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Second Life: 1st Impressions |
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Sunday, July 18, 2004
Linden Labs has finally released their much awaited Second Life, a Massively Multiplayer Online Lego Set. The hype surrounding this game before launch has been tremendous. Has the game lived up? Almost... The unique design offers many opportunities, but one major drawback prevents it from being recommended. The fun of Second life, and the major problem with it, is the freedom of creation. You build and script objects in the world, from simple benches to mansions to Soccer Balls to Casinos. The problem arises that the world has all of the beauty and serenity of a graffiti wall. Your little house by the hill may be surrounded by a dilapidated building consisting of four walls and a triangle, a Tie Fighter on a launchpad, a pole-shaped thingie extending several miles into the sky, and a floating billboard for a skin modelling company, among others. There is no stretch of land anywhere unclaimed, and there is very, very little that isn't loud, gawdy, attention-grabbing, poorly made, or some combination of the above. Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing most people are attempting to get away from: We live in loud, attention-grabbing cities, and would generally like to escape to something more structured and sane. The gameworld doesn't have the civilized feel of a city, with densely-packed space and open culture, but rather a suburbia with every parcel of land claimed and all of it wasted. But it has the dirty, technological, noisy feel of a city. Very few people bother to plant trees on their land, or go through any other sort of beautification with the surrounding environment. Even the people themselves can look like anything, from tiny little dwarves to pasty-white goth vampires to robby the robot. It's not necessarily lunacy, but it *is* disconcerting. Without an external area that people go to fight in, ala everquest, there is just no large open space within which one can be alone, or free, or communal. You can hardly sit down without paying attention to who owns the bench. Everything is owned, everything is shouting for attention, and everything looks different than everything else. The old-west themed area is refreshing, following the pre-concieved notions of design and function allows for a user to rest peacefully in a cute little town and recover sanity, but other than that area the game is a big artistic mess. I wish the Second Life people much luck and much success... But, in addition to a tremendous server upgrade and continents more worth of land, they need to deal with issues such as how to regulate freedom so that the activities of one person do not create a form of aesthetic pollution that makes things less enjoyable for their other paying customers. Perhaps pre-set texture sets for given areas? Or single-purpose areas? We will have to see how they deal with this issue. - Chris 11:20 PM [+] Comments:
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