Week 3, Topic 3 A- The Second Life

The second life is example of Lunenfeld’s immersive interactivity. The user can create their own character, and act as them as they live their life through a virtual world, by making things, buying things etc. This style of program is intended to increase the entertainment value of games, such as ‘The Sims’. It is encouraging the participants, to live through the virtual world, and the title ‘second life’ represents this. In my opinion, re-enacting normal life in a virtual way is different to meeting new people in the real world. I believe this because of the persona that people put on without realising it when typing on the internet. However, that is just my opinion, and as I have written before, people who find it hard to speak out IRL, may find this easier. Also, I think that this game appeals to more technological savvy people, who like gaming, and enjoy this as an escapism factor, rather than living their life through it. Turkle’s theory on MUD’s could be linked to how people communicate on this particular website. People are able to present themselves as they wish in these ‘deterritorialised’ situations, they can speak freely about their sexual preference, race etc without the worry that society’s opinion will criticise them. However, if a certain person does have a negative view against say homosexuals, and they too used this website, there is no reason for why they wouldn’t say something derogatory towards them. So even though there is this idea of a ‘second world’ the people who inhabit it are still from the ‘real world’ and even though, this selected group of peoples thoughts wont necessarily reflect the whole of societies, there may still be disagreements, which would reject the idea of these chat spaces being a new place to say your feelings. Feel free to contradict me though, because I have never actually been on second life properly!