding in  a  major way in business terms, but I suspect that the overwhelming bulk of people are either paying nothing and making nothing money-wise in Second Life, or paying a little or making a little, but nothing much either way.   It's quite possible to have a fun time in Second Life without spending a dime.   When I joined Second Life, it cost ten dollars to join, and once I paid that, I went at least six months without spending a dime, and had a fine time doing so. 

A new user in Second Life might be wise to avoid rushing in to spending too much money, at least so far as buying land goes.  Folks have different incomes and expenses, of course, so what constitutes a little or a lot varies from person to person, and with the state of the economy and so on, but for everyone entering Second Life, there are many many free things such as clothes, avatars, scripted toys, free houses, just all sorts of virtual things are available for free.  The one thing that is not readily available to start out with for free is land.

Although Linden Lab owns all the land in Second Life, in the real world sense of ownership, it "sells" virtual land to users, in one of two ways.  One can buy a virtual parcel of land in a region that is directly operated by Linden Lab, or one can buy an entire region from Linden Lab, making the buyer the operator of the region, with considerably more power over the region than a parcel owner has over their parcel.

A user thus can buy a parcel from Linden from Linden Lab, or buy a region from Linden Lab, but that's not all.  A user can also pay  a user that owns a region for a parcel on the region, or pay for the use of the whole region.  

The regions that are directly operated by Linden Lab are called the mainland, and the regions that are operated by other users are called private sims, or private islands.  Groups of contiguous or otherwise closely associated regions are called estates.  

When an estate gets big enough it might be called a continent.

So - Linden Lab runs several continents, all of which together are called the mainland.  Each continent is an estate.   Some users own just parcels, other users own a single region, or sim, while other users own one or more estates, some of which are also big enough to get labeled continents.

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July 16, 2009
As a resident of second life for the past 3 years, I will have to say that I've really enjoyed my time spent in this virtual world that lets you create just about anything you can possibily conceive. My two main enjoyments are the vast opportunities to partake in LARP (Live Action Role Play) areas and my time spent helping to develop a combat system which allows games within this virtual world. Love starwars? With enough land you could build your own starwars themed roleplay region and take on the role of a Jedi or a Sith with the aid of combat system like DCS2 (Dynamic Combat System 2) which allows you to create all the character classes and powers each player can choose from. You can have those lightsaber duels within Second Life because it allows you to build these types of games within their virtual world making it your virtual world.
 
April 30, 2009
Second Life also has always been committed to being a multi-platform virtual world. The creative diversity contributed by Windows, Mac and Linux users sharing a common platform shows, and single-platform virtual worlds are impoverished by comparison.
 
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More Second Life reviews
review by . March 30, 2010
This is not a game, it's a virtual environment, and if you don't understand the differences (which are immense), you're going to be disappointed.  Second Life is very much a social platform, which allows for all kinds of training, education and socializing.  I've been involved with SL for going on four years, and I'm always learning something new and meeting interesting new people who share my interests.  It's continually evolving.  It DOES have a steep learning curve, so …
review by . April 15, 2009
I like the Sims and relatively every other Simulation game out there.  I also like social games, like WoW and other MMORPGs.    But Second Life, I just couldn't deal with.    The reviewer before me mentions that there is no goal, no rules, etc.  And that's what I didn't like, there were no goals and no rules.  Everyone was free to do what they wanted and honestly, it didn't make any sense.  If there is no goal, then there is no point.   &nbs …
see all Second Life reviews (3)
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Ranked #1679
Member Since: Apr 1, 2009
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Wiki

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003 and is accessible via the Internet. A free client program called the King Bee enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (which residents refer to as "the grid"). Second Life is for people aged 18 and over, while Teen Second Life is for people aged 13 to 17.

Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based around simple geometric shapes that allows a resident to build virtual objects. This can be used in combination with the Linden Scripting Language which can be used to add functionality to objects. More complex three-dimensional sculpted prims (colloquially known as sculpties), textures for clothing or other objects, and animations and gestures can be created using external software. The Second Life Terms of Service ensure that users retain copyright for any content they create, and the server and client provide simple digital rights management functions.
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