Week 11 - Online communities

This week’s theme was online communities and more specifically our assignment was to inspect an online virtual world called Second life as a representative of the online community phenomenon.

Second life is an online virtual world, sort of an alternate reality. It is in many ways similar to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (usually simply called MMORPG). The main difference is that, whereas games have clear set objectives, Second Life has none. The players are basically free to do whatever they want whenever they want, there are very few limitations.

According to Linden Lab (the owner of Second life), the virtual world had about 1 million regular users in 2014. The average age of users is 32 and about 40-50 per cent of the users are women, so Second life seems to be quite popular among both genders. The users create a 3D-modelled resident, whose appearance they can freely customize. The residents can communicate through a chat platform.

At first glance, Second life seems like a poorly animated roleplaying game. However, the deeper you go into the rabbit hole, the more interesting, diverse and bizarre it gets. Unlike many of its more violent and darker counterparts, this virtual world is a place where the grass is green and the sun is shining all the time. Most players seem to live their virtual lives just as they live their real lives, concentrating in having fun, consuming, making money and meeting new people. The players can also use a three-dimensional modelling tool, as well as a special scripting language created specifically for the game to create their own content. This emphasizes the idea of Second life: freedom to do whatever you want, literally. You can even make money by selling the content you have created.

It is quite tricky to try to define what kind of community Second life is. It keeps evolving with the ideas of the users who consume it. Due to its excessive freedom, the players are the creators of the game at the same time. The most accurate way to describe Second life is to say that it literally is a second life. An alternate reality for people to do things they could not do in real life. A place where one can live a life without laws, rules or boundaries. Some players do it for fun, others maybe to escape a reality they don’t feel comfortable in. It will be interesting to see how this phenomenon develops in the future. We are talking about something that a few decades ago was merely something that science fiction writers wrote about.

R.C