I am in-between computer games right now. World of Warcraft has lost it's luster for me and the "new car smell" of the expansion pack wore off very quickly. I thought I would try Second Life ( http://secondlife.com ) to see if it held my interest for more than a few hours. Sadly, the answer is no. And here's why...
I breifly tried Second Life about a year ago but didn't make it out of the beginner's area. I found walking around to be akward, as if the characters pants were too tight or perhaps there was a serious medical condition that needed addressing.
A few weeks ago, I thought I would give it another pass. I quickly found out that characters can simply fly wherever they want. No more Geisha style walking. I even made it out of the beginners area, but not before being stalked by an online predator. I had created a petite female character (you can be someone else). Five mintues had not passed before two people where trying to 'chat' me to death. One of the 'chatters' got very agressive about me installing webcam software so we could talk face to face. Very creepy experience. Not one I want to repeat. Luckily I managed to log off and haven't seen that person since.
I moved on to exploring the world the next day. My first impression was that this was a very cool world where anything is possible. I even looked up Sun Microsystems and found the island that Sun has set up. Very cool. I flew around for a few hours finding interesting places at random. You can buy clothes, items and real estate for your character. I was so impressed, I upgraded from the free account to a monthly ($9.99) account. With a paid account they promised that I could own land in the game. However, after some more exploring, I soon discovered that land is not free and not cheap either. And there's a monthly 'tax' on how much land you own. Very small plots of land go for about $30-40. The interesting part is that you must pay for land with US dollars and not in-game money. I saw a pattern forming here. After a little more research, I discovered that you can own a whole region of the game. But the sticker shock hit me when I saw that you must cough up somewhere in the range of $2600 US dollars to buy that much land. This is where I realized that do to anything truely interesting, one must be rather 'dedicated' to spending alot of time here.
Some of the places I thought were cool were the Sun Microsystems island. Best virtual marketing environment ever. I soon discovered the casinos where you can bet your virtual money for a chance to win more virtual money. There are tons of malls where you can shop for new outfits, vehicles, body animations and furniture for your virtual home. You can also create your own objects (with the paid account) and sell them to others.
Now for the downside (those previous things were the upside). I noticed many things about the world of Second Life that started to bother me. The novelty was wearing off pretty quick. I got very frustrated by the real estate issue and realized that owning the amount of land that I wanted to do cool stuff with was going to cost alot of real money. Creating objects is rather awkward ( and I come from a 3D modeling background). The object scripting language was hard to use as well (I've been using Java too long). After a few days of flying around, I noticed a few more things. It's a ghost town (or world). I saw very few people online (except for the casinos). In between all of the vacant lots, there are many half hearted attempts at building something interesting. Some lots simply had the stuff the owners bought just left in random places on the lot. It reminded me of a vast junkyard in some areas and a rural third world neighborhood in other areas. Cars left on the lawn, homes missing walls, advertisements for porn sites on other vacant lots. Pretty sad.
All in all, Second Life is something worth exploring with the free account. Beware getting sucked into the game with the promise that there is something more there. Unless you are willing to have less of a life than someone addicted to World of Warcraft, don't go there and don't get suckered into plugging more and more real money into what ammounts to a failed science experiment. I was a beta tester for The Sims Online a few years ago, and found it to be way more satisfying on many levels. Now if they would make The Sims2 Online, then I might have found the next game to play.