The People of Second Life

During the course of this week I spent a lot of time getting to know the people who spend their time in Second Life. There was a wide variety of players from around the globe engaged in various activities from chatting up new players to finding a new partner to get virtually intimate with. While this may not seem like an activity that would be considered taboo in the real world, with in the confines of the digital world that is Second Life, it is not only accepted, it is also very popular.

One individual I met by the name of Mrs. Kekkris defined her self as a Digital Sex instructor. She takes new players, and teaches them how to engage in coitus in a digital sense, and use the commands and functions that exist with in the game. While I had to decline her many attempts to get in to my digital pants for a “nominal fee” she will explain the wide variety of potential in this rather exotic form of intimacy. She has setup a “School of Sex” where the various aspects of the digital exhibitions are available to try out. Inside of Second Life, you can not just decide to change positions in the middle of the act, you actually have to move to a new piece of furniture, or ‘spot’ in the world, click on it, and begin those actions. Next I met someone a bit more down to earth. I met a Vulcan named Commander Sporis, he spends his time creating Star Trek themed worlds, and if you’ve looked in my previous blogs helped create the meausum I toured earlier on. While he declined to tell me much about himself as a real person, he did give me a length back story about his time at the Vulcan Science academy, before deciding that it was a good time to spread the world of Trek in to a Holodeck (Which is what he claims is what we see around him) but after a freak accident, he got stuck in the Holodeck, and I, along with everything else around him is a hologram. He said he is constructing this measume to compile parts he needs to fix the “Photon Relay Nodes” which will enable him to end the program that we are all apparently apart of and return to his duties.

TesseractToo was the next lady I met, she was a 43 year old disabled artist, with a degree in Digital arts, and 3D animation. She suffers from "intractable multiple trauma complex chronic pain syndrome", having suffered for so many years that things in life such as dancing, or going out has become a complex circumstance for her. She has suffered for the better part of 25 years, and has missed a lot of things in life that require movement. She spends her day drawing, and makes a living off this. Most of her time in Second Life is spent socializing with people in the newbie area, and dancing because she can't dance in real life. She actually got her start in Second Life by a college project, so she was okay with answering these questions.

Somegeek is the name of the next guy I met, but he seemed to be unwilling to share information until we got chatting about why he was in the game. This was a rather interesting interaction, as he was trying to learn about Second Life from a Developer stand point, so he was in essence, experiencing the game with the same type of hat I was. He is a 25 year old guy who is spending time trying to experience the digital sex Second Life has to offer.
Dena, who appears to be stuck in a roleplaying world, is a vampire who submits to her master, and creates babies. She claims to be a "Hot Shot Driver in Real Life" and plays 25-30 hours a week of Second Life, so I feel like she may be slightly lost inside of a world of imagination, which is one aspect of Second Life that a lot of people really get in to.