Dolmere Talamasca - Second Life "resident": Challenge #10 Response: Your Original Expectations of SL

Rose Farina has gotten involved with the not-a-meme challenges lately and the latest challenge comes from her.
Challenge #10: How is Second Life like your original expectations and how is it different?

This is a pretty challenging question indeed. I can't really remember what my expectations around two years ago when I first heard about the program.

Let's see - I was impressed when they moved to free basic accounts. This gave people like myself a chance to use the platform to earn the dollars needed to upgrade to premium rather than invest a monthly fee and TRY to earn it back with activities in-world. My expectation was that I would pay a nominal fee in order to have access to an application I would likely not use very often. I expected to let an initial time period lapse and not return to the game at all.

I expected a 3D online game similar to perhaps a Diablo or Starcaft blizzard.net game, or perhaps I expected Black & White online, or perhaps I expected something like an Xbox Live (which I've had very limited interaction with). Instead SL is its own beast. It's not optimized for playback like World of Warcraft and other games are and can be. Since all the content is user created and has to be streamed to your computer there's little hope of pre-caching textures and whatnot. World of Warcraft is something like a 3GB install! 3GB! So, yeah, the performance as it relates to the different way the compents work together was a surprise.

I was interested in the virtual economy and the user created content from the beginning. Other than hickups and the normal complaints I've been satisfied on that front and it has met and exceeded my initial expectations on what virtual world could deliver.

Posted by Dolmere Talamasca on March 23, 2007 04:01 PM | Permalink
Posted to not-a-meme