Task 3: Scott K. Explores Second Life

The name of my avatar is Religio Neuman.

I changed my appearance by making his overall body bigger and stouter. I made his arms and legs shorter as well as his neck. The thing I focused most attention on was his face. I think I played around with basically every part of his face, focusing mostly on his beard. There is just something to be said about a guy that has a nice full beard. It’s just respectable. So I turned all the facial hair options to the max and gave him a little gray. I pretty much changed these things because it was required that we change at least something and I’m just a fan of the beard. I wish there was more tweaking I could have done with the beard. I did not intend for my avatar to look anything like me. Since it is a virtual world and there would be no way for people to make a comparison I did not see the necessity.

Second Life was a little more challenging to get oriented to because everything moves really slow on my computer so there is a delay between when I type an action and when the action actually takes place. This fact makes it very hard to move and control my avatar. The interface itself is pretty straightforward and like most interfaces like this the more you use it the more comfortable you will become.

My first impression of Second Life is that it is an interesting concept. The interface is very detailed, which is pretty cool. I play RPG’s so I like the idea of being able to customize things and have control over my characters. I don’t play MMORPG’s so this whole virtual world is new to me. Having random avatars come up to me and want to talk was kind of unsettling at first because I felt that these people are totally random and I will most likely never meet them or interact with them in real life. I would probably never use Second Life outside of this class. I would much rather interact with someone face-to-face.