Photo Journal of My Weekend Gaming Experience

I’ve been gaming from the moment that my tiny four-year old hands could grasp around the controller of a now ancient and obsolete NES. Second Life or The Sims or anything else where the game does not have any point except for being an alternate avatar life for the player I have avoided. They seem like wastes of time that aren’t even fun like the arcade/fighting/story-mode/rpg games I know and love. The challenge I made for myself was to play something I normally would not play.

So I chose to challenge myself by continuing the Second Life game I began for class. This game is so complicated and I couldn’t find my way at all in the first few days of playing. In my first attempt to find Bryn Mawr (following Hillary’s instructions to the best of my abilities) I found a wonderful person who took pity on my inexperience. She not only taught me how to search and teleport, she taught me how to instant message, and gave me her file of different hairstyles from her inventory as a gift! (Though I ended up just making my own hair)

It took me a while, but I found freebie markets and managed to compile a great look for me which suits my style! And once I felt comfortable with my image I visited Bryn Mawr:) It looks great and I got to pose as Athena.

I then just started sight-seeing. Starting with an exhibit called “You Are What You Eat” where Antoine Lancaster took photographs of every single meal he ate over the course of a year. Then I went to Rome, The Isle of Lesbos, Bucharest (where there was a really scary guy named Twiggy growled at me every time I walked past him. I started flying over him for “fear” of my safety!), and the University of Edinburgh (as my friend was in the room with me and she wanted to “see” the campus before she got there for study abroad). I went skydiving in Edinburgh!!!!

In one of my final actions this weekend, I visited EMH motors to look at really awesome cars.

I posed in a few of them and I was satisfied with that because I don’t have any Linden dollars (the currency in SL). And then I saw the most amazing thing ever. EMH was giving away cars for free! So I got a box of cars and started to learn how to drive in Bryn Mawr. Unfortunately, my lesson did not last very long as it is apparently banned to drive on the Teaching 3 island.

While I found the explorations entertaining and the people fascinating, I do not think that I will ever return to this game. I had a lot of trouble finding things and while there were many people who wouldn’t mind having a friendly chat with me, I mostly found this second life of mine to be very isolated. Though I did start getting attached to my avatar. I felt that I had to protect her. When my friend, we’ll call her “Ralph” (just for a random The L Word reference, hehe), took over the controls and started doing crazy things like having sex in a gay bar I felt embarrassed. Ralph’s behavior with my avatar was playful but my own association with my avatar is more personal because I made her and she’s too young to be having sex with random people! She should be older (at least 15 days old) before she gets involved in that drama:)

My other main problem was getting money, a goal which I have sadly still not accomplished. I don’t want to pay real money to get fake money. So I looked for jobs and teleported to four job agencies. ALL of them told me that to get a job one must be at least 30 days old to apply. Not only that, but that the jobs that would be available to me would be dancer, escort, cleaner, hostess, surveyor or security. And one help wanted ad for a dancer read as follows, “Do you like dancing? Do you have a hot body? Like showing it off? Then come dance for us!” And most of the ads had a similar theme. Let’s just say that I will not be playing this game after this.