Second Life Offers a Second Chance for the Young, and the Young at Heart!

Let's start right off saying I'm not a young person, although the concept of age is relative. To my 87-year-old father-in-law I'm a youngster, even though I'm eligible for Social Security. So it should surprise no one that the term Second Life is totally new to me.

Perhaps you know all about Second Life and have even joined the community. You may have been participating in Second Life for a long time, while I have been blithely living my first life totally oblivious to Second Life.

Assuming I am not the only one who has never heard of Second Life (and God I hope I'm not) let me attempt to explain the concept of this unique idea. I Googled Second Life and discovered the following interesting information.

Second Life is a virtual world filled with a lot of virtual people. In Second life you get to create things using building tools. You create your own avatars. The example used in the article that I read is for creating a butterfly and by writing some code you can make the butterfly follow you around. Sound simple? Well not to me. I really don't even know what HTML stands for let alone know how to use it.

Never mind though, according to the information given, if you don't know how to make your own creations using HTML, you can simply acquire your avatar the good old American way - buy it! That's right, you can buy and sell things in Second Life using the currency called Linden dollars. I don't know what the exchange rate is with American dollars but a little further exploration should resolve that question for me.

In the Second Life virtual world there is always plenty to do, from gaming to dancing to puzzles, casinos, movie theaters and even space stations. There seems to be no end of the fun in Second Life and apparently you can have this fun with the new virtual people that you'll meet in there.

When you arrive in Second Life you'll want to know what to do first, where all the hot spots are, where the action is. For this you need a map. Second Life provides you with a map to get your fun started. Once you decide where you want to go, say to a casino, you use the search menu for a description and you can be teleported there. How cool is that! After arriving at your destination you click on somebody's avatar to learn about them, I guess to see if they'd be cool to hang out with.

A short time after arriving at your destination you'll most likely be approached by these virtual residents who are more than happy to meet you and show you the ropes. Apparently there are many people like you (or who at least pretend to be like you, after all this is the anonymous internet) and you will have many friends to enjoy the shows with or take in an art exhibit. All the things you'd like to do in real life but don't have the friends to share them with or don't live in close proximity to such events.

You can own land in Second Life beginning with a modest $9.95 a month. Try to find that in the real world! But you can also participate in this community with a free basic account. There seems to be no end to the options to purchase land with those Linden dollars of course.

My life's dream has been to purchase my own island. And guess what! In Second Life I can have my very own island. Ahh, but just as in real life, it isn't cheap to own your own island. Perhaps that will have to wait until after I've made some money in real estate deals, which I can do in Second Life.

There is so much to know about Second Life that I couldn't possibly do it justice here. I can see why this concept has become so popular. It would be perfect for people just looking to have fun, but I can see where it would also be appealing to people with no real friends who want to create their own environment and recreate themselves.

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of Second Life before, surprised that psychologists and psychiatrists have not been voicing their concerns about the risk of addiction and the risk of people withdrawing from reality to spend all their time in their virtual world.

But for the healthy, adventurous mind I think this would be a fun place to hang out. For more information just Google Second Life and be prepared to discover a new world of fun. It's free to join. So sign up and I'll meet you there.

Source: Secondlife.com